Do more to end stigmatising of mental illness

EVERY year, Mental Health Awareness Month [May] has various mainstream media (news, social and entertainment) platitudinously state or promote the obvious: That society, collectively and as individuals, must open up its/our minds and encourage common dialogue towards far more fruitfully treating and preventing mental illness.

Needless to say, everyone will agree, at least publicly, that stigmatising such illness and, by extension, its bearers should have ceased long ago.

But then that is basically as far as it goes.

Unlike with the loud and apparently quite effective voices lobbying the news, social and entertainment media against reinforcing stereotypes based on skin colour, sexuality, gender and even gender bending; there is no comparable influential protest voice against reinforcing stereotypes based on mental illness. I believe it is called the squeaky-wheel effect.

When it comes to irresponsibly stereotyping and/or stigmatising people specifically living with schizophrenia, the 2008 box-office-hit movie The Dark Knight (as overall entertaining as it was) could be a textbook example.

In one shameful scene, the glorified Batman character recklessly erroneously grumbles to the district attorney character Harvey Dent that the sinisterly-sneering clearly-conscience-lacking murderer he has handcuffed to a wheeled stretcher is “a paranoid schizophrenic — exactly the kind of mind that the Joker attracts”.

I should add here, however, that I rather enjoyed and appreciated the relatively sympathetic theme on poverty and especially mental illness in the 2019 film Joker.

Like The Dark Knight, the 2021 horror-flick old also stigmatises schizophrenia via a creepy character’s violent behaviour.

We had entered the third millennium, yet a 4/4-star-rated Hollywood hit movie as well as a much more recent film, could still be readily found flagrantly demonising characters based on their mental illness.

There was no societal or vocal condemnation. It seemed to not matter that people living with schizophrenia are generally more likely to harm themselves and/or be a victim of violence than they are to harm others. Frank Sterle Jr