How the Media Portrays the Mentally Ill

       The view that the general public has of the mentally ill is mostly negative.  This has been largely shaped by the media and movies that have portrayed the persons with mental health problems as undesirable, dangerous individuals, preying on society.  In an article titled, “The Criminalization of the Mentally Ill”, by David Gonzalez, he states, “Movies such as Maniac (1934)..., Deranged (1974), Psycho (1960), and The Lunatic (1992), all portray the mentally ill as psychotic and deranged lunatics capable of snapping at the slightest provocation.   Movies such as these add to the misconceptions of the mentally ill and eventually influence the opinions of the judges, district attorneys, police officers, parole officers, correction officers, politicians, and the average citizen ....”.

     However, there are some movies such as “Rain man”, “The Aviator”, and “A Beautiful Mind” that show the struggle of mentally ill persons in a positive light.  In “Rain man” Dustin Hoffman portrays an autistic man who is a genius with math and who acted as a loving sibling when his younger brother needed comfort as a child.  “The Aviator” shows the struggle of Howard Hughes who became the richest man in the world, but who suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder.  A Beautiful Mind portrays John Forbes Nash who eventually won the Nobel Prize while battling the schizophrenic voices in his head.

     Mentally ill persons who are portrayed as dangerous monsters are not the norm for persons with psychiatric disabilities.  Most individuals who suffer from bipolar disorder or schizophrenia are not dangerous.  In fact society preys on the mentally ill more than the mentally ill prey on society. Psychiatric News reports that, "More than one-fourth of persons with severe mental illness are victims of violent crime in the course of a year, a rate 11 times higher than that of the general population, according to a study by researchers at Northwestern University. They estimated that nearly 3 million severely mentally ill people are crime victims each year in the United States.  This is the first such study to include a large, random sample of community-living, mentally ill persons and to use the same measures of victimization used by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, said lead author Linda Teplin, Ph.D., Owen L. Coon Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University, in the August Archives of General psychiatry."http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/40/17/16.full