TV’s troubling storylines for characters with a mental illness
TV’s attempts at tackling mental illness are usually reduced to characters with “special talents” derived from the symptoms of their illnesses. It’s about time things started to change, argues Rebecca Beirne in this crossposting from The Conversation.
Characters experiencing mental illnesses were once relegated to the margins of television dramas – mostly as villains, victims or figures of fun. In recent years, they have gained greater prominence, and are increasingly used to help move the plot forward or spice up an otherwise boring, procedural drama or mystery.
The trend took off in 2002, when Monk was promoted as “the obsessive compulsive detective” in the US TV series of the same name. Later came Perception (2012-2015), featuring Dr Daniel Pierce, a neuropsychiatrist with paranoid schizophrenia, whose hallucinations help him to solve crimes.
In the long-running Homeland, meanwhile, CIA Agent Carrie Mathison unravels cases through her intuitions about various terror suspects, which are heightened as a result of her manic episodes of bipolar disorder.
During these times, explains Carrie: “There is this window when you’ve got all this crazy energy but you’re still lucid, you’re still making sense, and that’s always when I did my best work.”
—TV’s attempts at tackling mental illness are usually reduced to characters with “special talents” derived from the symptoms of their illnesses
TV’s attempts are ever more accurate and sensitive, though one can indeed fond examples that differ.