Despite their fascination with mental illness, few films and television shows get close to the dull truth of what it's like to have a mental disorder, writes former depressive Tim Lott
My earliest recollections of madness are inevitably gothic - gothic being the cultural form that the theme of mental instability most naturally evokes. Hence my childhood and adolescent memories are branded with the raving Prince of Denmark, the baroque melancholy of Miss Havisham, the off-the-register psychosis of Rochester's wife, and the maudlin drifting into twilight of Blanche DuBois. This, as I grew up, was how I imagined mental illness to be, something far removed from ordinary life - melodramatic, overblown, almost otherworldly.
Naturally, one could laugh at madness. Clearly, the Marx Brothers were all mad, as was Dr Strangelove, Elwood P Dowd in Harvey, and Franz Liebkind, the crazed Nazi songwriter in The Producers. But horror and amusement represented the limit of one's responses. Culturally depicted madness in that sense wasn't "real".
These are my earliest memories, but genuinely accurate depictions of mental illness are still rare in all the art forms. Why? For the very good reason that real mental illness is boring. Depressives are toxic and dull. Manic depressives are irritating. People with schizophrenia or autism are largely indecipherable. Most of them are best treated not by charismatic psychoanalysts who carefully excavate the early, repressed trauma that has "led" to their illness, but by doctors who administer psychotropic drugs of one kind or another. Thus, dramatic narrative and the reality of mental illness rarely go hand in hand. It is no accident that Terence Davies's beautiful and haunting filmic Trilogy( Children, Madonna and Childand Death and Transfiguration) - a study in depression, as well as Catholicism and homosexuality - never got much mainstream attention. Nothing much happens. The film is not really a narrative; it is an atmosphere, just as mental illness is an atmosphere. I remember watching Trilogy when I was in my early 20s and understanding for the first time that mental illness wasn't always funny or horrific, that it wasn't necessarily exotic at all. It could also be an unseen layer of everyday life, something akin to what all of us feel now and then.
Although I had suffered no depression at that age, Trilogyhaunted me, as did the only other realist depiction of mental illness from that time - Patricia Hayes' unforgettable performance as Edna, the Inebriate Woman on the BBC's Play for Todayin 1971. Edna showed the desperate attempt of an alcoholic to hold on to her dignity while facing homelessness, and was both pathetic and utterly believable.
These naturalist characterisations were the exception. Around that time, far more radical depictions of madness were appearing, fuelled by the anti-psychiatric philosophies of Thomas Szasz and RD Laing. The idea was becoming fashionable that mental illness was a creation of, and a response to, social control - and the apotheosis of this idea was Ken Kesey's seductive One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, filmed by Milos Forman in 1975. The message of both book and film was unequivocal: mental patients, in this case specifically male mental patients, were the products of a combination of a repressive social system and domineering and dysfunctional mothers, represented by the icy and controlling Nurse Ratched. What they needed was a good dose of untrammelled id, or Jack Nicholson's Randle McMurphy, to set them free. But the system would do everything it could to prevent that happening. It would crush the glorious rebel. It would ensure the mad stayed mad for its own psychologically malign purposes.
Parallel versions of this heroic madman appeared elsewhere in the 1970s. Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, while more realistic than the baroque droolers of Cuckoo's Nest, showed Bickle as a psychotic on a moral mission to save a teenage prostitute from the "scum" that soiled the city's streets. He was clearly deranged, but he was also an avenging hero with a moral purpose. The madman as avatar had arrived with a vengeance.
BY THE TIME I reached my mid 20s, the template for mental illness that I had accrued from film, and from Szasz and Laing, was of a heroic, often tortured outsider who held up a mirror to society's ills, and who in some sense acted as a corrective. The idea of real mental illness, in all its sordid meaninglessness, still remained the sole province of Terence Davies by the time I came to experience mental illness for myself - a bout of acute depression in the mid 1980s. I started to read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, and found myself haunted by the romance of my own agonising condition.
