MHA's Blog: Chiming In

The debate over whether people with mental illnesses are a threat to society has gone on for an extraordinarily long time. Despite the overwhelming evidence that having a mental illness does not make you violent, there has always been a group of people who feel that locking them away from “normal” society will make the world a better place.  Being sick allows society to refuse them their Constitutional rights to a fair trial because their actions make people uncomfortable. This fight is often fought on the ground, as it were, with the police and in the court system.

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I wanted to discuss the way pop culture deals with veteran’s mental health, and to my surprise, a number of potential options appeared. Veterans are a common topic on TV procedurals (stereotypically watched by traditional, middle Americans who love apple pie and freedom), and due to the two wars and the influx of baby boomers remembering how Vietnam veterans were treated, the topic comes up a lot. The theme is usually how the government has failed veterans (and how they have!) and how the local community needs to step up and take care of them. Often, one of the main characters of the show is a veteran himself. Shows like NCIS, CSI and Bones have characters that are veterans, and have episodes about veteran’s issues. Recently, the issue has appeared in a more complicated fashion on more complicated cable shows like Justified and Sherlock. One episode about veterans that stuck with me is Criminal Minds’ “Distress,” from its second season.

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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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