Flackcheck's Murder By Wheelchair: Film Analysis

In much the same way a horror movie makes your heart race and saliva tinny, the upcoming election has inspired fear and anxiety among Americans.
Witness "Murder by Wheelchair," a parody video of the current health care election debate, produced by FlackCheck.org, part of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The video injects humor into the heated and emotional suggestion that the Affordable Care Act would send Medicare patients off the cliff, literally.
"I've had patients who are more or less besides them self with uncertainty that 'if this person gets elected' or 'that person gets elected,' " says clinical psychologist Dr. Berney Wilkinson in Lakeland, Fla., "everything we know in the U.S. is

Wilkinson, who practices privately and teaches at Webster University and University of South Florida.
Uncertainty, insecurity, fear-mongering and anger are staples of election campaigns, most famously in 1964 when candidate Lyndon B. Johnson got voters' attention with a commercial showing a sweet, young girl who plucked the petals off a daisy in a countdown that ended with an image of an atomic explosion. "Vote for President Johnson on November 3," instructed the deep, ominous voiceover. "The stakes are too high for you to stay

The threatening message sends a psychological response that starts a cascade via the limbic system, washing a glandular, involuntary response of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline though the system. Ironically, this can lead to the opposite of what candidates and campaigns seek to achieve.
Wilkinson says the children's parents "are not particularly political," and the unrelated youths report hearing the Doomsday message on political ads and in discussions at school. Women, he noticed, seem to register higher anxiety than his male patients. A recently released study said women who read negative newsremember it better than men do, and have stronger stress responses in subsequent stress tests, according to Sonia Lupien and colleagues from the University of Montreal, Quebec.
And it's not just women and children, as evidenced by research conducted by the American Association of Retired People (AARP). The group issued the results of their Anxiety Index in August, showing 70 percent of non-retired Baby Boomers — those older than 50 — experiencing high anxiety over the campaign and issues.
"I'm noticing specific symptoms more now than in the past," he says. "I see more Doomsday perspectives. You know, it's taking a toll on people's ability to