Holly-would, Wouldn’t It!

Some well-known insightful movies have been made about someone living with a mental illness. Examples are: “The Three Faces Of Eve (1957),” “A Beautiful Mind (2001),” and “Silver Linings Playbook (2012).” However, these movies are the exception rather than the rule. Focussing on Hollywood, for example, countless movies have been made which propagate the worst type of stigma against a mental health consumer to their mainly receptive audiences.

Time and again, especially in the horror and thriller genres, the person guilty of tormenting others and/or killing them is portrayed as living with a mental illness.

Well, Holly-would, Wouldn’t It!

Hollywood movies are often unrealistic, with heroes escaping impossible odds while things blow up and gun bullets fly. Horror and thriller movies often display extreme sadism on the killer’s part. The scriptwriter needs someone to blame, and so many, with a complete lack of originality, choose to cast a person with a mental illness as the perpetrator of unspeakable acts. Throwing in a few childhood traumas gives the message that abused children may turn into murderers, which is also a propagation of awful stigma. 

Similar criticisms are valid for many police thrillers on TV and thriller genre books.

I love the movies and am not about to boycott the medium. It does a lot of good too. However, makers of films and TV shows, and writers of books, need to be held more accountable. For many people, what comes out of those media is their only education on mental illness and abuse survivors. It’s stigmatizing, inaccurate, and insidious.

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