Changing minds about representations of madness...

Studying representations of relatively disadvantaged sections of the community is one of the staple concerns of Media Studies at every level. However, if ever there was a group for whom the disadvantages of repeated stereotyping may feed the formula prejudice + power = discrimination, then it may well be those with severe mental illness.

Prominent pressure groups involved in campaigning on behalf of this group certainly think so. And so, back in June, teachers and students were invited to a special education session ahead of the first London ‘Reel Madness’ Film Festival. This event and the film screenings that followed were part-organised by two charities – Rethink (the operating name of the National Schizophrenia Fellowship) and Mental Health Media. The education afternoon featured the screening of scenes from a variety of films including One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975); A Beautiful Mind (2001); and the recent Film Four production, Some Voices (2000). Also included was the challenging two-minute cinema advertisement ‘One In Four’ produced to promote World Mental Health Day in 2000 as part of the Royal College of Psychiatrist’s on-going Changing Minds campaign against the stigmatising of people with mental health problems. (See MoreMediaMag.)

Each sequence was chosen to highlight a key issue or misconception regarding aspects of madness – for example the relationship between insanity and genius that often provides the excuse for making madness the subject of mainstream movies, and which received its most recent emphasis in A Beautiful Mind. A formidable array of experts including a consultant psychiatrist, a neuroscientist, a mental health service manager and a service user were on hand to deliver their take on the clips being shown. It was a stimulating session, but one that posed more questions than answers regarding how practically this subject might be broached in class.

The ignorance issue quickly reared its head. For one thing many of the snippets were largely unfamiliar to the students (and teachers) there. Furthermore, the films from which they came are rarely, if ever, part of TV schedules, posing a potential headache when it comes to gathering such materials for classroom use. Then there was the problem that many of the portrayals screened felt as if they needed the insights of expert witnesses to place them in perspective. Quite unlike the stereotyping of groups by race, gender or sexual preference, which are familiar aspects of Media Studies, ‘madness’ is a highly technical and fought-over topic. Madness in its various forms has always been subject to a range of therapies and diagnoses – often conflicting and contradictory. So unlike other media portrayals, teachers and students are likely to feel unsure of their ground when evaluating the relative merits or otherwise of the depictions of madness they encounter.

Acedemic Articles...



The Sociological Quarterly

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1533-8525.1992.tb00383.x/abstract


'people labeled mentally ill experience negative societal reactions'

'respondents reject the mentally ill'




Stigma & Mental Illness Fink.P , Tasman.A (American Psychiatric Press, Washington DC, 1992)


http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=gmCxeAw7-Z4C&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=stereotypes+of+the+mentally+ill&ots=3jJKGwdgb8&sig=uuvd6lUaciWPA7hQeaBWWMoXphA#v=onepage&q=stereotypes%20of%20the%20mentally%20ill&f=false

'Stigma associated with mental illness can cause those afflicted to delay seeking treatment or to conceal the illness in an attempt to escape the shame and isolation of being labeled 'disturbed' and 'other' '




American Journal of Community Psychology Wahl.O, Yonaton Lefkowitz.J

http://www.springerlink.com/content/u576862827715776/fulltext.pdf


'media presentations about mental illness matched neither the views of the public nor those of mental health professionals'

'Domino (1983) compared responses to a questionnaire before and after the release of the film "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." He reported that those who saw the film expressed less positive attitudes than those who had not seen it and concluded that cinematography can exert a powerful influence on attitudes toward the mentally ill.'

Oxford Journals: Schizophrenia Bulletin, Images of Mental Illnes in The Media, Volume 30 Issue 3 Stout.P, Villegas.J, Jennings.N

http://schizophreniabulletin.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/3/543.full.pdf+html


'The mass media, including television and broadcast news, are the primary source of information about mental illness for many Americans'

'The media are believed to play a major role in contributing to mental illness stigma via the images they portray of characters with mental illness as well as the misinformation communicated, inaccurate use of psychiatric terms, and unfavorable stereotypes of people with mental illness'

How and why do Horror/Thriller films, such as 'Hide and Seek' exaggerate the mentally ill?...



Mentally ill Crazy Ill Health Depression

Exaggerate Amplify False Stereotype

Horror Scary Thriller


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8190036.stm

Health- Schizpohrenia

BBC Website

& it is relevent becuase it talks about how someone suffering from mental illness can cope in everyday life and situations - which is not what the media reflects.


http://ezinearticles.com/?(Mis)representations-of-Mental-Illness-in-Film&id=1610236

Misrepresentations of Mental Illness

Ezine Articles

& this actually partly answers my coursework question.. and talks about the respresentation of mentall illness in the media


http://www.shockmd.com/2010/08/09/mental-illness-in-movies/

Mental Illness in Movies

Dr Shock Blog

& links into how the movie industry portrays those with mental illness


http://www.ucreative.ac.uk/index.cfm?articleid=31091

'Sick' DVD Relsease

University of The Creative Arts

& this discusses a positive representation of mental illness in the film 'sick'

http://ezinearticles.com/?(Mis)representations-of-Mental-Illness-in-Film&id=1610236

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8190036.stm

Guardian.co.uk

Media 'Reinforcing mental illness stigma'...

