Portrayal of the mentally ill in comics

I'm kind of disappointed that I saved this thread up for a good binge and then it turned into another "what's wrong with DC" thread. :(

Going back to something that was mentioned early in the thread about what exactly constitutes insanity. (I really liked the comment about how the popular understanding of sanity relies on a model in which psychologically healthy humans are all fundamentally identical. ) In abnormal psychology, there are four basic questions that are used to determine whether a person is mentally ill, and generally at least three out of four of them have to be true:

• Deviance: Are the person's thoughts, emotions, or behavior typical of their culture? (Note the specificity of 'their' culture. This is not used to condemn an entire culture or subculture that deviates from the rest of society; it's been a huge problem historically, as I'm sure you can imagine.)
• Distress: Is the person troubled or deeply emotionally affected by the way they think and act? Do they feel in control of themselves?
• Dysfunction: Is the person impaired in their ability to survive? Can they get by in life on a day-to-day basis?
• Danger: Is the person prone to violent or injurious behavior, to themselves or to others?

With these criteria in mind, how many characters who are presented as mentally ill actually are? Batman, for instance, is absolutely not distressed by his own actions, and is (usually) unimpaired in everyday life, even though he does 'pass' (fail) the deviance and danger tests, and he has been known to distress people who care about him. Joker (usually) passes and fails the same questions, interestingly. (Batman's much-despised 'retirement' in TDKR is basically an eight-year episode of clinical depression, and an incredibly faithful depiction of one, at that. I have no idea whether that was deliberate on Nolan's part.)

Riddler on the other hand, at least in my favourite portrayals, meets all four criteria, and as far as I'm aware Humpty Dumpty only misses distress - due to his own obliviousness, which is one of those exceptions which would tend to reinforce the diagnosis. Who else?

Part of what I'm interested in here is the extent of the problem. I don't think it's at all contentious to say that comics tend to grossly misportray mental illnesses and psychological ailments in ways that are profligate with Unfortunate Implications. Is it worse at this than media and culture are on average, though? When have comics gotten things right?

edited 10th Jul '13 8:49:30 AM by Noaqiyeum

Interestingly enough, Harley Quinn and Two-Face fulfill all four requirements with ease in a regular basis. Dysfunction is the most debatable one, but I think they mostly get by on it because plot says so (truth be told, it's near to impossible finding a comics character fully fitting that category at all. It'd make any villain or hero horribly incompetent at what they do).

edited 10th Jul '13 10:45:52 AM by NapoleonDeCheese

That's actually a really good checklist. I like it.

Sometimes the villain isn't insane. Sometimes he's just an asshole. The Joker is just an asshole.

I was thinking about something for a while now: Is it possible for the Arkhamites to be portrayed as having realistic mental illnesses, while still keeping their character flavor and antagonistic roles?

Imagine Two-Face actually acting as someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder, with Dent having no idea of what his alter-ego does, maybe even trying to chase "him" down, only to find a Tomato in the Mirror.

Imagine Mr. Freeze never accepting his wife is really frozen dead, being in paranoid denial and forever trying to "save" her, never able to let go.

And finally, imagine how the Joker, much like The Pyro, hallucinates all day long of how he's just making innocent hilarious pranks and scenic spectacle for people to enjoy, and keeps wondering why nobody stays to laugh and applaud after the performance.

Don't know about an ongoing, but I think a mini-series would do nicely with such portrayals.

edited 10th Jul '13 11:24:08 AM by indiana404

Still haven't read it yet, but doesn't Arkham Asylum go that route in a few ways?

Tobias: True facts! :) (I blame You're Insane! for much of that problem, personally.) I paraphrased the list of the Four Ds from Wikipedia's article on psychopathology - just to give a proper disclaimer, I'm only an interested amateur, not a professional psychiatrist.

Napoleon: Dysfunctionality is kind of an unusual criterion to discuss in this context for exactly that reason. Contrariwise, almost any character we discuss is going to satisfy the Danger criterion simply by virtue of what kinds of characters populate the superhero genre. :P

I'm not sure about Harley - argument over dysfunctionality aside, how often has she shown distress over her romantic obsessiveness? - but I think you're right about Harvey Dent. Deviance and Danger are fairly self-evident, and he's often portrayed as totally incapable of making basic, everyday decisions without the help of the coin (Dysfunctional) and/or struggling to overcome his dependence on it or the influence of his other half (Distress). (He actually seems to be a pretty good example of how a villain can be dysfunctional and still threatening.)

Indiana: I'd definitely read that. (If Joker is psychotic, he obviously isn't manipulating anyone. That suggests Harleen might suffer from erotomania!) An alternative take on Freeze could be that his wife is alive and well, and in fact had nothing to do with the accident, but it caused him to acquire a neurodegenerative condition and he doesn't recognise her...