The Bell Jarsuggested to me that feeling this terrible was proof of how sensitive, poetic and intelligent I was. Yet I was scared; was I headed in the same direction as Plath? Was it my fate to be wired up to an ECT machine and turned into a zombie? I suffered my illness for four years, never allowing myself the possibility of seeing a doctor or taking prescription drugs. Had I taken less notice of Randle McMurphy and more of the pro-drug Nurse Ratched, I might have saved myself a lot of suffering.
My experience was as unfilmic, as uncultural, as unliterary as you could get - blankness, self-pity, immobility. The hero (me) was tortured, but he wasn't interesting and he wasn't a genius. He wasn't even sympathetic - depressives are selfish and unpleasant to be around.
The cultural industry wasn't ready to take on the realities of mental illness just yet. In the 1980s and 1990s, Hollywood dwelt on its favourite mental illness, psychosis, which stretched back to Norman Bates and beyond. There was Brian Cox's chilling depiction of Dr Hannibal Lecktor in Michael Mann's Manhunter, Robert De Niro's over-the-top Max Cady in Cape Fear, and Anthony Hopkins' grand guignol Dr Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs.
On television, there was the first Prime Suspect, in which John Bowe brilliantly played the "normal", charming and quotidian serial killer George Marlowe. Jane Campion's An Angel at My Tablegave an entirely convincing portrayal of a schizophrenic, based on the writer Janet Frame's diary of her own illness.
The huge success of Forrest Gumpin 1994 prompted a mini-boom in mental-illness films to rival the 1970s glut. Good Will Huntingfeatured a mathematical whizz whose reluctance to acknowledge his own genius is cured by lovable psychoanalyst Robin Williams, who uncovers the truth about Will's childhood abuse in foster homes. It wasn't his fault, apparently.
More recently, it has been television and not film that has dealt more realistically and sensitively with mental illness - notably the HBO trailblazers Six Feet Underand The Sopranos. Tony Soprano's blackouts and depressions have the ring of truth, and his therapy sessions with Dr Jennifer Melfi are largely convincing. Tony may be mentally ill but he is sufficiently functional to run a major New Jersey crime family. What better role model? Billy Chenowith, Brenda's manic-depressive brother in Six Feet Under, is an equally ambiguous character. Admittedly, nearly everyone in Six Feet Underhas displayed signs of mental illness at one point or another, but it is Billy who has been the most consistently crazed, eventually trying to cut a chunk off his sister with a kitchen knife. At the same time, he was attractive, intelligent and talented.
Nearer home, the mental illness du jour seems to be bipolar disorder ("manic depression" rebranded). Carrying as it does the patina of creativity and "interesting" behaviours, celebs have been queuing up to claim it as their affliction. In his recent BBC television documentary, Stephen Fry interviewed, among others, Robbie Williams, chef Rick Stein, Carrie Fisher and Richard Dreyfuss about the realities of living with wild and potentially dangerous mood swings.
British television drama, although not as stylish as its American counterpart, is beginning to make progress towards a realistic take on mental illness. Last year there were convincing narratives about obsessive-compulsive disorder ( Holby City), bipolar disorder ( EastEnders), eating disorders ( Silver Street) and Alzheimer's disease ( Coronation Street). Gillian Wright's portrayal of the manic-depressive mother Jean Slater in EastEndershad me in tears.
But perhaps the most radical and startling depiction of mental illness appears in Little Britain. David Walliams's character Anne is a raving lunatic, and we are openly invited to laugh at her. The comedy mocks the sanitisation and political correctness of the mental-health industry, and it also reinforces every imaginable stereotype.
It's funny, yes. But it's hard to watch without a feeling of discomfort when the reality of mental illness is so painful and stigmatic. Perhaps this means that dramatic depictions of mental health have finally come of age. You could argue it's a healthy thing that we can laugh at mentally ill people, and not simply admire their alleged "bravery" and "creativity". What I think more likely, though, is that the coarsening of the subject is ultimately too great a temptation for artists, comedians and film-makers to resist. Whether for dramatic or comic effect, mentally ill people are still more often caricatured than mirrored.
And I have to admit, I'm glad of it - the world of culture would be immeasurably poorer if it censored its own fascination with mental illness on the grounds of taste and an unwillingness to cause offence. (- Guardian Service)
