Mental was a short-lived series airing on Fox, and starring Chris Vance and Annabella Sciorra.
When Dr. Jack Gallagher is named the new Director of Mental Health Services at a Los Angeles hospital, he decides to make radical changes to the way patients are treated, much to the annoyance of the hospital's managers. Along the way, he also seeks a way to help his troubled younger sister.
This series contains examples of:
- Ambiguous Gender: In "House of Mirrors", Gallagher treats a teenager suffering from dysphoria who learns that they were assigned male at birth, but had been raised as a girl after a botched circumcision. Rather than pushing them toward either their birth gender or the gender in which they were raised, Gallagher and Artis suggest that the teen experiment with their gender for a while until they figure out what's comfortable for them.
- Big Brother Instinct: One of the things that drove Jack to become a psychiatrist is his desire to help his mentally-ill sister Becky.
- Lipstick Lesbian: Dr. Chloe Artis is a rather feminine lesbian.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: In "Do Over", Gallagher treats a man who is convinced that he's been reincarnated and that he's experiencing visions of his past life. Rather than dismiss the theory as a delusion, Jack decides to proceed from the notion that the visions are real, and tries to help the man figure out who he was in a past life in the hopes that this will bring him peace.
- Punny Name: Gallagher's perpetually-skeptical boss is named Nora Skoff.
- Really Gets Around: One episode sees Gallagher and his team dealing with a married woman with a high sex drive.
- Refuge in Audacity: In the pilot, in order to deal with a schizophrenic who's convinced that he's a John Carter of Mars-style warlord who's been stuck on Earth (and who has adopted the Martian dress code by disrobing in public), Gallagher takes off his own clothes and pretends to be a fellow marooned warrior so that the patient will trust him.
- Trans Equals Gay: In "House of Mirrors", Dr. Chloe Artis consults on a teenager with gender dysphoria, on the assumption that she has special insight because she's a lesbian.
- Wanted a Gender-Conforming Child: Dr. Chloe Artis was disowned by her parents after coming out as a lesbian.
