In our film we are going to attempt to convey the life of a girl with mental health issues, we hope to make it non offensive, not just displaying her as a monster with no remorse or on the other hand a character who's purpose is simply to receive pity from an audience. To help us present a balanced representation of a girl with these issues I have carried out extensive research into how mental health is currently being portrayed in films to see what people are doing right and what problems there are. During this research I came across an article named "A Century of Negative Movie Stereotypes in Mental Health" (see below) by Time to Change, an organisation fighting discrimination across all aspects of life. As I thought this article made several useful points within it I decided to carry out Secondary research on it.
On the second page can be seen a table displaying the common stereotypes used when displaying mental illness as either just, comedy, faking, pity or violent. These end up giving the character a very one dimensional personality with little most to be said about them other than their mental illness, similar to the issues around how the limited times gay people are represented in films the simple fact of them being gay becomes their entire personality. We hope to display our main protagonist as not just fitting into one of these four boxes, there will be some aspects of violence and pity but these are only by products. Through conversations with her mother we hope to depict her human nature and how she desires to get help and to fight back against herself. We will show the mother and the one standing in the way of her getting help as she refuses to believe in her daughters condition until it is too late. This will hopefully help to convey the message that we should listen to people who trust us enough to tell us about their mental health issues and when appropriate get them the help they require, the same as for and physical condition.
Time to Change along with Dr Peter Byrne are attempting to improve the way the public see mental health by properly educating people, in our current education system there is still very little in the ways of teaching people out mental health issues that effect so many people and what to do if not only you suffer from one but if someone comes to you care about does. The article discusses the challenges they have faced in spreading awareness when the films that are being widely distributed across all ages contain such glaring detrimental stereotypes of mental health.
The article then looks back at how stigma around mental health has been around for centuries, even early films such as Off to Bloomingdale's Asylum (1901) depicted the escape of several mentally ill patients, getting humour out of their illness, ending with them all being captured violently and retuning them to the asylum. On the next page of the article can be seen the striking statistic that 1 in 4 people will experience a mental illness at some point in their lifetime but because of the stigma around it such a small number of these people will talk about it with others. Even children's cartoons are rich with representations, demonising mental health suffered, giving the idea to children from a young age that mental illness is something to be afraid of and to disassociate yourself from whenever possible.
The article ends with presenting three solutions that everyone should carry out, to talk about mental health, mind your language and to abandon cliches, and the plea for people creating films around mental health issues to begin to use a more sophisticated representation of mental health, creating characters with more to their personality than just their mental health.
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