How do social media and the film industry influence how people view mental illnesses and psychological disorders?
Life is on its way to being the best it can be and then all of a sudden objects and people start to appear. Believing one thing is the only way to survive, but those new emergences are not actually there. The ability to continue having relationships with people is growing only more difficult and life in general is becoming increasingly intimidating. Family and friends are put on the back burner as hallucinations begin to control every ounce of attention, the mental illness is setting in and is starting to run its course. This is a short snippet of what occurs in A Beautiful Mind. Has anyone ever stopped to think about how the film industry and social media have impacted the way people perceive mental illnesses and psychological disorders? A more common question would be: has anyone ever thought about how the way something is portrayed could be far from what is actually taking place? The idea of these questions is rooted in the study of the human brain and behavior, or psychology. For this topic, it is imperative to remember that not everything on the internet is true, and just because something is on the internet, does not mean it is not true. Paying close attention to how the film industry can distribute a product (movie) that makes mental illness seem life consuming, or glorified, and other times releasing a product where the illness or disorder is just misrepresented exists and should not go unnoticed. Causing discomfort to audiences while watching movies is the last thing the film industry wants, however, when something is glorified or misrepresented, this could happen. (Zeri & Livi, 272)
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From when the first psychology based film was released (1912), until now (2017), the aim of film making has certainly changed. In the beginning, exposure to a certain idea or illness was the main concentration of film makers; however, now creators are trying to capture the audience’s attention any way possible. On December 21, 2001, the critically acclaimed film A Beautiful Mind was released. Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, and Ed Harris star in loosely based production surrounding the life of John Nash; the main focus of this movie is Nash’s mental illness: schizophrenia. So far, the idea for A Beautiful Mind is good: there is interesting subject matter, an admirable candidate for the main character, and a hook for the film to be based on. Although these things exist, one must not forget to look at what the overall feel of the movie is. Nash’s schizophrenia consumes his entire being: it ruins the relationships he has with his significant other, his friend, it even ends up affecting the way he performs in the workplace. According to Mascolo and Margolis, social interaction has a direct effect on cognition, therefore, when his social interaction decreased, his level of cognition and ability to breakdown complexities could have diminished over time. His life was taken over by this illness and all the audience can do is watch in awe. Schizophrenia is one of the more extreme mental illnesses one can be diagnosed with, but it by no means always takes over the individual’s life when they are diagnosed. (Schmander, Block, Lickel) This experimental film conveys the idea that it is unmanageable and the people around the one who suffers from the illness will be pushed away, hurt, forgotten about; when really, that is not true in all cases. (Michaelis, 1) With the correct dosage of medication and therapy, someone with Schizophrenia can function effectively and lead a seemingly normal life.
In 2012, a certain movie was released, and was nominated one hundred and forty-five times for awards and it won nearly ninety. This movie goes by the name of Silver Linings Playbook. The main character suffers from Bipolar Disorder and acts as a bull in a China shop throughout the film regarding his family, romantic relationships, even with his psychiatrist’s office. Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and Robert De Niro deliver a phenomenal performance in this major motion picture. The beginning of the film shows Cooper being released prematurely from a mental institution and then the plot hits the ground running. The character is troubled and has carried out actions that have hurt his loved ones and it seems as though his illness is the root for many of their issues. Bipolar Disorder is a mental illness that is severe and requires time and effort to resolve, but it not necessarily something that ruins lives. There is much more to this mental illness than meets the eye and it affects more than just the individual, it influences all of their social relationships; there is more to it than the stereotypical manic and depressive states. (J. Carranza, personal interview, March 8, 2017) Yes, when any psychological disorder goes untreated, there are negative effects; but if properly handled with good medication and meetings with a psychiatrist, the individual with the disorder and those surrounding them will not be in harm’s way the majority of the time.
As of now, there is only one episode of this certain television show that displays the idea mental illnesses and psychological disorders are life consuming, and that show is called Binge. To clarify, this is not the only show that displays this idea. As you may be able to conclude from the title, Binge is about a girl who suffers from Bulimia Nervosa, which is considered a psychological disorder. Bulimia Nervosa is an illness where the host feels discontent with their body and uses the mechanisms of binging and purging to release solid and liquid waste from their body in hopes it will release weight too. Initially weight may be released with the food and liquid purged, but after a while the body will stabilize and less and less weight will be released. Instead, nutrients and vitamins will be the main objects leaving the body. Binge actually does give a pretty accurate representation of what someone’s life would look like if they suffered from this illness. Despite this being true, it is a fictional television show that does also dramatize things to gain views and attention. This show could easily influence the way younger people view Bulimia and that could have a cascading effect in their development in thought process regarding eating disorders. (Agarwal & Dhanasekaran, 38) The lack of a therapist in the main character’s life and the minimal effort of her only friend to help her are not likely to occur with someone who has Bulimia; this is a separation of ideas with respect to reality and fictitious reality. (Ayers, 42) Furthermore, although the show’s main purpose is to expose the illness, it makes it seem as though Bulimia has the common power of taking over a person’s life. The disease itself does hold that power, however, it is not common a friend is an enabler of the disease. This means Bulimia is powerful and it can be life altering, but therapy and a change in thought can certainly tone down the toxic thought process that accompanies it.
