I recall from some years ago when a mental health survivor of the system told me about a meeting he had with script writers working on a soap opera. They were trying to create a storyline regarding a character and his psychotic breakdown culminating in him running amok brandishing a knife. The script writers were happy with the storyline and were engaging in a discussion with mental health users to see whether they had anything to add. The guy telling me the story said the other people he was sitting with just sat there totally gob smacked. One of them explained to the script writers that the current storyline as it stood only reinforced stereotypes and stigma (mental distress=psycho=knife wielding maniac).
After much patient explaining the penny eventually dropped, wasn’t so much an eureka moment when that happened. They changed the storyline, taking out the needless psychodrama for psychodrama sake. Wasn’t perfect, it still referred to stereotypes and your average psych textbook but at least they took out the knife wielding moment. My own view and I said it to the guy who told me the story is that this exposes lazy script writing as opposed to researching the realities of mental distress.
And now there has been a call for de-stigmatising mental health in the media. Including the assumptions regarding labels such as schizophrenia (which not a split personality…and the number of times I have tried to explain the differences between the two!). And I agree that language is a powerful tool that can create oppressive ideas and labels. But equally it can also be the language of liberation as well. Rethink (and I never thought I’d agree with them…. many many disagreements with Rethink/NSF in the past) are correct when they maintain that mental health storylines are used as a tool for dramatic tension.
But simple representation of people with mental health issues, or even programmes exploring the subject, are not necessarily enough if not done in the right way, says Rethink. “With the soaps, for example, being dramas they often focus on a dramatic incident rather than following people with mental health problems going about their lives like everybody else,” says Corry. “We need more accurate representation.”
And that’s central to the argument, depicting people with mental distress living their life day after day. The negative stereotypes do have an impact on people (I know Mind did a survey many years on this) such as avoiding people, not going out of the house etc. Stigmatisation and vilification have consequences on lives. Indeed, positive images depicting mental distress is vital, the complexities as well rather than resorting to 1-dimensional characterisations and caricatures. In my own experiences of mental distress, it is complex and contradictory, sometimes good sometimes bad, sometimes clarity sometimes a thick fog dragging me down, sometimes ordinary sometimes out-of-the-ordinary. but then that’s life but it is about coping, how people cope with what is flung their way. Storylines should be about exploring mental distress as whole. From a study in 2006, it was found that 64% of psychiatric stories were negative compared with 46% of general medical pieces (and the number of times over the years I have written letters criticising storylines that engender stereotypes and stigmatisation especially around the psycho=knife wielding maniac scenario, and also the depiction of self-harm which has always had negative stereotypes that expose a real ignorance.
One way forward to stem this negative tide is to involve mental health users/survivors in storylines (I know it happens but not on a grand scale) because we are the best people who know what it is like and the realities of mental distress….
