It’s schizophrenia awareness
week this week and I’m going to contribute by writing about something that may
seem like a subtle, mental health pedant niggle, but is actually a big
contributing factor to the stigma people with the diagnosis face.
So when I was 15 through to,
oh…I guess 17, Donnie Darko was one of my favourite films. I love dark sci-fi,
and it seemed obvious to me that Donnie Darko was a sci-fi, if you watch the
director’s cut especially, this seems abundantly clear. So it didn't bother me
too much in the fledgling years of my study of psychology that the character is
given the diagnosis of Paranoid Schizophrenia, of course the psychologist got
it wrong, she couldn't possibly know he’s actually involved in a time wormhole
thingummy.
The problem is that there are
parts of the story where Donnie is taken over by Frank the rabbit, his
‘hallucination’, and made to do strange and violent things he has no awareness
of.
Nothing, and I mean nothing,
will make people with any mental health knowledge squirm and grind their teeth
in annoyance like people confusing Schizophrenia with the controversial
diagnosis- Dissociative Identity Disorder. People with Schizophrenia can have
auditory and/or visual hallucinations (usually the former); they experience
them and may react to them, but they are not embodied by them. People with
Dissociative Identity Disorder have fractured personalities and give the
appearance of having several personalities in the same body, ‘taking turns’ on
the surface of consciousness. This is a fairly simple thing to explain to
people when one is merely confused for the other, but with representations like
the one in Donnie Darko, what could be taken as symptoms of both are mashed
together and called Schizophrenia.
A lot of the longevity of the
appeal of Donnie Darko was in the question of whether it was a psychological
horror or a sci-fi. It was marketed as a horror film, and released on
Halloween, continuing a long tradition of ‘eep look out it’s a dangerous mental
patient’ horror films, only this time the patient is adorable and you want to
give him a hug.
A lot of people who watch this
film take this psych-horror reading, even if it wasn’t the one intended by its
creators, that’s how it was sold, and for people to go back and forth on the
question of ‘was it real or in his head?’ both options have to seem viable.
There a plenty of things in
life where if they don’t directly relate to you, you won’t go out of your way
to learn about them, this won’t always be the case, but there are only so many
hours in the day so you are forced to pick and choose topics of interest and
expertise. If mental health is of no real interest or significance to you
(something I find hard to believe but it takes all sorts) pop culture
referencing is all you have to base your ideas on.
The thing that worries me
most about this kind of representation is it seduces the viewer with a
sympathetic representation of the supposedly schizophrenic character, they are
good natured and sweet but they have this disease that is very distressing to
them, at the same time as presenting the character as dangerous, dangerous in a
way they have no awareness of, never mind control over. So, although they are
deserving of sympathy, making the viewer feel like a compassionate, progressive
person, they are also to be feared and avoided, absolving the viewer of any
obligation to treat people with the diagnosis like their regular human peers.
This stigma that people with
schizophrenia are dangerous is widely believed. It is not helped by the way
every time a schizophrenic person does commit violence, it is guaranteed front
page news, this despite the fact that statistically mental health patients
represent a tiny percentage of perpetrators of violence, are more likely than
non-patients to be victims of violence, and are a much greater danger to
themselves than anyone else. The schizophrenic killer just makes for a much
more titillating story, and morbid fascination coupled with fear makes for high
sales figures, in fact and fiction. (Fantastic fact sheet on this)
This has a real impact on the
lives of people living with Schizophrenia; they not only have their symptoms to
deal with, but the realities of interacting with people on a day to day basis
who, if they knew about their diagnosis, would be frightened of them. This is
hugely isolating, can compound existing symptoms and result in new ones. Imagine the stress it would cause you to
have a chronic illness you were too afraid to tell people about because of how
they would treat you- at the same time as suffering with the illness you try to
hide it, which in itself looks like odd behaviour, so you worry about the way
you hide at the same time as worrying about what you are hiding. I’m exhausted
just reading that statement back.
What’s that? Donnie Darko isn't
the most mainstream film in the world so what’s the big deal?
Ok, let’s talk about Hollyoaks.
I admit I was quite excited
when I heard that they were going to have a Schizophrenia storyline and Mind
had congratulated the move. Mind and I had reason to be optimistic. Whatever you
may think of the show in general, they did a very good job of representing a
character with Anorexia. The most impressive thing about it from my point of
view was that Hannah’s eating disorder was presented as chronic and complicated, when every other time I've seen Anorexia represented on tv the character has it
for about a week but makes a miraculous recovery when given a heart-to-heart
from someone along the lines that she is beautiful the way she is, anyway it’s
what’s on the inside that counts, everyone hugs, the end.
But with Newt, the Hollyoaks
writers, rather than dedicate themselves to researching a relevant and fair
representation of Schizophrenia, seemed happy to lift the symptoms from Donnie
Darko and drop them in with a dollop of A Beautiful Mind. Both of these films
are fiction, and although A Beautiful Mind is based on a true story, a lot of
the details of John Nash’s symptoms were changed, for example, his
hallucinations were exclusively auditory, which is most commonly the case,
but that doesn't look as good on screen. I also believe this is often
overlooked in representations of schizophrenia because it seems less relatable
to outsiders, why would someone believe a voice was real if it had no body?
Well partly because they’re ill, and partly because, to randomly paraphrase
Dumbledore, just because something’s in your head doesn't mean it’s not real.
Anyway, so Newt sees and hears
a young man who not only tells him to do violent things, he also takes over his
body and makes him do violent things, (oh I forgot, there’s also a smattering
of Fight Club in there, it’s like the writers didn’t realise that libraries
have non-fiction sections). At this point I gave up watching in disgust.
Hollyoaks has a large, young audience, this was a great opportunity to raise
awareness about the real struggle that 1% of the population faces living with
this diagnosis and it had been thrown away for a cheap, lazy, time-tested narrative
about a violent mental patient.
These examples are from a few
years ago now, but stats seem to show that stigma has been near constant for a long time, and
stigma-enforcing events are common. Once this sort of thing starts to bother
you, you see it everywhere. From misleading fear-mongering on front pages, to insensitive Halloween costumes- people just don’t seem to get why it’s wrong, or why it
matters that it’s wrong.
Here is one article about a man
who was fired from his job and ostracised when he was open about being
diagnosed with schizophrenia,
but there are many more. Not to overlabour the point, but stigma has real life
consequences, when schizophrenic characters are badly written and portrayed;
there are real human beings whose lives will be affected by that.
So mainstream media, I throw
down the gauntlet, pleasantly surprise me with an accurate representation of
schizophrenia. Here are some links to help you:
Facts:
Blogs by people living with
schizophrenia:
(Of course I know nobody in the
mainstream media knows I exist never mind gives a damn about my gauntlets but
it’s worth a try)
No comments:
Post a Comment