My Illness is Not a Plot Point
I have noticed an increase in shows using bipolar characters in storylines. Great, right? Anything to show the truth of the disorder, right? It all raises awareness…. right?!
Yeah, except they all seem to be dramas.
Mind, I don’t like dramas. My brain is drama enough, especially with anxiety and OCD features making it even harder to logic things into place. And it would be one thing if it just happened that there was a character who had bipolar in the show… but it seems to routinely be ‘Bipolar person goes off of their meds, goes off the deep end, drama ensues’… which, while accurate to a point (Natasha Tracy makes a good point about how missing a dose doesn’t make someone automatically manic in her review of Black Box’s first episode), is kiiind of insulting. Missing a dose sucks, yes, but it doesn’t automatically make someone ‘go crazy’.
And that’s not even touching that it’s always a female character. I’ve seen this with Black Box and Homeland in the States, Rookie Blue in Canada, and even Hollyoaks here in the United Kingdom will be featuring a female bipolar character imminently (I’m not sure if it’s happened yet or not). We know from Miss Tracy’s review that while some of the portrayal of aspects of mania are accurate (and in the case of Rookie Blue and Hollyoaks, extensive research into bipolar is claimed to have been done in advance), in that they can be parts of a manic episode, it doesn’t change the fact that, to me, it feels like an excuse to portray ‘Crazy bitches be crazy ’cause women are hysterical and lesser, lulz’. It’s the same sort of misogyny that makes people think songs like Crazy Bitch by Buckcherry are not only okay, but that anyone who dares complain about being offended is *obviously* just some sort of bitter feminist with no sense of humour.
All I know is that my disorder is very real, and that I don’t think it’s okay for it to be used as a minimizing plot point. It’s the same reason I opted to bow out of an invite to be part of a documentary here; when they told me they wanted specifically people with Bipolar I and rapid cycling ‘because people don’t know about those’, I tensed up and refused to respond. Way to tell me you give absolutely no fucks about an accurate portrayal of the bipolar spectrum, mate — you’ve just told me you want me to find you the people suffering the most to up your ratings. Bipolar is a spectrum, and some of us function, and some of us don’t, but focusing only on the ‘drama’ stigmatizes the entire lot of us as ‘Oh, those poor crazy people!’. And here in the United Kingdom, where we have a government intent on demonizing anyone not working and healthy as skivvers and benefits cheats, and are trying to force them all into workfare ‘for their own good’? Eeesh.
But hey, maybe I’m being terribly unfair about these shows. Maybe these females are being portrayed as strong and not totally ruining everything forever at key points for dramatic convenience. I probably won’t know first-hand, because it’s not my genre of preference. But you’ll forgive me if I choose to not find out; I have almost nothing in the way of spoons, and I’m blowing more than enough at spluttering indignation at general stereotyping and dismissal of mentally ill by society as a whole. Yeah, I’ll hopefully have a post about that soon too, once I piece together things I’ve written on Facebook and Livejournal and condense it down into something useful for here.
For now though, hope you are all doing as well as can be expected.
<3
Amen and preach on, sister!!
I don’t own a TV, but I can and do watch some shows online for free. When my sister told me about “Homeland” I really wanted to watch it. At first I loved it — when Claire Danes went through her first manic episode it was done in an excellent manner, even though my manic episodes (mainly controlled by meds now, damn it — I miss them terribly!!) were different. However, as the show progressed it became more like what you’re talking about — “we can’t trust her, we can’t depend on her, how do you know she’s not going to blah, blah, blah.” I did my best not to bristle, but I didn’t like it. Then EVERYTHING turned around plot-wise the third year, I believe it was, and it wasn’t worth watching at all. I noticed after I quit watching it that I’d been tense during each episode knowing someone would blame Claire Danes’ character for any and every thing or suspect her every move due to her illness.
It was so good at first to see a show were someone is at such a high-level security clearance and with such responsibilities just happens to have a mental/emotional health issue to deal with privately. When that became the focus, when everyone — even her trusted mentor — spoke badly about her at every turn not because of the events of the show but because of her mental/emotional health it just became too much to bear. What a shame!!
I also watched some program years ago where a young man was “insane” and killing everyone. They caught him, put him in the local jail — very small town — and he was terrified and trembling. Then you see things through his eyes — he’s hearing voices and seeing horrible images. No wonder he’s terrified!! They bring a doctor who talks about various meds. Show goes on. Time goes on. I’m having a rough time, visit my doctor and he wants to put me on a medication I clearly remembered from that TV episode. I was horrified!! I wasn’t psychotic, so why . . .? I explained about the TV show and my doctor said, “No, no, no. That’s not it at all . . .” and went on to explain about the med. I was terrified for those few minutes just because I’d seen misinformation on a TV show about “a raving lunatic.” It’s not that I believe what’s on a TV show as being factual. It’s the point that the horrifyingly disturbing episode of that young man, what he saw, what he heard, what he did and who enabled him to continue to do what he did left such an impression on me that I was terrified to think my doctor equated a difficult time I was going through with the med they used to treat someone with all those symptoms that I’ve, thank God, never experienced. Later, I wondered about anyone who watched that show who had experienced the horrible things he saw and the scary voices he heard. I wondered how they might have felt about that portrayal. If it affected me so strongly, I can’t help but imagine how it must have made them feel.
