It bothers me a little, to be honest. When in television or movies, it’s often told in an appealling way and a lot of teenagers want to have mental illnesses now.
But at the same time, as ignorance about it still prevails, romanticizing mental illness is helping to end stigma. It’s good to have tv shows or movies that show depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, PTSD, OCD. But at the same time expressions like “That girl is psycho” (meaning psychotic or psychopath… two very different things), or “That’s crazy”, or “I’m so depressed” when their just sad, or “You’re so OCD”, show the ignorance behind what people really know about this subject.
I’m torn here, I hope people start to get more educated on the subject. Although I see a lot of improvement, there’s is still a long way to go.
What are your thoughts on this? Are things different in your country? I’m talking mainly about Hollywood, I’m aware
Mental Illness is romanticized seemingly in the US @ minnii. See Hollywood.
It’s not OK.
For every one celebrity diagnosed with a mental illness there are dozens of publicists with greedy hands on how they can spin it into a media grab.
In my experience I think a lot of folks think seeing a psychiatrist is like lying on a sofa discussing all their symptoms in a Freudian kind of way. In my experience it is nothing like that.
Also I think most people have no notion what taking APs is really like.
Yeah, that’s true. A lot of people don’t know the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist, or even how psychology has evolved.
There’s a lot of stigma envolving psychiatry too, that we see reflected here on the forum a lot, and taking medication, like it’s a terrible thing. Psychiatry is one of the sciences most researched and that had one of the biggest evolutionary jumps in the latest years, but still people don’t trust it.
Maybe romanticizing mental illness is not helping to end those stigmas associated with psychiatry and medication.
I think movies and tv swing between the severely mentally ill as violent angle and the severely mentally ill as trendy and ultra intelligent/insightful angle. Neither really fits the average person with a severe mental illness. However the need for dramatic content ensures you’ll seldom get a portrayal of an average person with severe mental illness .
@Jimbob I can relate, on the country village where my family has a house, people saw me psychotic and the rumor is that I have a deep depression. I don’t correct them.
@flybottle from believing that mental issues were spiritual matters, to the locking people in asylums for their whole lives, to the discovery of lithium and its usages, to modern day psychiatry.
In general I am pretty optimistic when it comes to the capacity to separate fact from fiction for most people. Those who can’t - I hope they’ll find their way to the forum some day.
Yeah, it is a double edged sword for sure. On the one hand it raises the Mental Health status from a taboo subject to a (little) more open one, there is a way to go yet. The other side is an absurd portrayal in movies, but also in books, of a kind of sanitised ‘acceptable’ mental illness; it’s not real of course, more a kind of Disneyland version. Somewhat humorous even.
A couple of years ago it was almost a vogue to have depression or something! Nowadays with the economic situation, immigration, etc we are back to square one.
I think a lot of people attack psychiatry for its past history as though it is applicable to modern psychiatry. Yet you don’t see people attacking other branches of medicine for past,what would now be seen as, primitive practices.
There are those who attack medication but have never been on it. There are also those who attack medication because they have had a bad reaction to it. The antipathy of the latter towards medication is understandable. After 60 years we still have antipsychotics with too many side effects .Medications with far fewer side effects would surely see considerably less aversion to taking them , and better outcomes.
Quite true. There’s when movies and shows and books come to play, the overuse of the idea of ECT, asylums, etc.
Things are way better regards to medication. It’s still difficult, but way better. I think with new discoveries in genetics and neuroscience things will surely get better.
I hope so. Huge amounts of money have been spent on that in the last couple of decades. I don’t think it has delivered equally in terms of new treatments. Sooner or later it has to deliver or other areas will look more promising to spend all that cash on.
I personally think where it is better is in terms of dosage levels prescribed. Nowadays the emphasis is on putting people on the lowest possible therapeutic dose. That wasn’t always the case as some of us who were around in the 70s and 80s, or before, can attest to.
