A mental illness is a condition that affects a person's thinking, feeling, or mood. There are over a hundred different disorders, but each person’s illness is different even if they have the same diagnosis. These conditions can affect someone's ability to relate to others and function each day. While there is no distinct cure for any mental illness, recovery is possible, especially when treatment is started early and is continuous.
Mental illnesses can be caused by genetics, environment, lifestyle, and/or basic brain structure. They can be treated through various types of therapy and medication. Mental health awareness has become increasingly recognized and supported over the past few decades, but there is still a strong stigma attached to mental illness. 450 million people worldwide suffer from mental health conditions, 60% of whom do not receive any form of care.
Mental health services can be very expensive, so poorer people are often not able to access any kind of treatment. For example, an estimated 26% of homeless adults staying in shelters live with serious mental illness. The lack of treatment can worsen mental health and has lead to approximately 20% of state prisoners having a mental health condition, and 70% of youth in juvenile justice systems having at least one mental health condition.
Approximately 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. experience mental illness in a given year, so why are people still ashamed. Lack of information is a big problem, but misinformation is a much more problematic one. Literature has a long history of inaccurately portraying mental illness. Whether it be the “temporary nervous depression and slight hysterical tendency” attributed to the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper or the over-dramatized portrayal of bipolar disorder by Claire Danes on Homeland, mental illnesses are consistently misrepresented by books, movies, TV shows, and other forms of entertainment.
There has been some progress, though. Recently, books like It's Kind of a Funny Story, movies like Little Miss Sunshine, TV shows like Shameless, and musicals like Dear Evan Hansen have gone to great lengths to portray characters with mental illnesses as unique people who handle experiences in different ways. The result has been the best and most accurate portrayal of mental illness some people have ever experienced. Even if for those who have family and friends who are living with mental illness, it is impossible to know how that person feels. Art like this has given the general public a window into how someone with depression, an anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, or a host of other mental illnesses can live with their disease.
Unfortunately, the result of many mental illnesses, suicide, has been even more highly stigmatized than the disease itself. In the U.S. suicide is the 10th overall leading cause of death, the 3rd leading cause of death for people aged 10-14, and the 2nd leading cause of death for people aged 15-24. Books like Anna Karenina dealt with the subject poorly, afraid to be too taboo, but newer books like The Perks of Being a Wallflower have been written as mental health and suicide has become a more talked about issue.
People’s relationships to society are largely shaped by how they see society portrayed through pop culture. This holds true to people’s relationships to their own mental health and the mental health of their friends and family. How they see these things are very important because of the detrimental effects untreated mental illness can have on a person’s life.
The theme of this project is most simply put, mental health and people’s relationship to it. In each artifact, the words mental health or some derivation of them can be found. One each page, there will also be green somewhere in the design because green is the color of the mental health awareness ribbon. As each artifact endeavors to answer the question “What effect have characters with mental illnesses in pop culture had on society?”, an answer regarding the mental health of the public arises, but all of the answers are unique and can be interpreted differently because each person’s mental health is unique and can be interpreted differently by different people.