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It happens in almost every true crime documentary. Even though the producers have made very sure that we all know who did it - or who we think did it - they also include clips of people associated with the crime talking about who they thought might have done it. And in almost every situation, at least once, someone suggests the ultimate boogeyman: A crazy person.
People will go to exceptional lengths to try to preserve their understanding of the world, of morality, and of why things happen. It’s the reason that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary in a nation that is replete with firearms but make healthcare essentially inaccessible, “this kind of thing” apparently doesn’t happen anywhere. And it certainly doesn’t happen to nice, normal (read: not crazy) people like them.
Sure, the husband made a 911 call that sounded like a child actor on their first audition for a Law and Order part they couldn’t possibly understand. Yes, the wife had an absolutely fantastically large life insurance policy on the recently deceased. But what if, instead of the very plausible suspect right in front of them, we consider the statistically implausible solution of a rogue, bloodthirsty maniac?
Some of this hesitation to believe that a “normal” person can commit a heinous act comes from confirmation bias. We see so much media about serial killers and secret bad guys who commit random actions of senseless violence but are rarely exposed to the realities of crime data in our own communities. In order to exist in a world that’s pretty scary, people build up defenses and rationalized why, of all the things they need to be afraid of, their own loved ones can’t possibly be high on the list.
Instead, we blame the mythical crazy person. The person who roams from town to down doing murders because he’s crazy. Or, sometimes, the person who was normal but then (this is my favorite because it’s also such a cliche) just “snapped.”
We use mental illness as a catch-all to explain all kinds of crime, but especially violent crimes. It’s easy to point to a “bushy-haired stranger” as the probably killer. It’s hard to point to a person who used to come to your July 4th cookouts with a sixer of Mike’s Hard - unless, of course, he went crazy. Then that explains it.
But if mental illness is that scary - if we’re that petrified by fear of the idea of a crazy person coming into our homes at night - why do we continue to pretend like its care is optional? I suspect it’s because the horror genre has spoken to us on this level for so long that it’s just deeply ingrained at this point.
We believe that crazy people aren’t worth saving. They’re threats. They’re monsters. They’re ticking time bombs. They’re not even real people.
I mean, I can Google and find a mass-produced Halloween costume wherein the entire premise is just “someone with mental illness who is getting treated but is still very scary because lol they’re crazy.”
Look, I’ll do it right now:
It took me less than 10 seconds to find this costume and many others like it. And to be fair, this lady is really doing the most with what she’s got. That back-combing! You’d have to be crazy to get volume like that.
You can even get one for a kid because that’s a perfectly normal thing to do.
The point is, we’re so afraid of mental illness as a society that we think of it as something scary you can emulate by putting on shitty costume with lots of belts. That’s what people with mental illness represent to the public: Fear.
Writing for PsyCom, Jennifer Tzeses stated that “over and over, certain mental health disorders—and even psychiatric hospitals—themselves, are unfairly misrepresented and stigmatized on the big screen.” She summarizes:
In nearly every horror movie, the killer is portrayed as “crazy”. An archetype that not only instills a sense of fear in the viewer but paints a dangerous and disturbing picture of what someone with mental health issues looks like.
“In the movies, people with mental illness are literally seen as monsters and dehumanized,” says Barry Katz, PhD, a forensic and clinical psychologist at the West Essex Psychology Center in Livingston, New Jersey. “This takes fears and lack of understanding people already have and exploits them by presenting a narrative in which the individual is threatening or scary,” he says.
And like, yeah, living with mental illness can be pretty scary. You can’t trust your own brain and you’re always trying to overcompensate. It’s also pretty frightening to think that if at some point Elon Musk mines all of the lithium out of the earth that I may be shit out of luck and have to go back to an unmedicated life which like, NO THANKS.
But the people most likely to be hurt by mental illness are people with mental illness, not the normies around them.
In 2019, interim chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Alan Leshner pleaded with the public: Stop blaming mental illness for violence, specifically gun violence. The data just are not present. An excerpt (emphasis mine):
According to the National Council for Behavioral Health, the best estimates are that individuals with mental illnesses are responsible for less than 4% of all violent crimes in the United States, and less than a third of people who commit mass shootings are diagnosably mentally ill. Moreover, a large majority of individuals with mental illnesses are not at high risk for committing violent acts. Continuing to blame mental illness distracts from finding the real causes of mass shootings and addressing them directly.
Again, though, I can’t be surprised that people think of mental illness as the cause of violence and terror. Consider some of the most classic horror films. There’s Psycho, of course, but there’s also Halloween (Michael Myers is an escapee from an asylum), Friday the 13th (a one-two punch because you get a crazy mom), Nightmare on Elm Street (Freddy Krueger was a child serial killer), The Silence of the Lambs (the entire thing is an exploration of mental health/illness, The Shining (same deal), and basically every other horror classic that is not a zombie or ghost movie. And even then sometimes the ghosts are crazy because apparently we do not get healed in the afterlife.
Tzeses is clear to note that “while horror films are largely made to entertain—not educate—media that portray mental health conditions accurately can be a powerful way to heighten public awareness while lending understanding to the vulnerability of being human.” She also points out the ways in which these misunderstandings can impact vulnerable people in daily life - like, say, if the cop who gets called when someone is having a mental health crisis is a big fan of true crime and horror and automatically views the person as dangerous.
Does this mean that we should prune down our media and only look for spooky movies that present mental illness in a realistic light? Hell no, because then we’d never get to watch our favorite scary movies. I mean, my partner and I just watched Session 9 last night - a film literally shot inside Danvers State - and it was honestly not-terrible. I think the more important job for us as media consumers and people who care about mental health is to consume these things (and I include true crime-type stuff) while also considering what the underlying message is, and then rejecting or questioning that message once we’ve figured it out.
Like, is this movie portraying mental illness/someone living with mental illness as the problem or the aggressor, or are they the victim?
Are the storytellers using mental illness as a convenient trope, or are they exploring the actual facets of the lived experience?
Is it easier to believe that a “normal” person just “snaps,” or is possible that mental illness doesn’t look the way we think it does?
I’d also add that this has real-world consequences when it comes to voting, too. Often, “tough on crime” messaging just means “locking up crazies so no one has to see them,” and too many elected officials get away with throwing up their hands on the subject of gun violence by blaming “the mentally ill.” Laws about when people can and can’t get help for mental illness, policies upheld by police departments and healthcare providers, and access to fundamental care are all enacted by human people with fallible, silly human brains - which means they’re impacted by media portrayals.
Would it be dope to have more horror films that portray mental illness as a vulnerability, not a violent tendency? Sure! But we could also just, uh, stop making movies where the bad guy is conveniently crazy and instead find other ways to create a good scare.