Blogpost 6: Depiction of Media

I remembered watching films like, “We need to talk about Kevin” where Kevin a psychopath or sociopath boy decides to murder his classmates and his family members using bow and arrow, then “American Psycho” where a wealthy businessman murders people and animals whenever something upsets him, and of course “Wonderland” where a schizophrenic man goes on a shooting spree in Times Square. Are you seeing a pattern here? Look at how those movies portray a mentally disturbed person; they make them violent in the movies like they are very dangerous to the society.

In an article I’ve read entitles “Movies Stigmatize Mentally Ill as Violent and Dangerous” in brainblogger.com written by Elise Stobbe, she says that in reality mentally ill person does not more likely to commit a crime, rather, they are the ones who became victims of the crime. Well of course there are some “rare” cases that a mentally ill person becomes so violent that he started to hurt other people.

Elise Stobbe also said that “This sensationalism, combined with other factors such as the stigmatization of the mentally ill resulting from portrayals of dangerous and violent mentally ill people in films, results in injustice and prejudice to the great majority of the non-violent mentally ill.”

People with mental illness in the movie were depicted as violent, dangerous, demonic and crueler. These kinds of stigma are not helping the mentally ill person and as I have said in my last blog, if this continue they will have a hard time asking for help. Because people fear them and if you are afraid of something you tend to have a distance with him. And I bet that these mentally ill people are more afraid of themselves than we are already afraid of them.

As I continue my research about the portrayals in films, I’ve come across an article entitled “Mental Illness: How the Media Contributes To Its Stigma” in everydayfeminism.com written by Jarune Uwujaren. She carefully explains every myth people have on mentall illness in her article. She said that portrayals of mental illness in media are so inaccurate, but then again media does not want to educate us they only want to entertain us.

She also said “The fact is, you’re more likely to see scantily clad women getting lobotomized in an old school mental asylum than you are a sensitive media portrayal of mental illness or the mental health industry.”

We enjoy seeing these kinds of portrayals in films right? Halloween movie night, we pick the psychological thriller film, why? Because it amuses us; we enjoy the part where a mentally ill guy randomly kills everyone or the part that he kills people who hurt him. The problem is that we as audience believed that we are fully educated in about the mental illness but the truth is we are not. Those we’ve seen in movies or television were just for pure entertainment. And you know why they still do that? Because we like the stereotypes and stigma the media shows us.