mental health

A medic—who was sent away—checks out James Chasse's injuries as police sip coffee. 

Cases of police brutality are reported time and time again across the country.  And yet, despite the passing of years and supposed reforms, we are always taken aback when new cases arise. 

Seven years after one particularly awful case in Portland, Oregon, the new independent documentary Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse captures the horror once more. The film is a chilling, intimate look at one case of police brutality and the flawed justice system that allows officers to act with impunity.

I originally intended for this to be a companion piece to my previous post about the 2009 film Adam. Mozart and the Whale is a 2006 romantic "dramedy" about a man and a woman with Asperger syndrome and, in many ways, it makes a very neat thematic companion to the other film. In Adam, the protagonists' relationship ultimately fails because the title character's autism prevents him from fulfulling an appropriate "masculine" role. In Mozart and the Whale, the relationship succeeds because both characters are autistic; neither of them can successfully maintain a relationship with a "normal" person but, as the tagline says, "They don't fit in. Except together." The troubling implication is that if autistic people are going to pursue romantic relationships, it's best if we stick with "our own kind."

"Crazy" people aren't the only ones who are a bundle of stereotypes in popular media. We also see examples of therapists (including psychologists, psychiatrists, and counselors) being presented in a very negative light. In the following examples, I highlight pop culture therapists who are incompetent in a variety of ways.

Some of these movies and television shows are, of course, comedies. Not only are therapists being mocked, but so are a variety of other people. What's interesting here is how similar a lot of the mocking of therapy is across various genres.

Throughout this list I've used the catch-all term "therapist" for consistency's sake. I've also used "incompetent therapist," although "incompetent" is often in the eye of the viewer.

This post includes spoilers for the movies Single White Female, The Craft, and Perfect Blue. These three movies have several things in common:

• The main point-of-view character in each one is what I’ve called "fake-out crazy." Each one exhibits some sort of behavior within the movie that could be viewed as "insane," but unlike the villains, these women end up being "strong enough" to overcome this. (Earlier in the film, the "crazy" character always accuses the "sane" one of being "too weak" or "pathetic".)
• None of the characters are actually diagnosed with anything within the films, although psychiatrists are contacted in all cases. The Internet has provided the "crazy" characters with a variety of diagnoses.
• Two of the movies have a red herring character who is "crazy" and is obsessed with the main character.
• Each movie uses sexual behavior as a way of showing how "out of control" one of the characters has gotten.

Last year in Canada, there were two nation-wide campaigns to fight mental health stigma.

The first focused on the financial cost of mental health. It was launched by one of our major banks, and had a slick advertising campaign full of dark colors and statistics. There were multi-page discussions in the national newspapers, as well as multiple bus shelter advertisements driving home the point: Mental illness is a cost to the Canadian economy.

The other, Stand Up For Mental Health, was launched by actual people with mental health conditions. The program is open to people with a variety of diagnoses, and trains them to become stand-up comics, making jokes and wise-cracks about the experience of being mentally ill, as well as other aspects of the lives of the comics. Last year, Stand Up for Mental Health did a cross-country tour to university campuses in the hopes of raising enough awareness to get a Pepsi Refresh Grant so they could get more funding for their work.

I encountered both of these programs at university.

If you read popular anti-street harassment blogs and media coverage of the topic, a pattern of perpetrator name-calling rapidly emerges, and some of the most prevalent terms you'll hear to describe the guys who "holla" at women and girls in public spaces are "pervert," "asshole," and "creep." I've always felt uneasy at this type of dehumanizing, knee-jerk response, and at this defining stage of street harassment, it would be wise to interrogate its purpose and meaning in shaping a new narrative regarding violence against women.

If Frida Kahlo's painted figures and Marcel Dzama's illustrations were lifted off the canvas and brought to life in a seance performance, their stories and gestures would surely resemble the performative cabaret work of Geppetta. Philedelphia-based queer fabulist Adelaide Windsome is a multimedia puppeteer who explores mental health, identity and survival through the fantastic.

If we're going to talk about voluntary sterilization—or even the simple act of opting to have few or no children—we've got to get everyone on the same historical page. While I tend to take for granted that people understand the history of forced sterilization in the U.S., as well as countries such as China that mandate single-child families as part of population control, it may not be a given that everyone understands the connections between modern eugenics, race/class/ability privilege, reproductive justice, and the struggle for voluntary sterilization. Much as I know loads of folks use it as a jumping off point, skimming the Wikipedia entries for compulsory sterilization and eugenics in the United States only gets you so far.

This week on Grey's Anatomy, lightning strikes a flag football team, Doctor Yang breaks down in the operating room, Callie and Arizona spar over paint, Dr. Bailey lays down the law with Dr. Karev, Meredith opens up in therapy, and so much more! Find out what the Grand Rounds bloggers think about it all after the jump.

There's an patronising narrative that happens with a lot of disabled characters. They don't act out of free will, but because they are disabled. They aren't allowed independence, because they are disabled and clearly incapable of acting on their own. Other characters do things 'for their own good' and this is depicted in a neutral or even positive way. These 'small details' that barely register with nondisabled viewers make me cringe and make me approach something that other people love from a completely different perspective.

This has real-world impacts on how nondisabled people interact with us. If you are a wheelchair user or you are in a relationship with one, people will ask you 'How do you have sex?' If you are a person with mental illness, you are going to be continually questioned about whether you are choosing relationships out of free will or because you're sick. If you have a cognitive or developmental disability, there will be concern trolling about whether you are able of making independent choices.