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🦋 Story Idea

towards a business proposal: Maniapedia

1. Maniapedia offers clients supervised, controlled "Mental Illness Experiences", in a variety of safe settings. Clients will have the opportunity to descend into the pit of schizophrenia/mania/psychosis and to emerge unharmed from its jaws after a set period.
2. Slogan -- some variation on "Abandon hope all who enter here" which makes it clear that Maniapedia is in the business of hope and growth. "Embrace hope all who enter here" possibly; or something a little faker, slicker. Possibly have the Hippocratic oath on the homepage somewhere, with a sort of implied self-consciousness of the irony/hypocrisy (There's a fine line...) in such a declaration.
3. Staff of psychiatrists and nurses work to ensure that each client's MIE has only positive sequelae (and we will be up front about the judgemental, paternalistic tone implied here) -- although room will also be made for the occasional thrill-seeker/Mental Illness tourist, the occasional macho adventurer or seeker of validation through stress; obviously we are going after a middle or upper-middle class clientéle, but we can make some allowances, subsidies for struggling artist types and can potentially even broaden our appeal to a more diverse, more urban client base -- commercials will include close shots of staff smiling in the surroundings of our facility, shot through a light amber lens to soften the distinctions between them, to sweeten the gleaming white surfaces of the clinic.
4. Therapeutic goals --
   1. Understanding of self. MIE and the experience of return to normalcy will provide client with a heightened understanding of his/her internal structures, needs, desires, fears (and, but, is that such a selling point?)
   2. Conquering fear of illness. Fear of mental illness/breakdown is a neurosis* which can prevent the client from living an honest, non-repressed life. The controlled, supervised nature of the MIE allows the patient to confront and master this fear across multiple sessions. Here we will have to include some language about the low failure rate, and I'll note in passing that the sardonic tone does not quite ring true for a "business proposal", if that is indeed what's being proposed, and that the high negatives of the term "illness" may be a way of shooting yourself in the foot, it's becoming an inseparable core part of your strategy.
   3. Vacation from self -- market this aspect of it to the "mental health tourists" segment of the client base mentioned above. (Strictly avoid, of course, too much time spent on this segment, this and the neurotic repeat business, would not be desirable -- we would like to try and paint a more therapeutically defensible picture of the business. But they have to be mentioned when they are, after all, such a key potential piece of our revenue stream.)
   What motivation people would have for using our service is going to be a sticking point if you make it one -- on the one hand it sort of seems obvious to me that people would want to experience insanity if there was a safe out, but --

   I know, not really, right? That would be difficult and unlikely to succeed, for us just to come out saddles blazing, "We know you want to go crazy, come on, give it a try," doesn't make much of an advertisement unless there is already a group of well-off people who want to go crazy and will seek us out -- and if we pitch it that way it will seem more like a form of entertainment we are advertising than a therapy. So instead of trying to justify it we take as read that we will be a success, that everybody's already on the same page... if we can get away with that...

*And of course a key to Maniapedia's success will be getting its client base to accept this formulation.

posted evening of Tuesday, July third, 2012
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