Coursework Research

Independent.co.uk- Roger Dobson Friday 9 October 1998

• In the Hollywood version of mental illness, sufferers are almost always violent, usually kill or maim innocent victims and are not infrequently triggered into carrying out savage deeds by innocuous events such as a full moon, Halloween, or Friday the 13th.
• those few mentally ill people on film who neither kill nor scare the neighbours are usually cured with an hour or two on the couch with a sympathetic shrink and follower of Freud who, for good measure, may well fall in love with them.
• patients are stigmatised as either being incurably violent, or as people suffering problems so minor they can all be solved by love and affection, -Dr Cleo Van Velsen
• "Mentally ill people are often wrongly portrayed as violent and that perpetuates the myths about all or the majority of patients being violent. In The Silence of the Lambs, for example, we have the portrayal of an unstable man who is extremely violent. In Psycho you have the sense of violence and the secret basement world, and generally odd people. There is also the danger and violence in Halloween where the man escapes from an asylum," -Dr Cleo Van Velsen
• She says that mentally ill patients also have their illnesses trivialised: "In a lot of the films there is the underlying message that all the patient really needs is love and affection. There is a tendency in films to try and normalise mental illness by saying that patients don't need treatment, they need love. The audience gets the two extremes and what we are not getting are portrayals of people with chronic illness."