Journalists are reinforcing the stigma around mental illness by failing to provide "balanced" coverage, according to a survey published today.

While common mental health problems are treated in much the same way as other health issues, sufferers of severe mental illness were portrayed as "problem people", in ways similar to asylum seekers, youth offenders and drug users, according to the report Mind over Matter: Media reporting of mental health.

The report was published at the launch of a five-year campaign to both monitor the media and encourage more balanced coverage of the issues surrounding mental health in a bid to reduce prejudice. It was compiled by an alliance of mental health charities, including mental health media.

Attending the launch, the health minister, Rosie Winterton, criticised the way people with serious mental illness were represented in the media, claiming journalists tended to represent sufferers as a threat to the general public.

Messages about the risk of violence posed by people with mental health problems were present in 15% of stories, over three-quarters of which implied the risk was high, not low, according to the study.

This is despite the fact that people with mental health problems were more of a risk to themselves than others. Around 4,500 people kill themselves each year, nearly double the number killed on the roads.

Only 6% of stories about mental health included interviews with people experiencing difficulties, the survey found, with coverage often including stigmatising language and "unhelpful comments".

Overall, the study found "clear evidence" that reporting on severe mental health problems across the media was still problematic.

But Ms Winterton admitted the government also had a role to play in the portrayal of mental health in the media.

"What it shows, perhaps, is some gaps - not only in the media response ... [but] are we as a government doing enough to assist the media and people with mental health problems to improve coverage?" she said, speaking to an audience of journalists and mental health professionals.

"We need to make sure there is balanced coverage, and that particularly applies to people with severe mental health problems. "

The minister called for action, "particularly looking at what can be done to work with journalists to provide a more balanced view", before being barracked by a psychiatrist from the floor over the conflicting messages issued by the government itself.

Professor Graham Thornicroft criticised the minister for sending out messages in "two different directions", which he said served to reinforce the very stigma it accused the media of perpetuating.

The draft mental health bill - which has yet to be tabled in parliament, despite first being drawn up three years ago - supported the mistaken assumption that people with mental illness were particularly dangerous, he said.

The controversial bill has faced strong opposition from a broad alliance of campaigners over plans to detain people with untreatable mental illness who have committed no crimes.

"It is time to consider having a close look and accept that the current mental health bill is pointing in the wrong direction," he told Ms Winterton.

Efforts to improve coverage under the five-year Shift programme will include a mental health bureau to enable journalists to access people with mental health problems for interviews for mental health-related stores.

Guidelines jointly drawn up in conjunction with the National Union of Journalists and the Society of Editors will also be distributed to the media.

Guardian.co.uk

Hollywood's Mental Block...

Cinema has long been bad news for the mentally ill, typically representing them as the likes of Psycho's Norman Bates – crazed, dangerous and in need of harsh restraint. Film-makers have treated them as conveniently dehumanised as useful monsters, inviting cinemagoers to assume they should be feared, shunned and confined.

So what, you may feel: people can tell the difference between fiction and fact. Unfortunately, such research as has been conducted suggests otherwise. It has shown the mass media shapes people's ideas about mental illness, and that entertainment plays a bigger role in this process than factual output. In focus groups, people with hostile attitudes have cited films like Psycho as influences on their outlook.

To be fair, in Hitchcock's day harsh attitudes to mental illness pervaded not just films but society as a whole. Since then, public thinking has been changing, and so has film-makers'. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest marked a turning point. Before it appeared in 1975, few would have believed that a film sympathetic to the mentally ill could win all five of the Academy's top awards. Though it cost only $3m to make, it brought in $108m at the US box-office. Hollywood took note: compassion can pay.

Of course, scary lunatics continued to find a place on the big screen. When Milos Forman's five-Oscar triumph was finally matched in 1991, it was by a film rather less sympathetic than Cuckoo's Nest – The Silence of the Lambs. The tagline of this year's The Crazies, "Fear thy neighbor", is probably as negative a message about mental illness as has ever made it to a cinema poster. Nonetheless, over recent decades, we have also been presented with the often winsome, sometimes gifted, but generally sympathetic flakes of the likes of A Beautiful Mind, Shine, Rain Man, Adam, The Aviator, The Black Balloon, Séraphine, Keane, Away from Her and Girl, Interrupted.

However, those portrayals have not necessarily been psychiatrically accurate or even entirely helpful to those who are mentally ill in real life. Those that sanitise conditions, like Away from Her, can give the impression that sufferers need less help than they actually do. Where a link with genius is implied, as in A Beautiful Mind, sufferers whose conditions will bring them no equivalent benefit can find themselves disappointing both themselves and those around them.

Still, cinema's treatment of mental illness has been growing more sophisticated as well as more sympathetic. The diversity of the conditions involved is now generally recognised. Autism has its own cinematic sub-genre, which even extended its reach into Bollywood with My Name Is Khan. Bipolar disorder has been honourably treated in Mr Jones, Sylvia and Michael Clayton. Depression has had its day in The Hours, Prozac Nation and The Butcher Boy. Schizophrenia has been acknowledged in The Soloist, Spider and Me, Myself & Irene. The Madness of King George may even have done something for porphyria, though that diagnosis remains disputed.

