[SPOILER ALERT in this post for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them]
I don't know if there is such a thing as Mental Illness Kindness Day, but there ought to be.
One of my favorite people and good friend was recently diagnosed with depression and anxiety. It is taking me a while to figure out what this means. My mother had depression and was on medication for years. Hers didn't kick in until after I was living on my own in a different state, so I didn't see to the day-to-day impacted on her. My father tells me stories of how she would cry for days.
Yesterday, I went to see Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them with this friend and our kids. After the movie, this friend said she didn't like it: "The bad guy was a psycho bent on destroying the world." This hit her close to the heart.
Having just been diagnosed with a mental illness and starting treatment, she struggles with the loneliness of the disease and understanding how her body impacts her mood in such a way that makes her unmotivated to leave the house. She is functional in some respects of her life because she has to be, but in others, she falls. She tells me of her dark thoughts and wishes them away. "When I get bored, I think. When I think, I get depressed." I can't imagine what it would be like not to want to be inside your own head, wanting to escape your own mind.
In some sense, the answer could be to be distracted to the point of not thinking, but then she introduced a new word to my vocabulary: maladaptive. Maladaptive means using a coping mechanism that doesn't improve mental health, like drinking or giving in to other addictions like video games. Adaptive strategies are exercise, being around friends, exploring nature and getting enough sleep.
Her issue is that bad guys in movies are often disturbed or crazy. I suppose a bad guy can't simply be sane because then perhaps he wouldn't be a bad guy because theoretically he or she would know better than to commit evil acts. That being said, many if not most people with mental illnesses know the difference between right and wrong, likely at the same rate sane people know right from wrong. Some folks with mental illness have a very heightened sense of right and wrong -- they might be more sensitive to injustice than a typical person. My daughter pointed out that Putin is sane and Lincoln was crazy. Does that make having a mental illness a good thing? If you only use those two as an example, I suppose so, but life isn't so simple.
I am asking Hollywood this: can we have more empathetic depictions of people with mental illnesses? Can we have some heroes who suffer from bipolar disorder, or OCD? I googled famous people with depression and it was twelve pages long. How about showing a biopic of Lincoln that includes his depression?
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