Television and the Portrayal of Mental Health

Yesterday, 22 November 2010, it was widely reported in the British press that a study had found that television drama often portrayed those with mental health problems as ‘dangerous’.  The study was conducted by the Glasgow Media Group who produced the following findings:

• 45% of fictional characters with mental health difficulties were portrayed as a threat
• 63% of references to mental health problems by fictional characters were derogatory

So what, actually, is television drama doing?  It is presenting a particular view of mental health entirely generated by the imagination of its writers?  Or is it reflecting the misapprehensions and prejudices of society in general?  I would suggest that it is indeed reflecting common prejudices, but it is also reinforcing them.

In a previous post in which I wrote about some of the intentions behind my book, Delivered Unto Lions, I said that mental health problems, even today, still carry a stigma.  This stigma will not go away as long as society’s misapprehensions and prejudices go unchallenged.  As I see it, TV drama should represent these prejudices (and this may involve characters using derogatory language), but it is lazy writing that depicts a false representation of the reality (i.e. that those with mental health disorders are dangerous).

Needless to say, a small number of widely reported incidents may persuade us that many people with mental health problems are a threat to us, but the facts say something different.  Violence (for example) is proportionally less common in suffers of such problems than it is in the general population.  Indeed, sufferers of mental health problems are far more likely to be victims of violence than they are perpetrators.  According to Heather Stuart of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, the mentally ill do not contribute significantly to the prevalence of violence in wider society.  If all people with mental disorders were removed from society, violent crime would be reduced by less than 5%.

The writers of television drama are, of course, mainly operating in the sphere of fiction, but surely that fiction would serve viewers better if it displayed a better understanding of the reality.

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Delivered Unto Lions by David Austin is published by CheckPoint Press.
For more information visit www.davidaustin.eu

Harry Potter and the Psychiatric Unit of Cadaverous Misfortune

People often ask me about the striking similarity between my book, Delivered Unto Lions, and J K Rowling’s Harry Potter series.  Actually, that’s a lie.  I don’t think anyone has ever asked me about this striking similarity, because it simply isn’t that striking.

What we have, however, are two narratives which follow the story of a boy who is something of a misfit.  The boy ends up in a rather unusual school environment where he is subjected to various threatening experiences.  However, the similarity ends there.

The celebrated fantasy writer Terry Pratchett has questioned certain aspects of the Harry Potter mythos.  In particular, he is critical of the (perhaps) derogatory attitude portrayed in relation to ‘muggles’, i.e. ordinary people without magical powers.  Ordinary people are looked down upon in the Harry Potter stories, and yet, Pratchett argues, ordinary people have skills and abilities of their own.  An ordinary person can be a skilled fisherman, for example, while a particularly gifted wizard might not be able to tell one end of a fishing boat from the other.

I agree with Pratchett to a large extent.  But I also suspect that he may be missing the point of the Harry Potter books.  When we first come across the character of Harry, he is a child in very unhappy circumstances.  He is living with an unsympathetic family who force him to deny the person he is.  But he is special and they are ordinary.  And his special nature is eventually recognised and rewarded by admittance to Hogwarts, a unique school where his talents can be fostered and where he can work towards reaching his potential.

This is all in stark contrast to the character of the 12-year old Daniel Kinsley in Delivered Unto Lions.  He too – as a sufferer of depression – is living in very unhappy circumstances.  But there’s no reason to think that his family aren’t sympathetic; indeed, they are loving and caring.  But his depression – the thing that is ‘special’ about him – is ‘rewarded’ by admittance to Oakdale Children’s Unit, a residential psychiatric institution which, if anything, stunts his potential and makes his unfortunate condition worse.

For children whose lives are unhappy, dreams of being special in some way may be the only things that keep them going through the darkness.  So, in a sense, the Harry Potter stories encourage hope in those children who may feel like misfits, hope that they can rise above the unhappiness and be something more.  It may be just a dream, it may not have any basis in reality, but it is supportive.  With the right support and encouragement even an ordinary (or problematic) child can flourish and grow up to live a worthwhile life.

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Delivered Unto Lions by David Austin is published by CheckPoint Press.
For more information visit www.davidaustin.eu

 

Should We Forget the Trauma of Past Mental Health 'Care'?

