Looking Mental Illness in the Eye

To reside in a capital of mass entertainment is to live ringside at an endless slugfest between market share and truth. Show biz wants good guys and bad guys; “good” and “bad” guys want understanding and nuance. Conflict, as the scripts say, ensues.

Conflict over the way TV portrays brown people and the way MTV portrays women. Conflict over whether “The Sopranos” makes Italian Americans look too sleazy and whether “Erin Brockovich” makes plaintiffs’ lawyers look too honorable. Now come sick people, this week’s contenders in the fight for a kinder, gentler spotlight.

In a politically loaded campaign against ABC’s new drama about a psychiatric unit, mental health advocates are going after “Wonderland.”

The show runs on Thursdays opposite “E.R.,” and is everything the long-running hospital melodrama is not: grim, extreme, unsentimental and devoid of neat, heartwarming resolutions. In the first episode, an untreated schizophrenic opens fire in Times Square and then stabs a pregnant doctor in the womb with a hypodermic needle. In tonight’s episode, he cries helplessly that “I don’t go around wanting to kill people,” even as he adds that he got his instructions from Greek gods.

As show biz treatments of mental illness go, “Wonderland” is a cut above most of the past, lame TV depictions. It shows mental illness as illness, and crazy people as something other than “evil” or eccentric-yet-

misunderstood. It dwells way too much on the tiny proportion of sick people who commit crimes, but viewers also see that these people--the world’s Ted Kaczynskis and Buford Furrows and Andrew Goldsteins--have faces and families: “He’s my son,” the killer’s father cries at one point, in a voice that will resonate with anyone who has a mentally ill loved one. “My son, who got into Columbia and who loves Chinese food and rock climbing in the Catskills. My son, whose dream was to build a boat and follow the journey of the Odyssey. My son.”

But the advocates hate it, and have persuaded at least one sponsor, a pharmaceutical company, to move its “Wonderland” ad to another time slot. The show, they say, makes the mentally ill seem uniformly violent, when 96% of them are not. Also, they charge that the treatment shown is at best inept and at worst harmful. In one scene, a psychiatrist gives a suicidal man a discourse on the relative effectiveness of pills, belts and wrist-slashing. God help vulnerable viewers, not to mention the patients of the technical advisor who suggested that as competent treatment. Does no one at ABC know what good therapy looks like? (Don’t answer that.)

In letters to ABC and to Peter Berg, the creator and executive producer of the show, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill charges that the series’ tone discourages viewers from seeking treatment, and--most important--that the show’s failure to depict recovery makes it harder for healthy Americans to sympathize.

“Yes, this nation’s mental health system is inadequate,” NAMI head Laurie Flynn writes. “NAMI believes one of the reasons to be portrayals of people with mental illnesses like those in your program. ‘These’ people are killers, crazies and freaks. ‘They’ can’t be helped. ‘They’ can’t be treated. Why should anyone try?”

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This is the actual crux of the protest. For the first time in decades, mental health care is finally on the political radar again. The U.S. surgeon general has made it a federal priority. State after state is giving mental health care insurance parity with other health care. California alone has nearly a dozen bills pending that address the system, from the hospitals to the jails.

Billions of dollars in long-yearned-for public resources hang in the balance. Television is a powerful medium, with great powers of propaganda. Groups like Laurie Flynn’s are afraid that if mental illness gets a harsh portrayal, the money will dry up before it ever appears.

But they’re wrong. Harsh truths--even when they’re over the top, as TV so often is--are always more moving than fluffy public relations. And the harsh truth is that, right now, it’s all the public can do just to look mental illness in the eye. This kind of sickness may not make its victims do violence, but, untreated, it does make them act hostile, and that’s scary. Just conceding that is a step toward winning hearts and minds.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.