Where does social media play a role in mental illness dramatization? Tumblr is a blog website that hosts well over three hundred million blogs and is home to over one billion posts. This is a common website used amongst pre-teens, teenagers, and young adults; it is also one of the most common websites where mental illness is displayed. Many blogs are dedicated just to depression or anorexia nervosa and visitors of those blogs often suffer from those mental illnesses. They tell the story from the perspective that mental illnesses have taken over their (the creator’s) lives when the whole story just is not there. Have they been diagnosed? Have they received the help they need? Without any disclosure of fact-checked information, blogs are being created to put forth the mindset that once you have a mental illness or psychological disorder, or at least if you think you have one, that your life is over when that is simply untrue.
An issue that is quite common in today’s society is how mental illnesses are glorified in social media and in films; this can almost certainly result in desensitization of them. (Mrug, Madan, Cook & Wright) One of the most popular films on Netflix for teenagers and young adults because of its featured mentally ill characters is entitled 6 Years. This movie’s plot is about a couple that is madly in love, the key word here is madly because one of them suffers from mental illness. Even though the specific mental illness is not disclosed in the film, manic-depressive disorder is surely displayed. For six years, this couple was together feeding off of the toxicity of the relationship itself. Throughout the film, the audience is exposed to the main character, Mel’s (Taissa Farmiga), manic-depressive states. One minute she is head over heels in love with Dan (Ben Rosenfield) and the next she is violent and spiteful towards him causing him to be arrested and hospitalized through the course of their relationship. The film creates this mentality that even if you are not good for each other, if you love each other enough, your issues will slowly go away. Their relationship is glorified for being toxic and that is said to be “the beauty of it”. The sick beauty of pushing mental illness aside is what 6 Years unapologetically depicts and millions of young adults are consuming the product.
Visiting the idea of social media when it comes to glorifying mental illness is the right way to go. Various psychological approaches are used to convey ideas and the aforementioned website Tumblr is notorious for glorifying mental illnesses and psychological disorders. (Bassil-Morozow, 132) Depression and Self-Harm are such common searches on the site that the creators have embedded a pop up for when someone searches it. A warning to the searcher and the numbers/web addresses to globally recognized organizations that fight against the subject that they have searched comes up on the page immediately. Tumblr’s staff released a statement a few years ago that stated PSAs will be issued to those searching words that fall under the criteria of mental illness; including but not limited to depression, self-harm, anorexia, bulimia, schizophrenia, cut, ana, purge, thinspo, proana, thinspiration, and so on. Of course the censoring of the website was immediately put into action, but that has not caused avid users of the blog site to hold back when posting about these intense topics. The idea that mental illness is somehow a good thing has been present since the inception of social media. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and most of all Tumblr are all subject to host individuals who have that mindset. Recently, there has been a coin phrase “triggered” or “triggering” or “I’m triggered” by a range of things mostly having to do with mental illness, but sometimes not. This saying was initially created to warn people on Tumblr about certain pages that had sensitive subject matter. For example, someone that wanted to get better or recover from a mental illness would be warned that that certain blog was triggering and they should not continue. Needless to say, this was not as effective as the internet community would have hoped. Now the people use the term/phrase as a joke the majority of the time, its ability to aid certain situations has seemingly disappeared.
