Stereotyping Mental Illness

As an “ex-mental patient,” I’m really quite disturbed. I’m disturbed by the dehumanizing way the media portray people identified as mentally ill as quintessentially violent beings.

The mass media are far and away the American public’s primary sources of information concerning people identified as mentally ill--and it isn’t nice. From the ubiquitous “psycho” and “mad bomber” story lines to the sensationalistic headlines of “Ex-Mental Patient Kills Two,” violence incarnate goes by the name of “psychotic” and its variant terms.

Playing into the cultural myth of the “crazed murderer” (I have never heard of a “crazed peacemaker”), the latest of many movies to fall into this stereotypical trap is “Just Cause,” which offers the serial killer role of Blair Sullivan as played by Ed Harris. Although The Times’ Peter Rainer pans the movie, including the characters played by Sean Connery, Lawrence Fishburne and Blair Underwood, as unbelievable, he finds the one convincing role to be the out-for-blood Harris (“Talented Cast Bogged Down in Mystery Thriller’Cause,’ ” Calendar, Feb. 17). Favorably comparing Harris’ character to Anthony Hopkins’ Academy Award-winning role as Hannibal Lecter in “Silence of the Lambs,” Rainer writesthat Harris has “never before been this scary” and with head shaven “looks like a skinned rabbit, and when he goes into one of his crazy-man trances, his eyes seem to slide upwardinto his skull.”

Such pernicious stereotyping with all the grotesqueness that Rainer so lauds bears little resemblance to real human beings. Such distorted and formulistic images of the “homicidal maniac” impoverish the lives of people diagnosed with mental illness, who, research shows, are overwhelmingly not violent. The effect of such media stereotypes is to create for people identified as mentally ill a pariah status in a world made increasingly hostile to them. These portrayals are as dehumanizing and unacceptable as any racist or sexist stereotype, and should be scrutinized accordingly.

Persons identified as mentally ill have been embraced by the mass media as the secular version of the devil, transmogrified into the out-of-control madman bent on a rampage of seemingly inexplicable death and destruction. While recent research has shown a modest correlation between major mental disorders and violence, people diagnosed with such mental illnesses are, by far, not the most violent group in American society, and, in fact, according to the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, are responsible for no more than 3% of the violence in the United States. Such factors as age, gender, substance abuse and educational level are, among others, significantly greater contributors to violence than mental disorder.

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Now, as a person who has been diagnosed with such major mental disorders as manic-depression and schizophrenia, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I really have nothing against normal people. Just because normal people started World War I, World War II, dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, committed genocide against the Native Americans and instituted slavery, I have nothing against “normal” people, but I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one.

Unfortunately, malevolent and fear-invoking stereo-

types of people identified as mentally ill are not limited to theatrically released movies. In the realm of television, a study of network dramas covering more than 25 years by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication found that “mentally ill” characters were portrayed as the single most violent group on TV. Furthermore, only two out of 10 characters identified as mentally ill were considered clearly good, while about six out of 10 “normals” were depicted as good.

But, perhaps, the award for the most stereotypical statement goes to The Times when it proclaimed in a Feb. 27, 1985, editorial, “A mentally disturbed person with only the thinnest streak of violence can produce disaster any time, any place.” The Times, continuing to be no stranger to throwing out psychiatric epithets to define global conflicts and social dislocation, called terrorism “The True Face of Insanity” (March 10, 1994), and homeless people labeled as mentally ill as “The Specter Haunting America”--and this around Halloween, no less (Oct. 24, 1991). Actually, according to the publication Science News, studies have found members of identified terrorist groups from Ireland, the Mideast and South Africa to all have personality scores that fall within the normal range.

And I thought that the purpose of responsible jour-

nalism was not to validate popular prejudice but to elu-

cidate the truth. So much for my delusional thinking!

I’m not mad, I’m angry.