When a patient with dissociative identity disorder, otherwise known as multiple personality disorder, abducts three teenage girls, one of his personalities emerges as violent and uncontrollable. This is the plot of the newly released psychological horror film Split. Despite its success, generating nearly $250 million in revenue as a $9 million movie, it serves as a prime example of the increasing stigmatization of mental illness in films.
Over the last decade, Hollywood started to feature the mentally ill instead of the supernatural in an effort to revamp the horror genre. Films like Halloween, The Shining and American Psycho all use psychotic disorders as the motivation for the antagonist to act irrationally and enact violence on the public.
These movies use commonly misunderstood disorders such as schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder and bipolar disorder to instill fear in their audience. The idea that a mentally ill person is more likely to be your neighbor than a ghost or a vampire makes the audience experience a fearful sense of legitimacy and likelihood to the storyline.
While these disorders often have features like hallucinations, delusions, unpredictability and irrationality, their symptoms are typically well-controlled by those who experience them, and more often than not, are entirely harmless to others.
According to co-director of the Center for Mental Health and Media Cheryl K. Olsen, “Studies have found that dangerousness or crime is the most common theme of stories on mental illness,” Olsen said on the center’s website. “But research suggests that mentally ill people are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violence.”
Assistant professor of psychology at North Carolina State University Dr. Sarah Desmarais conducted a study which supports Olsen’s statement, concluding that mentally ill people are 11 times more likely to be the victim of violence than the general population. Additionally, the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin reported that those diagnosed with a mental illness are responsible for no more than three percent of the violence in the United States.
Despite these statistics, the film industry continues to present connections between danger and mental illness to the public in a means that is detrimental to the success of integrating those individuals into society. The longer movies perpetuate these myths, the more likely the public is to perceive people with a mental disorder as a threat and likely to “go berserk”, as described by a participant in a focus group on mental illness conducted by Lichtenstein Creative Media.
The reality is, most individuals with extreme symptoms due to a mental illness go on to lead normal, functional lives. With advancements in mood stabilizers, antipsychotics and other psychiatric medications, mentally ill people are not going around killing their neighbors and eating children’s flesh like horror films depict them to be, and they never were. Movies like Split only detract from the incredible contributions made by individuals with these disorders, further alienating them from the general public.