goingrampant:

tiggurix:

cracked:

22 Things Movies Get Completely Wrong About Mental Illness

Cracked doing the Lord’s work and shedding light on ableism and inaccuracy.

So, is it AuntieMeme’s goal to make people with depression feel worse about themselves? Because that’s how people who are predisposed to take any negative portrayal of their condition personally will take a PSA saying they’ll make terrible partners and ruin relationships. If she’s not trying to trigger suicides, her PSA is dreadfully misguided. @cracked

OK, great, thanks for confirming that I’ll never be in a functional long-term relationship. I really needed that, Cracked.

There are a lot of problems with this list – which you can probably predict if they’re given in bite-sized “meme” form.

22. Amnesia. “In The Avengers, Black Widow punches back Hawkeye’s memories” – Did you even fucking watch The Avengers? Because that’s not what happened. It was presented as a way to break magical mind-control (a problem that will never arise in the real world), not to cure amnesia. The “head-bump” amnesia cure thing is a movie/TV trope, apparently, but The Avengers doesn’t use it.

19. Psychopathy. “The charismatic psychopath is everywhere” – First of all, why is Loki’s picture on here? He may be many things, but he is never characterized as a psychopath. OK, Tom Hiddleston inaccurately used the term in some interviews for The Avengers. But psychopaths don’t start crying when their estranged brother urges them to stop the evil plan they’re carrying out under threat from a bigger supervillain.
More importantly, though: “antisocial personality disorder causes a laundry list of symptoms that make a person impossible to be in a relationship with.” Define “impossible.” I don’t think any movie depiction of a psychopath denies that it becomes extremely difficult, unpleasant, or even dangerous to be in a relationship with a psychopath for an extended period of time. But it’s extremely dangerous to suggest that you can identify a psychopath immediately in such a way that no one will ever be tempted to get into a relationship with them. Because people do, and it ends badly. Yes, there are charismatic psychopaths. They can’t keep up the act forever, but they can lure people in.

15. Depression. “Hollywood loves a sad, brooding love interest” – @goingrampant pointed out the biggest problem with the claim in the second picture above: it suggests that depressed people are rightly doomed to be alone forever because they can’t sustain a relationship, which is empirically false. It is true that it can be very hard to sustain a relationship with undiagnosed and/or untreated depression. But really, the problem with the two characters pictured is that they’re immortal vampires in love with mortals, and in Angel’s case, tortured by guilt over centuries of murder (never having read or seen Twilight, I don’t know what Edward’s issues are). Again… probably not gonna arise in real life. What this entry should have said is that depression itself should not be romanticized. If you’re attracted to a sad, tortured person because they’re sad and tortured, whether you think you can save them or want them to stay that way because you think it’s hot… just don’t. Or maybe they should have pointed out that while many creative people are depressed, depression doesn’t make you more creative. If you love a depressed person (or their art), encourage them to seek and/or stay in treatment.

9. Electroconvulsive (electroshock) therapy. Yes, it’s now quite safe and well-controlled. Many of the movie depictions take place in an earlier era, when it was not so safe and well-controlled (here’s the history from the Wikipedia article). It would be good if media also contained accurate depictions of the way the procedure works now rather than allowing the sensationalistic, exaggerated depictions of earlier methods to dominate the popular imagination. But it’s misleading to use the contemporary status of ECT to berate Hollywood for its portrayal in movies set in the 1950s and 60s.

4. Autistic savantism. “Even if the character was meant to be autistic, the likelihood of him having savantism would be a scant 10%.” Um, OK… what’s the likelihood of anything else that happens in movies? If the movie were somehow making the claim that it’s typical for autistic people to be savants, that would be a problem. Maybe audiences have drawn that conclusion, but that seems like a problem with the reception rather than with the film itself. (Unless there are a lot of other movies about autistic savants? Do most media depictions of autistic characters involve savantism? If so, they should have said so.) And then they go on to say that “the prevalence of savantism in the non-autistic population… is less than 1%.” Sounds like they just confirmed that it’s way more common among autistic people than the general population, so it’s actually more probable than if it were just an otherwise neurotypical dude.
Of all the problems you could have picked with Rain Man, this seems like an extremely odd one. Surely there are other harmful inaccuracies in the depiction of autism. Or you could point to the troubling fact that neurotypical actors use portrayals of people with mental illnesses or disabilities as Oscar bait.

The rest are fine and probably helpful to some people. But it’s not helpful to replace misconceptions with different misconceptions.