Are you thinking of A Serious House On Serious Earth? That had a kind of similar feel, although not to the same extent or in the same ways - the encounters with Clayface and Zeus, particularly.

how often has she shown distress over her romantic obsessiveness?

It's actually a fairly frequent facet of her character, how she's basically a chronically relapsing romantic addict who keeps lamenting and regretting her association to Joker yet coming back to him.

During Gotham Sirens, there was a scene where she admits that her obsession with the Joker is unhealthy and that he's a truly bad man who does unforgivable things. And then just when the reader thinks she's made a breakthrough, she laments and says "Well, he MIGHT change someday?" and is then promptly gagged by Poison Ivy. It's Played for Laughs but it seems like a pretty genuine insight into how damaged she is. She knows what she's doing is wrong and that Joker really is a horrible man, but she can't stop herself from trying to rationalize BS excuses for him.

It's also worth noting that at least until the final arc (where she reunited with the Joker after a lengthy absence), the writers seemed to be trying to push her into more sympathetic Anti-Villain territory.

Would someone meet the dysfunction criteria if they're highly competent at whatever task they put their mind to, but the methods they choose for meeting their goals are incredibly impractical?

Like the "Laughing Fish" story. When the Joker tries to douse all the fish in Gotham's harbor with a chemical that makes them look like him, he succeeds. However, his overall plan was that, once the fish look like him, the fishing companies will have to pay him royalties, since the fish they're selling are using his likeness. When the people at the patent office try explaining to him that intellectual property laws don't work that way, he responds by trying to kill them, thinking that will make them change their minds, not grasping the fact that they simply don't have the power to do what he wants them to.

edited 10th Jul '13 9:36:11 PM by RavenWilder

/ Oh, I see. I've seen a couple of instances like that, but I think they gave me the impression that it was just a by-product of shifting her dependence to Ivy instead (and imitating Ivy's insights without really internalising them). I haven't read Gotham Sirens, though, and Harley isn't a character I really pay attention to in general; clearly I'm under-informed.

Dysfunction is more on the level of being able to, say, go outside without having a panic attack. Disconnected thought processes are another indication of Deviance. (I guess his inability to understand that he was mistaken is dysfunctional, but that isn't something he struggles with repeatedly.)

edited 11th Jul '13 2:44:08 PM by Noaqiyeum

...bump?

What about other characters who are commonly portrayed as mentally ill? I know Banner is supposed to have dissociative identity disorder and apparently has more personalities than just Bruce and Hulk, but I haven't read his series at all. How does he fit into the criteria?

Just on these. Distress doesn't cover psychopathy. A psychopath isn't distressed by their behaviour. They are (usually) content with it and, given psychopathy is a common disorder in Super-villains, it's not a great criteria.

1. Psychopathy is not clinically-defined. The nearest conditions are antisocial personality disorder (DSM) and dissocial personality disorder (ICD).
2. Neither of these is limited to or entails lack of empathy or remorse. There are multiple criteria for diagnosis, of which some minimum number must be met. This is only one of them.
3. Distress can include remorse, but doesn't have to. If I understand the process correctly, a patient with dissocial personality disorder who doesn't regret breaking that person's hand but doesn't understand why it didn't get them what they wanted would meet the criterion.
4. It's still a three-out-of-four guideline! Missing one category would not automatically disqualify a diagnosis anyway.

edited 30th Jul '13 6:31:38 PM by Noaqiyeum

Actually, under DSM -V, it's Antisocial/Psychopathic Personality. The definition of Anti-Social Personality Disorder was/is broad enough to cover most career criminals.

The problem is reliably measuring lack of empathy or remorse. That's why it's left out. Even with the DSM-V, from what I've read, they're going by other traits of psychopathic personalities, such an inflated self-image.

I've no problem with the idea that someone could not suffer distress and still have a mental disorder, but given Batman and the Joker (above) "failed" the distress characteristic, that shouldn't be seen as the portrayal of their own mental issues being less realistic. The Joker has much more in common with the Psychopath idea than many other characters who are labeled as such do.

edited 31st Jul '13 2:47:48 PM by Anteres

In a medium like comics, I don't think you'll ever find enough consistent portrayals to actually build up a reasonable diagnosis for any one given disorder. Especially given that Depending on the Author is one of the big staples of the comic medium.

I also dislike that mentally ill or disabled are generally portrayed as villains in both comics, and media in general, especially when combined with outright support for fascist ideals, such as in the comicbook movie 300.

I have read that in the real world only 4% of all violent crimes are connected to mentally ill people, and given that they are mentally unsound, they would probably be incapable of virtually any other type of crime.

