Television for what ails you

This is how TV used to show mental illness: Men imbued with magical crimesolving or diseasecuring powers that hindered their personal lives. Criminals who were “psychotic” and therefore could not be understood, only feared. Girls with eating disorders that appeared in one episode of a sitcom and then were cured after a heart-to-heart. Soap operas that revelled in the split personality not actually a real disorder - as a plot point.

Lately, TV has been doing a much better job, portraying mental illness in an empathetic way, and giving us protagonists whose struggles are realistic and only part of their personalities. The main character in “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” tackles the intricacies of anxiety and depression with humour and sensitivity. “Lady Dynamite,” starring comedian Maria Bamford as a version of herself, hops around in time to show us both Bamford’s struggles with bipolar disorder in the past juxtaposed with how she manages in the present - and it’s hilarious. I’m a former couples and family therapist who now writes for TV, so it is very reassuring to me that mental illness is no longer the butt of a joke or a motivation for murder. It’s part of who we are.

For so long, TV consisted of a limited number of shows a year, and those shows had to appeal to as many people as possible. The joy of TV now is that shows don’t have to be broad anymore - they can be small, weird and niche. In fact, as Sunday night’s Emmys showed, many of the most celebrated shows are the most niche. TV can give us depressed, confused, weak, anxious heroes. And it can give us something else, in a better, bigger dose than ever before: the TV cure.

I grew up in a very small town in North Carolina, weird and pudgy, without too many other kids to play with. I spent a lot of time watching TV. It was my reassurance that the outside world was bigger and more colourful than the one I lived in. I’d watch shows like “The Kids in the Hall” or “Twin Peaks,” and I’d see weird people being celebrated and appreciated without compromising their weirdness. On “The Facts of Life,” I’d see girls who were pudgy, beautiful, popular, tomboyish many ways of being female, and I’d feel quietly reassured. Sure, we weren’t really nailing body diversity, or any diversity, on TV back then, but it was something. Far from “rotting my brain,” as I was often told would happen, TV helped me feel less alone at a time when I spent so much time alone.

That may sound sad, but it wasn’t, not to me. I did my best to connect to other kids my age, but when things got rough I knew that I had my friends on screen to hang out with. I knew that after a long, lonely summer, I could look forward to familiar faces coming back again when the fall season started.

Now there are many unique characters and situations for us to feel a kinship with, and far from making those shows less accessible, it’s awakening the fandom of those of us who have never seen ourselves on TV. Not only are people connecting to these flawed characters, but TV is so good and so specific now that people are connecting to the show itself as a way to cope, because they feel as if the show was made for them.

I have friends who are former substance abusers who cite the next season of “The Walking Dead” as the thing keeping them from using. Looking forward to a season premiere gives them the hope to stay sober day after day. I have anxious friends who watch “The Big Bang Theory” to calm Not only are people connecting to these flawed characters, but TV is so good and so specific now that people are connecting to the show itself as a way to cope, because they feel as if the show was made for them down, because they are comforted by its patterns and well-known characters. I have depressed friends who send episodes of “You’re the Worst,” a cable comedy show that deals explicitly with characters who suffer from depression and PTSD, to family members to help explain how they feel. When Gretchen, the character with depression in “You’re the Worst,” spends one episode immobile on the couch, and her friends work themselves into frenzies trying to “fix” her, it highlighted both the futile kindness of their efforts and Gretchen’s inability to be fixed. And it’s much easier to communicate those delicate ideas with a link to a TV show.

This is what TV does for us now. It doesn’t replace relationships, or intimacy, or make us cold strangers to one another, but it can shine a light on our darkest, loneliest corners. It can give us something exciting to look forward to. It can help us find communities of people who like the same stuff we do, even if we’re not quite sure why it’s speaking to us.

I don’t practice as a therapist any longer, but I do write an advice column. People who ask me questions often say that they worry they are too obsessed with certain shows or movies. The therapist in me encourages them to seek out interests beyond TV. I tell them to apply their obsessive pop culture enthusiasm to their own lives and relationships, to become as eager for knowledge about their friends and significant others as they are for details on “Supernatural.” But the TV watcher in me gets what they’re saying.

Sometimes people ask me what a TV writers’ room is like. The best way I can describe it is to ask: Remember when you had a summer job in retail, and it got slow, you would sit with your co-workers trying to figure out what you had in common, and trying to make each other laugh? That’s what being in a writers’ room is like, but the talking is your main job. The odds are, if something you’ve experienced makes people shout “Yes!” it’s going to make viewers at home feel understood and less alone.

Our wealth of weird, niche TV today means that almost anyone can see themselves reflected on screen, or see other possibilities for their lives. Or watch and just think “Yes, me, too!” Television is a drug to be taken in moderation, sure, but it’s a drug that, more and more, is prescribed specifically for you.