I recently came across a very interesting comment from a former child psychiatric patient.  This woman had been admitted to children’s mental unit back in the 1950s, and she was responding on an Internet forum to various posts from other former patients.  Many of these other posts had referred to various horrific ordeals, including physical and psychological abuse, all of which had been experienced while in the ‘protection’ of a supposedly caring service.  But this particular woman, now in her 70s, advised them to try and forget their experiences: ‘[Y]our only hope is to put [it] out of your mind and never let them win.’ By ‘them’, of course, she meant the perpetrators of the suffering these people had known.

Is this the best approach to the trauma of past mental health ‘care’?  Is this something that those concerned should forget?  Is forgetting the only way to ‘defeat’ the institutions and individuals responsible for such awful memories?

The answers to these questions will be different for different people.  It is certainly the case that people need to move on in their lives and live in the present, not in the past.  But does this mean they must forget the past?

My book, Delivered Unto Lions, tends to answer these questions with a definite no.  I wrote it from the assumption that the past needs to be remembered, that lessons need to be learnt.  Needless to say, for some people past memories will be so painful that it would not be a good idea to deliberately call them to mind.  But for many of us, we can use our memories in a constructive way as we move forward and live our lives.

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Delivered Unto Lions by David Austin is published by CheckPoint Press.
For more information visit www.davidaustin.eu

Child Mental Health Care: Hidden Truth Revealed

Conspiracy theories are all very well, but many of them lack credibility and can often be dismissed by looking sensibly at the evidence.  Were the moon landings faked?  Unlikely.  Those who believe they were may well have considered the evidence, but their interpretation of it has been coloured by rumour and suspicion.  Much the same can be said of those who believe the US Government staged the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. 

Such conspiracy theories assume there is a concealed truth, that someone is deliberately hiding something from the public gaze.  And there are, in fact, many things that are hidden from the public gaze.  But occasionally fragments of fact that slip out.

This is certainly case when it comes to mental health care. In the past, people with mental health problems – and even people simply imagined to have mental health problems – were removed to isolated asylums.  Once there, they were ‘out of sight, out of mind’.  Most people, of course, would have known that these asylums existed, but they wouldn’t have known – or wanted to know – what happened at these places. 

By the latter part of the 20th century, these asylums (now known as psychiatric hospitals) were more visible than they used to be – though what went on inside them was still largely hidden.  But one type of mental institution that remained unknown to most people was the children’s psychiatric unit.  This may not have been a deliberate conspiracy, but that hardly matters to the children who were admitted to such places.

My novel, Delivered Unto Lions, is about revealing the hidden existence of these institutions and what happened in them.  Back in the 1970s, I was unfortunate enough to become a patient in a children’s unit of this kind in Somerset, England (due to depression).  Before I ended up there, I had never heard of the place, and I was surprised to learn later that very few others had heard of it either.

When things are hidden away they take on a special kind of power.  Because of the stigma that still persists in connection with mental health, few former child patients are willing to speak out about what happened to them, and few parents will want to be reminded that a child of theirs was taken away from them and placed in such an institution.  And so the hidden past can continue to control the present. 

Delivered Unto Lions seeks to uncover something of the past treatment of emotionally disturbed children.  There was physical and psychological abuse, and powerful psychoactive drugs were often used in a punitive way.  All this was hidden away, largely unknown to the families and friends of the children who suffered.  That’s not to say that the people involved in caring for disturbed children – nurses, psychiatrists, therapists, etc. – were bad people.  Apart from a few exceptions, most of them were caring and dedicated.  But terrible things still happened. 

In Delivered Unto Lions I adopt a ‘fictionalised’ narrative approach to the issue.  This is to present an accessible, readable story; to protect identities; to fill the odd gap in my memory; and to enable particular themes to be drawn out – themes of hidden truth, of a child’s powerlessness, of institutional callousness, and of the impact of genuine kindness in an often thoughtless environment.

While my book cannot be described as literally true (though a lot of it is very close), I believe it is representative of the truth.  And so I want my book to push at a door and open it just wide enough for the truth to come through.  If that can happen, I hope that it will have a liberating effect – in whatever modest way – for children past and present.

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Delivered Unto Lions by David Austin is published by CheckPoint Press.  It is available from Amazon and all good online booksellers, and can also be ordered from many local bookshops.
For more information visit www.davidaustin.eu