On the other hand, I have also read (Both in the New York Times) that mentally ill people are on average 11x as likely to be subjected to violent crimes as a regular person.

Hence, in reality amoral sane people tend to victimise insane people enormously more than the reverse, and as such the prevailing current manner of portrayal genuinely files under the extreme hate-speech and scapegoating banner.

A much more accurate portrayal would be that at most 4% of all fictional villains have any form of disability or medical disorder.

And no this isn't Political Correctness Gone Mad. If this was the almost uniform portrayal of, for example, homosexuals, or brown-hued people there wouldn't be any doubt that this was misleading scapegoating hate-speech practice, whether intentional or accidental. And, you know, at least they don't usually have as hellish living conditions to start with. So rationally this is in fact even worse.

That said, for example, of course the Joker should get the electric chair. I have a problem with the fundamental narrative, but within that false narrative I obviously don't support that maniacs should be allowed to go around on repeated killing-sprees.

edited 13th Aug '13 10:21:09 AM by CodenameBravo

I can believe that maybe 4% of fictional villains actually suffer from a serious mental disorder. As previously noted, "You're insane!" is thrown around so much that it's lost all meaning. Most villains aren't actually insane. They're just assholes.

Yes, we need less villains with diagnosable mental disorders. Ras Al Ghul works very well as a Batman villain, yet he himself is not insane, meaning even Batman's rogues don't need to be all insane to actually work. There's also, of course, Bane. Meanwhile, Spider-Man tends to have some very sane villains. They're generally thugs with superpowers or enhancements (Sandman, Electro, Rhino, Shocker, etc.)—shame they generally play second fiddle to Green Goblin. Personally, I liked Kingpin better as an ever-present Spider-Man villain, because his villainy is so easy to mask, while he has no mental disorder to justify his actions.

But how about the mentally ill heroes? I can think of the Hulk, Creeper, Moon Knight, Crazy Jane, and Deadpool (when the mood strikes him—and there's the argument that he really isn't insane at all) off the top of my head. All of them display some degree of DID (even Deadpool argues with his narration boxes—which comes across as DID to me). It seems difficult for writers to come up with a mental disorder that isn't so flamboyantly over the top and obvious (and often annoyingly called schizophrenia—it's not the same thing as DID at all!). I'd love to see a well-done character who simply has a social disorder, or maybe actually has schizophrenia (they'd go over the top with it, but it would be nice to see somebody who is said to have it actually HAVE it).

I dunno, even with mentally ill as heroes (at least the ones you mentioned, or Legion for that matter) it tends to come across as sick, inaccurate, and exploitative to me. (Deadpool is also a thrill-killing assassin, so I hate the character.) Not to mention that m.i. are barely able to take care of themselves, much less playing heroes.

And more often than not we get the Norman Osborn variety, which just reads as hate-speech to me.

I wish that authors could just leave mentally ill or disabled alone in general. As I mentioned earlier, the matter of fact truth of reality is that mentally ill are preyed upon through abuse, torture, rape, bullying, and any other violent (or financial) crime 11x as much as regular healthy people.

Meaning: Sane people being evil amoral threats to mentally ill is the reality, and fiction should reflect that to not encourage more of the same treatment.

It feels like the authors in any form of media often enough tend to feed off of the pain and misery of as vulnerable, unbalanced, and despairing victims as possible through severe distortion, misblame, humiliation, degradation, hatred, and dissection.

edited 17th Aug '13 11:54:59 AM by CodenameBravo

Well, one could argue that anyone who, upon inventing a portable, fully-functional freeze ray, instead of patenting it and making a fortune, decides to dress up in an outlandish costume and rob banks with it, is at least a little mentally unstable.

Heck, if Wikipedia's to be believed, "According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), over a third of people in most countries report problems at some time in their life which meet criteria for diagnosis of one or more of the common types of mental disorder."

edited 17th Aug '13 12:05:43 PM by RavenWilder

I know a manic-depressive bipolar paranoid schizophrenic with synesthesia, borderline personality disorder, and insomnia who would disagree very strongly with this statement, and actually be incredibly offended by it.

edited 17th Aug '13 12:21:52 PM by TobiasDrake

I have a theory that anyone who develops powers and then puts on a costume, for good or evil, is more than a little fucked in the head.

Okay, I apologise. It should be revised to something like:

"A large part of mentally ill have a hard enough time taking care of themselves. Handling a superhumanly stressful and demanding job like superheroics seems self-contradictory."

And that's coming from somebody with both mental disability and illness.

edited 17th Aug '13 10:33:17 PM by CodenameBravo

Fixed your post.