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Kayla Senzig

Professor McDurmott

Film History and Appreciation

26 November 2019

Has Hollywood Gone Mental?

The topic of mental health has been taboo for many years. According to the National

Alliance on Mental Illness, “1 in 5 adults experience mental illness each year.” (NAMI.org). This

corresponds to 47.6 million people in the United States alone. Now that the conversation on

mental health has started, Hollywood is taking an interest. Mainstream media depicts mental

health in various ways, sometimes correctly and other times just the opposite. Shows such as

American Horror Story: Murder House, 13 Reasons Why, and Criminal Minds, and movies like

Split and Joker, attempt to show what mental illness is like, but ultimately fall flat and the list

only continues from there. One movie that had an accurate portrayal is Rain Man starring Dustin

Hoffman as Raymond Babbitt. Unfortunately, the positive portrayals are much less common than

the inaccurate. This fact goes back to the stereotype and stigma that mental health is bad and that

every illness is portrayed the same way in each person.

The main problem with Hollywood’s portrayal of mental illness is that they are too

extreme. Take the movie Split for example, the main character has dissociative identity disorder,

or DID for short. This character has twenty-four various personalities who appear throughout the

movie and dictate the main characters life. DID is a dissociative disorder, which Cleveland

Clinic explains as, “... mental illnesses that involve disruptions or breakdowns of memory,

consciousness or awareness, identity and/or perception — mental functions that normally work

smoothly.” (Cleveland Clinic). A main characteristic of this disorder is that it is caused from a
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history of trauma and abuse. The multiple personalities help the individual to take the abuse and

cope with what is happening. This matter is not discussed in the film Split. In the film the

character with DID kidnapped three girls and is holding them hostage. Unfortunately, that is the

stereotype that becomes associated with mental disorders, that the person is a criminal. This is

most often times not the case. The film makes it appear like this disorder is supernatural as in the

end of the movie, one of the personalities turns the main character into a literal monster, who can

climb up walls and begins to rampage about the city. Not only has the film villainized a mental

illness that, according to NAMI, approximately two percent of the world has, but now a

supernatural aspect has been brought to a very real disease. Split is not the only movie to

villainize those with a mental condition.

The show Criminal Minds exploits those with mental illnesses in the same way. The

unidentified subject is almost always has some form of a mental disorder whether it is DID,

antisocial personality disorder, or narcissistic personality disorder, to name a few. However, the

way the show portrays the illness in its characters is more accurate than films like Split. In season

two episodes fourteen and fifteen, a character named Tobias is introduced as an unidentified

subject, or the perpetrator of the crime. Tobias has DID and switches between three personalities,

his, one of his father, and a mediator between the two. Throughout the course of the episode, the

viewer learns that Tobias was abused by his father and it was a moral dilemma that caused the

personalities to split. Another episode containing DID, is in season four episode twenty, when

college students are found murdered while on spring break. The perpetrator is a young man

named Adam who’s alter ego Amanda is killing the young men. The depiction of DID in these

episodes is better even though it still vilanizes the characters. According to the DSM-V, which is

the diagnostic manual used by psychologists, to be diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder,
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a person must have, “ Disruption of an identity characterized by two or more distinct personality

states… recurrent gaps in the recall of everyday events… the symptoms usually cause clinically

significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, and other important areas of

functioning…” (DSM-V). All of these characteristics are clearly shown and explained through

these three episodes. The way Criminal Minds depicts mental disorders is good but not the best.

The movie Rain Man is one of the best explorations of what a mental disorder looks like.

The movie focuses on Raymond Babbitt who is an autistic savant. To prepare for the role, Dustin

Hoffman extensively researched savant’s and met with people who had this condition. One

example of this condition that occurs in the movie is when Charlie first meets Raymond.

Raymond recites the time, place, and specific details about their father's car. He then is able to

recite various baseball statistics without any problem. A key characteristic of savant syndrome is

an excellent memory. Darold A. Treffert explains it as, “Whatever the special abilities, a

remarkable memory of a unique and uniform type welds the condition together.” (Treffert).

Hoffman’s performance accurately depicts what someone with autism and savant syndrome may

be like. The key aspect in Rain Man is that the character with the mental illness is not vilanized

as many other movies and shows like Split and Criminal Minds do, and is instead portrayed

accurately.

Mental stereotypes are one of the many stereotypes that are still prevalent in today’s

society. This fact is enforced by the media’s depiction of those suffering from a mental illness.

People with a mental disorder are often portrayed in a way that criminalizes them or that is so

exaggerated it becomes unbelievable. The problem with this is that people will believe these

depictions in the media and treat others based on what they have seen. Both Split and Criminal

Minds exploits mental disorders for entertainment, even though Criminal Minds has some basis
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in truth. It is the movie Rain Man that helps its viewers understand what savant syndrome is like

and how it affects people. The media is finally addressing mental health, but now it has to work

even harder to make sure that it does so accurately and in a way that does not create harm for

those struggling with the disorders that they are expressing.

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Works Cited

“Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder).” Cleveland Clinic, Apr.

2016, my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9792-dissociative-identity-disorder-multiple-

personality-disorder.

“NAMI.” NAMI, Sept. 2019, www.nami.org/Learn-More/Mental-Health-By-the-Numbers.

Treffert, Darold A. “The Savant Syndrome: an Extraordinary Condition. A Synopsis: Past,

Present, Future.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B,

Biological Sciences, The Royal Society, 27 May 2009,

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2677584/.