It's against this background that Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island was eagerly awaited by those concerned with mental health. Here was a big-budget, mass-audience film by a legendary director dealing not just with mental illness but with the intricacies of its treatment. Set in the 1950s, when psychiatry was a battleground in which traditionalists wedded to lobotomy, electric shock and incarceration clashed with modernisers eager to move over to psychotherapy, education and medicine, it is based on a best-selling novel by Dennis Lehane published in 2003. Before filming, Scorsese chose to embark on intensive research. He appointed a psychiatric consultant of his own, Professor James Gilligan of New York University, a world authority on violent psychosis. In the 1970s, Gilligan was the director of a Massachusetts prison hospital for the criminally insane like the one featured in Shutter Island. The film's heroic Dr Cawley (played by Ben Kingsley) is largely based on himself in that era.

Scorsese was out to create high drama and to maximise emotional impact. Gilligan was batting for accuracy. He says he also wanted to protect the image of psychosocial treatments, since he feared that enthusiasm for physical remedies might be on the way back. So what was the outcome of these two men's debates? Maintaining historical accuracy, Gilligan assured me, had been no problem. The lengths to which the designers went to get things right amazed him. The psychiatric picture, however, was another story. But don't read on if you don't want to know the film's big twist.

DiCaprio's character, Teddy Daniels, is essentially delusional. He's not a cop, but a patient. According to Gilligan, a sound medical basis for Teddy's condition does indeed exist: he could suffer dissociative identity disorder. "I have known patients who were like that," says Gilligan. It is Dr Cawley's treatment that is nonsense. Cawley attempts to shock Teddy out of his delusion by enabling him to act it out in glorious detail. This, apparently, is the exact opposite of what would actually happen. According to Gilligan, the therapist's task is to encourage the patient to face reality "and help him to mourn his losses".

Unfortunately, the film's plot depends entirely on Cawley's exotic roleplay experiment, so that was that. Gilligan says that the story as told requires "the willing suspension of disbelief". He comforts himself with the thought that it can at least be seen as "a kind of metaphor for psychosocial methods of treatment as opposed to damaging the brain". Not to worry; elsewhere he seems to have won a victory, given that in the film – unlike the novel – Cawley's non-invasive treatment succeeds.

All the same, Shutter Island has left much of the mental health community unimpressed. The film may speak up for humane treatment; DiCaprio is wonderfully appealing and empathetic. But Shutter Island's world is one in which bipolar mothers kill their children, to be killed in turn by their demented husbands. Hospital patients are gruesome scarecrows. Psychiatrists are obsessive crackpots.

In the end, movies are drawn to madness because it's scary, however kindly they try to treat it. Their chilling images are bound to leave more of an impression than their worthy explanations. Gilligan still believes cinema's ability to instil sympathy for the mentally ill has come to outweigh its negative impacts. It has indeed come a long way. But it has still further to go.

Critical Investigation...


How and why do Horror/Thriller films, such as 'Hide and Seek' exaggerate the mentally ill?


Issues/Debates & Theories...


Moral Panic
Moral Panic is a feeling expressed by a large proportion of society on an issue (by a group of people or individuals) that is deviant to society.
Internet Link: http://psychservices.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/54/4/441

Genre Theories
Genre Theories are the ideas that a certain genre has constructed different elements in order to tell a story.
Internet Link: http://www.artandpopularculture.com/Horror_film

Representation & Stereotyping
Reperesentation and Sterotyping are the ideologies of a group of people that is constructed through the media.
Internet Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6043231/Heath-Ledgers-Joker-exacerbates-stereotypes-about-mental-health.html

Media Effects
This refers to the theories of the ways the media is constructed to affect how audiences think and behave
Internet Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_influence


Guardian.co.uk ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/jul/22/hollywood-mental-block

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/jan/24/broadcasting.pressandpublishing

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2004/jun/14/medicineandhealth.lifeandhealth1

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/19/schizophrenia-murder-mental-health

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/04/the-crazies-mental-health

Research...


To what extent does Horror/Thriller Films offer a true reflection of the Mentally Ill?
OR
Why does Horror/Thriller Films offer an exaggerated refelction of the Mentally ill?


Links:

http://thehorrorfiend.wordpress.com/2010/04/30/horror-films-and-mental-illness/

http://kpsych.wordpress.com/2008/06/10/hide-and-seek-media-portrayl-of-split-personalities-media-analysis-5/


http://www.helium.com/knowledge/29638-movies-and-mental-illness-the-depiction-of-mental-disorders-through-film



Texts that can be looked at:

The Uninvited (2009)- Dissociatve Disorder
Hide & Seek (2005)- Dissociative Disorder
Shutter Island (2010)- Schizophrenia
Obsessed (2009) - Delusional Disorder
Veronica Decides to Die (2009) - Clinical Depression