Clearances and mental illness are problematic, to say the least. I didn’t get any help with my issues when I was in the Air Force for fear of losing mine (I had top secret, which really, they kind of hand out like candy xD), though I wasn’t diagnosed prior, so I wasn’t lying about it either. From what I can tell, she-the-character DID lie and should have had her clearance revoked upon its discovery. Which isn’t to say she should have had to go around telling everyone, but she had a legal obligation to both inform when she applied for her clearance, and to be appropriately treated. The non-military government agencies are very clear on that, since there is the need for agents to both be trustworthy, and to not have any secrets that could be used to blackmail them into stealing.
((I know, I know, TV show, so it’s not like they have to get those particular details right, and I’m not super-bothered by the lack of accuracy in that regard either. I’ve just done a lot of reading since I heard about Claire Danes’ character due to my own experiences on clearance and mental illness!))
BUT I will say from the military angle, it’s supposed to be this bastion of normal-to-superior. And it’s probably fair to say that the prevailing attitude in these areas are rather sausagefest in spite of the high population of female employees (I think the CIA is half and half-ish).
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And that is an excellent point about portrayals in general. When I started on Seroquel, the doctor explained it was an anti-psychotic, and then immediately felt she had to explain that no, she didn’t think I was psychotic. And last night, we had ‘Casualty’ on for like, 2 seconds between things. In those two seconds, someone in a wheelchair at the hospital finds out she’s being taken to the psychiatric ward, flips out, and tries to run away after trying to beat up a nurse with her notes as a response. It’s like, really? Really?! Oh okay, I don’t want to go to the psych ward either, but that’s more about not wanting my husband to get stuck with the kids alone, and that I’m pretty sure ours is bereft of internet… I need my connection to the outside world, darn it.
Really brilliant, thoughtful post. And accurate. I don’t like being used as a plot device either. I was talking to a friend about how the mental illness storyline in films typically goes: person becomes ill. His/ her (usually her) life goes out of control. Suddenly, in the midst of this, there’s a moment of realisation/ clarity, a “pop” or a “ping”, and that person is able to turn his/ her life around and suddenly get on top of said illness. Illness all but vanishes, or at least is barely mentioned again. Life doesn’t work like that. There is no magic “pop” or “ping” that makes you suddenly able to control an illness. It doesn’t happen like that.
OR it happens in the way described with the Clare Danes character. There is no magic cure, so the person becomes seen as “untrustworthy” or “likely to ‘go off’ at any minute”.
There is never a plot in which mental illness is dealt with in a realistic sort of way: episode happens. Things return to normal but “Normal” is never “completely fine as if it never happened” and “it *may* happen again but this does not make a person unreliable or dangerous.
The film Shop Girl is quite good at portraying depression, actually, in a way that it’s dealt with as “a thing she has” rather than “a thing she is” and also it isn’t shown as going away just because someone loves her enough.
Anyway, have rambled on and hope it makes any sense…
Thanks again for your post.
I dig, I dig. Also, I should probably google Shop Girl sometime. 🙂
*gets on that*
I go both ways on this. Even when it isn’t done well, I sort of feel like “hurray?!?!?” for any representation at all, a la Toni Colette (United States of Tara) , which is sad, the which I know, but at the same time, I am not “out” at work because I have been in the past and it hasn’t worked out. If you’re honest about your illness everything is blamed on it– you’re not allowed to be human and make a mistake & everything is viewed through the microscope lens of you must be crazy– not just stressed, or dealing with other unreasonable people, etc. At the same time, feminized representations of mental illness in media are inherently misongynistic and strip away all the “isn’t he a brave little toaster, look at how well he’s coping,” shit (Anthony Michael Hall & The Dead Zone, & interesting now that he’s come back that all references to bipolar are edited out of his wiki bio) that, quite frankly, all us humans deserve, mental illness or not. The “vulnerable”/mentally-ill but charismatic female character as plot device is both misogynistic and lazy writing. We get to objectify her body while she’s curled up in a ball crying on the floor, and feel smug because she’s a hot mess. Bleh. No thank you.
Pretty much. I love the concept of representation, but when the ‘reality’ is often so off the mark… blah.