In the article, “Media’s Damaging Depictions of Mental Illness“, it’s argued that certain shows like Wonderland (premiering in 2000) have done a relatively poor and inaccurate job of portraying certain mental health issues. For example, in the show’s opening scene, a man suffering from schizophrenia goes on a violent rampage that included stabbing a pregnant physician in the stomach.
Though I’ve never seen or heard of this show, apparently it has had a reputation of being over dramatized. Upon reading about it, Wonderland had a prominent theme of hopelessness for sufferers of mental illness, something that strongly angered groups like the National Alliance on Mental Illness. It was quickly cancelled as a result.
In Hollywood, there are many other in-your-face examples of mental illness, especially in horror movies. Films like The Shining and Nightmare on Elm Street have helped create the fictitious link between mental illness and violence. Like the opening scene in Wonderland, these movies portray people with mental health issues as perpetrators of maniacal violence and it’s often grossly misconstrued.
Vice magazine spoke to Dr. Danny Wedding, the former director of the Missouri Institute of Mental Health and co-author of Movies and Mental Illness: Using Films to Understand Psychopathology. Wedding emphasized the negative stereotype by stating, “slasher films like Friday the 13th, films that portray people with mental illness as homicidal maniacs, those are pretty awful, and there are a lot of myths still being portrayed in films.”
As somebody who has watched a lot of horror movies, it’s often scared me how crazily people with mental illnesses have been portrayed. It kind of makes me feel like these scary and nutty characters could actually be in society. I get that the point of watching a horror movie is to be scared, but they’ve done such a good job of creating this negative stereotype of mentally ill people being violent and dangerous that it seems realistic.
Margarita Tartakovsky, M.S. said in “Media’s Damaging Depictions of Mental Illness” that, “Research has shown that many people get their information about mental illness from the mass media (Wahl, 2004). What they do see can color their perspective, leading them to fear, avoid and discriminate against individuals with mental illness.”
Mental Health, Society, and Social Media 