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Mental Health Is Political [nytimes.com]

 

By Danielle Carr, Image: Nico Kijno, The New York Times, September 20, 2022

What if the cure for our current mental health crisis is not more mental health care?

The mental health toll of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the subject of extensive commentary in the United States, much of it focused on the sharp increase in demand for mental health services now swamping the nation’s health care capacities. The resulting difficulty in accessing care has been invoked widely as justification for a variety of proposed solutions, such as the profit-driven growth of digital health and teletherapy start-ups and a new mental health plan that the Biden administration unveiled earlier this year.

But are we really in a mental health crisis? A crisis that affects mental health is not the same thing as a crisis of mental health. To be sure, symptoms of crisis abound. But in order to come up with effective solutions, we first have to ask: a crisis of what?

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Also political is how serious mental illness has been portrayed by Hollywood.

Unlike the crass portrayal of serious mental illness that emanated from the entertainment industry, other social issues have been noticeably more responsibly portrayed by Hollywood, such as the 1991 blockbuster movie Silence of the Lambs. In it, actress Jodie Foster’s character, FBI Agent Clarice Starling, with Anthony Hopkins’ character, Hannibal Lecter, in full agreement with her seem to make an effort to inform the viewing audience that, in general, transsexuals do not become serial killers.

Their clarification was all well and good while also especially timely when considering the exceedingly creepy and nightmarish actions of the film’s bad-guy, multi-murderer, wannabe-transvestite and human-skin harvester β€˜Buffalo Bill’. There was significant potential for dangerous stereotyping in that box-office hit, which I feel was averted.

The same, unfortunately, cannot be accurately said about the 2008 box-office-hit movie The Dark Knight. In a blatant example of stereotyping people living with schizophrenia, Hollywood’s production and release of the film took advantage of the still-politically-acceptable environment of stigmatizing the debilitating mental illness. Specifically, in one memorable Dark Knight scene the glorified Batman character irresponsibly recklessly erroneously grumbles to the district attorney character Harvey Dent that the sinisterly-sneering clearly-conscience-lacking murderer he has handcuffed to a wheeled stretcher is β€œa paranoid schizophrenic β€” exactly the kind of mind that the Joker attracts.”

However, censors somewhere have consistently found it worthy of their cutting-block the scene in which Gotham’s district attorney Harvey Dent’s crazed Two Face persona pistol whips the female police detective indirectly responsible (as a Joker informant) for Dent’s loss of his assistant district attorney and new fiancΓ© Rachel Dawes. Mind you, this is a police officer; female or not, she’s a significantly authorized official of the police force β€” not in the least a profession in which violent offenders are at all known for adhering to public policies condemning violence against female employees. This is not to make light of a serious social issue, especially that of sexual violence directed at women basically just for being physically disempowered women; rather, my aim is to justly critique and (to very many still innocent minds) expose a blatant absurdity and hypocrisy when it comes to politically acceptable yet inaccurate slander of people with a serious mental illness, all the while it remains unacceptable to show the strike of a female cop whose job is not known for encountering the gentlemanly criminal element.

As one fairly close to someone surviving the terrible illness on a day-to-day basis, this astonishingly thoughtless claim blew me away when I initially viewed the movie, and it still leaves me angry when I re-watch the picture (one I admittedly enjoy watching, though almost entirely due to the late actor Heath Ledger’s excellent post-humus Academy Award winning role as the Joker).

Considering that even as we’ve entered the third millennium a four-star-rated Hollywood hit movie can still be readily found flagrantly demonizing mentally ill characters, how much longer will it take for allegedly enlightened society to explicitly discourage via blunt condemnation such obviously unjust blanket branding by the entertainment industry of undesirable killer characters? How much more of such presumptuous yet incorrect extremely negative stereotyping will people living with schizophrenia have to endure due to superhero-role scripts brainlessly stating that such ill people are naturally predisposed to psychopathic violence? For a more accurate perspective on the illness, Schizophrenia.com states, β€œPeople with schizophrenia are far more likely to harm themselves than be violent toward the public. Violence is not a symptom of schizophrenia.”

It seems obvious to me that, unless and until it’s successfully very vocally countered, this mental-health stigma condition will likely continue to be abused by the entertainment industry for some time yet to come. Which leaves one to ask where was the public protest, the large and loud outcry? I’ve yet to hear of it from any one person in the local mental health community. If one felt like delving into the ideological/political realm there are some fitting double-standard examples one could easily give, such as, β€˜Had it been an equally unjust recklessly punishing comment about the such-and-such community in this day and age, you’d know there’d be public relations hell to pay.’ So why is it, at the very least with the astonishing brainless Batman slur, still open season when it comes to stereotypical Hollywood portrayal of people with such a serious mental illness? Why can The Dark Knight’s screenwriters and producers so brazenly get away with such an apparent cruelly careless act? Is there such an absence of any notable or even at all noticeable squeak to the mental health community wheel?

What’s clear and consistent to me is, people living with clinical mental illness, and especially those suffering what’s essentially an untreatable form, must contend with what I call the societal β€˜out of sight, out of mind’ effect β€” i.e. if it can’t be seen nor readily relatable to, on a subconscious level it in effect doesn’t really exist for the healthy masses.

Last edited by Frank Sterle Jr.
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