CW: Suicide; self-harm
In 2019, only 65.5% of people with a serious mental illness and 44% with any mental illness in the U.S. sought of treatment. The inaccessibility to mental health care makes it to where media and lived experience are often time’s the only “education” regarding symptoms of mental illness or behaviors of neuro-divergent people that the average person is ever exposed to. This symptom of lack of health care and emphasis on media norm production results in less people understanding how interact with neuro-divergent people and people with mental illness, an inability to self-diagnose or recognize symptoms in oneself, and perpetuates stigma towards mental illness. First of all, let’s discuss some examples of how mental illness/neuro-divergency is depicted in media.
- ADHD
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The most prevalent example is probably ADHD which is almost exclusively represented by overactive little boys who talk and play a thousand miles per hour. However, this narrow representation ignores the dozens of different ways ADHD affects people’s lives—especially girls whose symptoms often manifest much differently, and resultantly go undiagnosed—including lack of emotion regulation, hyperfixation/obsession with hobbies, time blindness, executive dysfunction, and lack of object permanence among many others. Without proper education about the symptoms of ADHD (and ADD which has been dissolved and turned into a sub-category of ADHD), we often minimize the effects it has on others by saying things like “everyone’s a little ADHD” as well as being unable to recognize ADHD symptoms in ourselves which often leads to a late in life diagnosis after coping mechanisms have already been difficultly learned.
- Depression
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Additionally, we have depression which is often presented as the inability to get out of bed, constant sadness, alcoholism, self-harm, and/or suicide. While these are very real experiences of many people with depression, there are also dozens of other ways it can manifest. Depression has many faces whether it is finally cracking and entering a spiral after realizing you’re out of pop and have to go out to buy more, or not showering for days at a time, or your limbs—even your fingers—feeling like boulders that can’t be budged, or if it’s a good day where you are able to get out of the house and go out with friends, but something inside you just doesn’t quite feel right. The fact that these and many other examples are not depicted in media means that we cannot recognize the signals in our loved ones or in ourselves that outside help may be needed.
- Bipolar Disorder
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Next, we have representations of bipolar disorder. First of all, bipolar disorder is almost exclusively represented as being in a constant back and forth of severe depression and mania (this can occur and is called cycling, but it is not something that always or even often occurs). This is problematic as it paints people with bipolar as “crazy” and “unpredictable” when in actuality many people may only have manic and/or depressive episodes once a year or every other year or even less frequently. Additionally, bipolar 2 disorder is virtually erased in media’s presentation of bipolar. Bipolar 2 is more or less a more milder form of bipolar 1 disorder where you experience hypomania instead of mania. While this more mild, it does not mean that it can’t cause chaos and serious disruption to one’s life when gone undiagnosed. However, women are overly diagnosed with bipolar disorder and bipolar 2 disorder often goes undiagnosed at all.
- Anxiety
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Next, anxiety disorders are often shortsightedly represented as well. I didn’t know I had panic attacks throughout high school and into college until my Junior year of college because I never knew what anxiety felt like until someone else identified it in me. Once they did that, it clicked in my mind, and I thought “Oh my god, that’s exactly what it feels like.” I wasn’t the shy girl who would freak out in social situations or before public speaking events, so I never thought to evaluate myself for an anxiety issue regarding fear of failure in academic situations or fear of disappointing authority figures.
- Autism
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Lastly, I’ll discuss the representation of autism in media and its erasure and degradation. First of all, when autism is named in media, it is typically represented as Asperger syndrome. And while there may be some accurate representations of this in media (often times people point to “The Good Doctor”), the fact of the matter is that autism exists on a spectrum, and most of that spectrum goes underrepresented or ignored entirely. This poor representation leads to a lack of education on the true experiences and perspectives of people who are autistic. While many perceived incompatibilities could be fixed with an emphasis on communication and emphasized social cues, people tend to instead “other” people on the spectrum. Additionally, I believe we tend to see an erasure of autistic characters in television, and, instead they are written as characters to laugh at and serve as the “other” character that acts as a punchline. For example, I think of Sheldon from “Big Bang Theory.” A staple tagline he says is “I’m not crazy, my mother had me tested,” and his behavior is labeled as neurotic and humorous. However, isn’t his inability to pick up on social cues and desperate need for routine possibly a signal that he is on the spectrum? However, this is never even mentioned as a possibility in the 12 seasons the show ran for. I think of this as an erasure of identity as well as a stigmatizing effect media can have while reproducing social norms. (This also exists with many mood disorders where women are written as “dramatic” but really their behaviors seem to more so be mirroring emotional/mood disorders). Additionally, we see real life detriments to this stigma in the form of intense fear of autism in our children. Think of the anti-vax movement—there has been such deep fear of children becoming autistic that many parents have risked the very lives of their children in order to “prevent” its development.
- Many Others…
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While I do not go into depth on all different types of neuro-divergency and mental illnesses, I’d like to point out other places where this occurs, such as schizophrenia being depicted as inherently dangerous, obsessive compulsive disorder being written exclusively in its most extreme form of repetitive behavior and/or germaphobia while ignoring the many other symptoms that coincide, PTSD being exclusively written as the result of an isolated event and being experienced solely through flashbacks which ignores the complexity of the human mind and the effects trauma has on it, and many others.
To close, let’s talk a little bit more of the effects of this problem. First of all, it doesn’t display the complexities of mental illnesses because we are only ever shown one manifestation or stereotype of the illness. Additionally, within a culture that places an emphasis on individualism and does not value communication as deeply as it should, this results in an inability to communicate and interact in the most productive and empathetic ways with people who have mental states than your own, as well as it reproduces and reinforces the prejudice against people who suffer from mental illness. And, lastly, it results in an inability to recognize potential symptoms in oneself, so signals are never noticed, and psychiatric or therapeutic help is never sought out. This final point strikes home for me as I am one of many who did not discover their ADHD and bipolar 2 disorder until later in life, and I kick myself for not recognizing the signs earlier. However, I choose to see my experience as further proof of how we have been let down regarding proper education of mental illness and stigmatization and stereotypical presentations. Since on a macro scale we have not been taught properly and there seems to be no sign of it happening anytime soon, I challenge all of us to think more thoughtfully about what we are consuming and how much of it we take to heart and educate ourselves on various illnesses that we know our common in our communities.