MHA's Blog: Chiming In

Comedy and mental health have always gone hand in hand. There’s an old saying that comedians need to be miserable to be funny. In recent years, more comedians have been vocal about what’s making them miserable.  Comedians have been more open about their mental health conditions and trauma they’ve suffered. Maria Bamford’s Special Special Special takes it to a new level, though.

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This week, I went back in time to take a look at a story that comes up in discussions of mental health in literature, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I’ve read the story a bunch of times in various settings, particularly in a class on American Literature, and I always see something different in it. This time, the need for autonomy came to the front.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” was written in 1890 in response to Gilman’s experience with postpartum depression following the birth of her daughter. The story is about a woman who is locked in a room by her husband (who is also her doctor) following the birth of their child. She is driven to distraction by the ugly yellow wallpaper in the room, which eventually causes her to have a nervous breakdown.

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This week, some MHA staff members and I had the chance to see Jason Invisible, a new play co-commissioned by the Kennedy Center and VSA, the international organization on arts and disability. The drama, which focuses on a young boy dealing with his father’s mental health conditions, is a terrific way to educate middle schoolers about mental health.

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The Three Faces of Eve, made in 1958, is one of the earliest films to deal with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID).  Despite being tied to its time, the movie handles the illness with intelligence and sympathy.  In a time when movies were censored for content, how did this movie get made?

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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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