It’s officially national mental health month and as usual, we -hopefully- take our time to think about people who battle with mental illness. It is estimated that 8.2 percent of the total adult population in the United States suffers from mental illness. Yet they remain mostly ignored through most of the year.
Representation in the media is as important to Neurodivergent people ( an umbrella term for those whose brains operate different due a plethora of conditions) as they are to any minority. If they’re not making us monsters that need to be killed ( looking at you Split) they make us into tropes that are honestly toxic in the stories they tell.
Without much ado, let’s take a look at a few good representations in media Neurodivergents can see themselves in.
Dory_Finding Dory
Dory was first introduced in Finding Nemo and was shown as having short-term memory loss. While this is played for laughs at first, when she gets her own movie Dory’s disability is explored to a depth which -sadly- very few movies do. It tells the tale of a person who has always struggled but knows that that struggle is an integral part of who she is. It shows how having a child with a disability can affect parents while also showing that the right thing to do is support them. It shows how different people have different levels of disabilities and that’s okay. It shows how, when you have a disability even your dearest friends can make you feel like a burden or see you as nothing more than your disability and how that’s wrong. All the while the story remains about Dory and how she manages to not let her disability define her. The fact that this is directed to young children, and that it shows Dory as a young child, makes this even better.
Marvin_Finding Nemo
Marvin shows a level of worrying that rings true to anyone with generalized anxiety. This man-er, fish, after suffering the loss of his spouse and 99% of his children is so crippled with anxiety he can barely leave his own house. He’s afraid of basically the entire world. Like Dory he doesn’t lose this, it’s a part of him, but he does learn to live with it, and after isolating himself and closing himself off ( something that a lot of people with mental illness do due to our brains telling us no one wants to talk to us, or that we bother people) he eventually finds out how much better he does with a proper support system.
Pearl_Steven Universe
Pearl can be seen to exhibit a lot of symptoms of PTSD ( which if you know her storyline, it really isn’t surprising) while the cartoon shows her struggle with these symptoms, they also show her doing good, and learning to live with them. No one in the show demonizes her or calls her out on her bad traits. This goes a long way to show that mental illness isn’t always pretty but still deserves compassion. And that it doesn’t detract from the good traits that you possess.
Sadness_Inside Out
Sadness makes it here almost on a cheat. She is the actual embodiment of sadness and spends most of the movie crying. However people with depression have found her relatable. More to the point, the movie shows how a lot of people can treat you when you let them know you’re depressed. Sadness is avoided and kept at a distance for most of the movie by the other emotions who don’t understand her. She herself feels like she’s upsetting people by being depressed but doesn’t know how to stop. It’s a struggle a lot of people who suffer from mental health know quite well.
Charlie Brown
Throughout the comic strip, Charlie Brown is riddled with anxiety. The creator of the comic was trying to make the character more relatable-since he believed human beings as a whole can relate more to loss than victories- but it does give an accurate portrayal of what living with anxiety is like.
Eeyore_Winnie The Pooh
Everyone who knows eeyore can tell that he’s more than a little glum. Psychologist have long since concluded that the beloved character suffers from anxiety and depressive episodes. What makes Eeyore important however, and the reason he’s the last on the list, is how others react to him.
Eeyore is accepted, he’s never asked to change. His friends understand that this is something that’s a part of him and love him all the same.
This is important.
You may notice that I only use cartoons for this. The reason for this is the sooner we teach people that talking about and accepting mental illness is good, the better it is for everyone around. A lot of people can develop mental illnesses as early as middle school or high school. Going undiagnosed can be harmful since usually by the time the symptoms become telling, a lot of damage has already been done. Storytelling is important, it’s how we communicate with people, it’s how we understand people. In creating these characters, artist give children who may relate to them or know people like them a voice, and a message that they are understood, that there is nothing wrong with them, and that they matter.