Recent years have seen an increased interest in mental health. Stephen Fry’s 2006 documentary The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive has helped to dismantle the taboo of talking about mental illness. Neil Lennon’s decision to ‘come out’ in his memoir Man and Bhoy, about his experience of depression, is not something that could have been imagined from a football autobiography ten years ago.
Novels such as John Harding’s What We Did On Holiday, Willy Russell’s The Wrong Boy, and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, have all refused sensational treatment of mental illness. Since 1998, Bethlem Hospital, the original Bedlam, has had its own gallery, where it holds regular exhibition of works by artists who have been patients of the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust.
And yet cultural representations of disorders of the mind continue to struggle with the reality of mental illness. From Charlotte Bronte’s Mrs Rochester to Alfred Hitchcock’s Norman Bates, most of our reference points are to the extraordinary. People are objects of our amused or horrified interest and are portrayed, particularly in the cinema and on TV, both of which have far greater reach than the novel, in a number of dangerously reductive ways: they are either pitiable simpletons touched with spiritual splendour; tortured geniuses paying a high price for their brilliance; or else crazed, spittle-flecked murderers hooked on extreme violence and wanton mayhem.
Professor Glenn Gabbard, author of Psychiatry in the Cinema, is critical of the attitude shown by the movies towards mental illness. ‘There’s been a long tradition of treating the mentally ill like zoo specimens,’ he says. ‘There was a time in the US when people would actually pay admission to asylums to gawk at the patients and make fun of them. I don’t think cinema has necessarily improved on that a great deal.’ According to Professor Gabbard, the tradition of misportrayals of mental illness in movies began with DW Griffiths’ 1909 film The Maniac Cook. ‘Ever since then,’ he says, ‘there’s been an equation in the cinema between the violent, murderous out of control individual and mental illness and schizophrenia.’ Joe Greco’s debut film Canvas, released in the US on October 12th, is Professor Gabbard says, ‘a reasonably accurate depiction of schizophrenia.’ However, he doesn’t think this will necessarily mean a change in attitude in the cinema. ‘I would hesitate to predict that the tide will turn,’ he says.
Suzy Johnston, author of The Naked Bird Watcher, a candid account of living with manic depression, is far more positive and believes the culture is changing. ‘Thing are getting better,’ she says, ‘more open, more exploratory. Girl Interrupted was very good in that you saw the hospital staff treating the patients as people rather than diagnoses. I think that in the next few years there’ll be lots of books trying to normalize mental illness. People are realising that it’s important, as happened with AIDS and cancer. We have to help each get help.’ Provide help is exactly what Johnston does. As well as giving talks and writing for journals, newspapers and magazines, she runs a website called thecairn.com. She also has a band called Bad Alice, which she formed to help young people in particular. ‘They can use the lyrics if they can’t vocalise their feelings,’ Johnston says. ‘They can show them to their parents and say this is how I feel; or they can understand what their parents might be going through.’
Many people will find themselves in need of such support. The World Health Organization estimates that one in four people will experience problems with mental health at some point in their lifetime. It also suggests that the number of suicides could rise from the current level of one million a year, to 1.5 million a year by 2020. And yet we still live with a crude and insensitive tabloid media which not so very long talked of ‘Bonkers Bruno’ being ‘locked up,’ telling with evident relish the story of the former WBC World Heavyweight Champion struggling with police officers. Only a very small percentage of violent crimes are committed by people with a mental illness, and the overwhelming majority of people with a mental illness are not violent. ‘But for some reason,’ says Professor Gabbard, ‘filmmakers can’t resist the stereotypes of the ‘homicidal maniac’ or the ‘psychotic killer; the news media loves to play this up as well, as with the Virginia Tech situation.’ Even last year’s Keane by Lodge Kerrigan, the antithesis of the blockbuster and a sensitive and affecting account of mental illness, still felt the need to equate it with aggressive unpredictability. Professor Gabbard believes this is due to fear. ‘I think mental illness is the great ‘other’, the great ‘not-me’,’ he says. ‘People fear it because they know that they too have problems, and they worry that ‘there but for the grace of God go I.’ So they stigmatize it as a way of saying ‘this happens to others, not me.’’
Andy Bell, of the The Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, thinks that we ought to consider the language we use. ‘The US sitcoms are the worst,’ he says. ‘We still see words like mad, psycho, loony and nutter used. When you consider that to how the handling of gay or black people has changed, mental health is way behind.’ Clare Allan, whose debut novel Poppy Shakespeare, a satire on the psychiatric system in which she spent more than ten years as a patient and which is currently being adapted for television, points out a vital difference here. ‘Mental illness is not an identity. Nor is it something I wish to celebrate.’ Suzy Johnston prefers to say ‘I have bipolar’ not ‘I am bipolar.’ In light of this, aren’t the Mad Pride marches, which are beginning to spread around the world, missing the point? ‘Mental illness is certainly not a weakness,’ says Clare Allan, ‘but nor it is a sign of special ‘artistic’ sensitivity. It affected Van Gogh, as it does bus drivers, plumbers, teachers, older people and children.’ Surely the only hope of undermining public fear and reducing the stigma which surrounds mental illness then, is for there to be more films, TV programmes and books which show ordinary people with jobs and families, with friends and dreams and disappointments. People with everyday lives. People generous and mean-spirited, people flawed, troubled and vainglorious. People just like you.
