I love TV- from Friends, to Luther, to KUWTK, to you know… Blue Planet and stuff. I love movies- Fight Club, Black Swan, and if I’m being honest I buy a trashy magazine before every flight I take.
The stigmatization of the mentally ill in media is unconscious. Initially, when people had very poor understandings of mental health in the first place, the creation of Psycho did not seem to be as, well… psycho. It was the information people had at the time. But things have evolved. It’s 2016. We know more, much more. However, the media has yet to catch up.
Mental health in media has spiraled into being the most significant way in which people are informed about mental health. I REPEAT. MEDIA IS THE PLACE WHERE PEOPLE LEARN THE MOST THEY WILL EVER LEARN about MENTAL HEALTH.
So, imagine learning about something like the chicken pox for the first time in an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Your neighbor is affected- he loses all sanity to the itch and becomes agitated, unpredictable in his anguish and pain. You’re scared, confused, and uncomfortable by this entire scene, and by the time the film ends you have not learnt about the cause of chicken pox, the cure, the calamine lotion; instead you are left with a warped perception of an illness that many people experience in their lives. Now, imagine the ways in which media is perpetuating the same ridiculous perceptions of mental illness, similarly without taking into account the causes, treatments, or cures of an illness. This is where we’re at today, and its not great.
These false perceptions of mental illness spiraled out of control to create the inescapable stigmatizations that mental health faces today. Stigmatization is the near automatic universal branding, denouncing, and fear of those who are mentally ill. It’s rooted in generalized assumptions, creating the inescapable culture of negativity around mental illness. These assumptions assume that those who are mentally ill are unstable, violent, harmful to themselves or others, and incapable of sound thought.
One in four persons in the world will experience a significant mental health problem in their lifetimes, and 450 million worldwide are diagnosed with some form of mental illness. According to the World Health Organization, “stigma, discrimination and neglect prevent care and treatment from reaching people with mental disorders”. By being unaware of and not protesting the deplorable representation of the mentally ill in media we are allowing those around us to continue to learn to think of the mentally ill through negative stigmatizations, and seeing discrimination as normal. This is how your teachers, your family, your friends, your parents of friends, your service providers, your bosses, and every other owner of a television are learning to think of and interact with 1/4th of your loved ones. This affects you.
So. I TV, movies, magazines as much as the next person, but I also love my family, friends, and myself! And I really want them to live in a world where a mental health example means more than just Crazy Eyes, more than just Nina Sayers. If you’re feeling up to it, have a chat with someone about mental health today, or do some research online by using the UBC library website to search up peer reviewed articles on mental health. By doing this, we can slowly aim to surmount the overpowering influence of the media, and replace the flashy lights with a real understanding of mental health.
Written by Emma Gibson