MHA's Blog: Chiming In

It’s Kind of a Funny Story is a sweet little movie that manages to do something almost unheard of in movies about mental health, especially those in mental hospitals. It treats all of its characters, the patients, the doctors and the love interests, as real people. Heck, it’s even better at character creation than most movies not about people with mental illnesses.

The movie is about a teenager named Craig Gilner. Stressed out from the pressures of school, an application for a prestigious summer program and his friends, he dreams about committing suicide. Concerned, he checks himself into the psychiatric ward of the local hospital, where he is housed with the adults. He meets Bobby, an older man with depression, and the two become friends. He learns about himself through his week on the ward, and about all of the other patients. He even begins to date another teenaged patient named Noelle. By the end of the week, Craig has learned about himself and leaves the ward with a more positive outlook on life.

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Suicide, and its image in pop culture, has a long and confusing history. Anyone you ask about suicide will tell you that it’s a horrible thing, especially the suicides of young people but ask anyone about Romeo and Juliet, and it’s the most romantic story in the world. The deaths of the two lovers becomes the final point in their love, not a mistake egged on by adults who want to use the teens for their gains.  One of suicide’s connotations is now the tragic end of teenaged love.

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For the first non-American Horror Story blog, I wanted to start right away with something great, something that helped redefine the way mental health is viewed in pop culture. Instead, I watched the first episode of Do No Harm. The show gave me a good gauge on where pop culture is in regards to Dissociative Identity Disorder, which you might know as Multiple Personality Disorder, and it’s not good.

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American Horror Story’s second season ended last week, but I had some final thoughts about the show and one topic that I never got a chance to discuss before the blog moves on. 

When I started thinking about this blog and using American Horror Story in particular, I thought the show was going to focus more on the well-documented abuses of the mental health system, and I wanted this column to address those issues directly.  I assumed that we would see more of topics like Lana’s expos é or lobotomies and studies like Milgram’s obedience study or the Stanford Prison Study (which is the topic of two horror movies in its own right).  Despite the fact that the history of psychology is no more tawdry or evil than any other medical field, the ugly side is certainly more well-known than the positive side and I really thought that was what the show would be about. 

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This week’s American Horror Story brings us to the end of the season (I’m sorry I missed last week’s blog.  I had the flu).  It also brought us one tiny glimpse of what I thought the show would be more about, the state of disrepair of the mental hospitals during the 1960s.  The show we got was nothing like that, but I wanted to talk about that idea for a bit. 

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