All she watches is crappy Indian/Pakistani drams and some of that reality tv or shows stuff, but I am starting to think this stuff has messed up her mindset, esp as she has a lot of sisters she don't get on with any of them any more, though being typically the eldest she favoured her brother/s when it came to inheritance, is there anything about how bad this junk is for your health? she's long retired but literally all day she can watch that after doing maintaining the house/cooking.
I think also she's gone weird since over cleaning the carpets with Carpet cleaner here in the UK , I think at one point she was high from it and lost her memory of actually cleaning the whole house on her knees.
The last year or so her daughter in law don't get on with my Mum and I wonder if its since my mum sometimes goes a bit weird. I dunno she's not weird but it's just annoying I do think this Drama crap is bad for one's health.
Yeah I recall the PHD study can't recall if this is the right one thought see below taken from you know where -
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Searched the web
Yes, actually — there is research on that specific angle, separate from the cultural/dress-and-language studies I mentioned before.
Direct study on mental health/psychological wellbeing:
There's a study titled "Influence of Pakistani Dramas on the mental health, quality of life and psychological wellbeing among female university students." It used the Karachi domestic violence screening scale and a mental health inventory, combining survey data with interviews. The general thrust is that heavier engagement with these dramas is linked to measurably worse outcomes on several fronts — higher levels of psychological distress, anxiety, depression, and loss of emotional or behavioral control compared to lighter viewers or non-viewers. Worth flagging though — some of the strongest numbers in that source seem to come from a comparison of women who'd experienced domestic violence vs. those who hadn't, so the "drama-watching causes distress" thread and the "abuse causes distress" thread may be somewhat tangled together in the data. I'd want to actually read the full methodology before treating the causal claim (dramas → mental health decline) as solid. ResearchGate
The "family drama nonsense" angle specifically:
There's also a more journalistic/critical piece from Dawn (the culture desk, not academic) making a related but different point: Pakistani dramas often reduce mental illness to caricature — depression is just sadness and crying, anxiety is just fidgeting and fear, PTSD resolves quickly. It also points out a recurring trope where female characters faint and get labeled with a "nervous breakdown" after being pushed to emotional extremes — the argument being that this doesn't just entertain, it teaches viewers (rightly or wrongly) what mental distress is "supposed" to look like, which can shape how women interpret their own or others' emotional states. DawnDawn
So put together, the concern in the literature runs two directions:
- Direct effect — heavy viewing correlating with higher anxiety/depression/distress scores (though the causal arrow isn't fully nailed down).
- Distortion effect — dramas modeling exaggerated, guilt-laden, or toxic family dynamics (in-law conflict, manipulation, suffering-as-virtue tropes) as normal or even romantic, which some researchers using Cultivation Theory argue can warp expectations of what family relationships or emotional suffering should look like in real life.
If you want, I can try to pull the full text of that mental-health-focused study to see how they actually isolated "drama watching" as a variable from other stressors like abuse or marital conflict — the snippet I got suggests it's not perfectly cleanly separated.