In addition to making mental illness seem unbearable or glorifying it, social media and the film industry have plainly misrepresented the community as a whole. Mostly Tumblr plays a role in this because personal blogs are posting individual opinions on certain matters and that is influencing how people see the mental illness. In actuality, the opinion of one should neither promote nor jade the opinion of another, as opinions are not fact-based. Therefore, someone’s blog hosts their realm of opinions on Tumblr and rarely are there legitimate statistics listed and/or cited. Many of these instances can be used to teach psychology by focusing on the initial post, who posted it, and the demographic they were aiming to reach. (Fleming, Piedmont & Hiam, 185)
The one movie that comes to mind when considering the plain misrepresentation of a mental illness or psychological disorder would be Good Will Hunting. This is one of the most successful films Matt Damon and Robin Williams have stared in and that fact is understandable for most after watching the film. However, there are some that recognize the plausible claim that there is a mental illness being represented in the film. As it is never explicitly stated in Good Will Hunting what the main character suffers from, it has been up to audience’s discretion to decide whether or not they believe he does or does not. Some sources and individuals claim that Will has Stress Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, and an Inferiority Complex. While watching the film, you could see all three of these claims, but you could also draw out hints of depression and/or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Although the film is great and considered to be a “rite of passage movie”, it does seem to misrepresent quite a few psychological disorders. How has this affected the way people view these disorders? The film’s characterization of Will Hunting has promoted the idea that people from his type of background (difficult home life and low income household) can and will turn out like him, or at least similar to him. This includes but is not limited to the idea of them also having the psychological disorders he displays. Once again, this is not the whole truth, and the entire story, so to speak, is not being conveyed to the audience.
Over the course of the past one hundred and five years, the film industry has morphed into many different things and social media has been established. Mental illnesses and psychological disorders have been studied more in depth over the past sixty years than they ever have before. Films, television, and social media all influence the way people view mental illness and some are even used to teach psychiatry. (Kalra, 258) With new ideas and theories surfacing all over the world from multiple walks of life, it is interesting to see how different groups of people convey things and how the others perceive and interpret them.
Works Cited
1. Mascolo MF, Margolis D. Social cognition as a mediator of adolescent development: A coactive systems approach. European Journal of Developmental Psychology. 2004;1(4):289-302.
2. Agarwal V, Dhanasekaran S. Harmful effects of media on children and adolescents. Journal of Indian Association for Child & Adolescent Mental Health. 2012;8(2):38-45.
3. Michaelis AR. Research films in biology, anthropology, psychology, and medicine. New York: Acad. Press; 1955:258. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=kERRgqbRHx4C&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=psychology+in+films&ots=vUSZb4MsFP&sig=pBYH2JPMaIHI0lmSDn5Yw86NF6M#v=onepage&q&f=false.
4. Fleming MZ, Piedmont RL, Hiam CM. Images of madness: Feature films in teaching psychology. Teaching of Psychology. 1990;17(3):185-187. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1207/s15328023top1703_12.
5. Zeri F, Livi S. Visual discomfort while watching stereoscopic three-dimensional movies at the cinema. Ophthalmic & Physiological Optics. 2015;35(3):271-282.
6. Kalra G. Psychiatry movie club: A novel way to teach psychiatry. Indian Journal of Psychiatry. 2011;53(3):258-260.
7. Mrug S, Madan A, Cook E, Wright R. Emotional and physiological desensitization to real-life and movie violence. Journal of Youth & Adolescence. 2015;44(5):1092-1108.
8. Bassil-Morozow H. Analytical psychology and cinema. J Anal Psychol. 2015;60(1):132-136.
9. Ayers D. Bodies, bullets, and bad guys: Elements of the hardbody film. Film Criticism. 2008;32(3):41-67.
10. Schmader T, Block K, Lickel B. Social identity threat in response to stereotypic film portrayals: Effects on self-conscious emotion and implicit ingroup attitudes. J Society Issue. 2015;71(1):54-72.
11. Carranza, J. (2017, March 8). Personal interview with Jennifer Madden.
Reflection
For this project, it was interesting to see that few other people had previously studied this. When looking for scholarly sources that is when I cam in contact with the most difficulty. Reading each article and choosing which ones were most relevant to my topic was time consuming, but rewarding in the end because they were the most accurate. From the beginning of this project, I thought that I had already made up my mind on how social media and the film industry influence the way people view both mental illnesses and psychological disorders. I was incorrect. There is always so much more than meets the eye with any topic and this one in particular was not only enjoyable to research, but it was a real experience learning about other peoples' viewpoints on the matter. Furthermore, choosing what Television show and movie to discuss was difficult as well. Binge was the most fitting, in my opinion, for this paper's topic, but there is just so little about it on the internet. It really does do one of the most raw portrayals or Bulimia Nervosa and the creators of the show take it very seriously. For this project, it was fun to hear peoples' reactions to the paper as well. For some of the media included, certain details about the film or show and/or theories about them had never really come into play. Being able to speak about these intense topics in a more relaxed and non-biased manner gives the paper a welcoming and non-judgmental vibe for those interested in reading it.