A Look into Sophia Nemeth’s “The Harmful Impacts of Mental Illness Representation in Television”

Why you should read it

This article does an excellent job of explaining how TV shows and films perpetuate negative stereotypes about mental illness by analyzing a single episode from Law and Order: SVU in which a ‘psychiatrist’ diagnoses an abusive mother with borderline personality disorder and attaches her abusive behavior to her illness. Included is an excerpt from an individual with BPD and her reaction to the episode and how it impacted her own thoughts regarding her mental illness. This shows how much a harmful portrayal of mental illness can impact an individual suffering from that same one. What makes this article so great for learning about how the media perpetuates stereotypes about mental illness is this: the media usually inaccurately and irresponsibly portray extremely complicated disorders, such as schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder, and personality disorders, that usually require at least a Bachelor’s in psychology to fully understand.

What to look at

One of the most important points of this article is how these harmful depictions of mental illness can impact those suffering from them in real life. These stigmas can be internalized and “translate to negative self-esteem and a sense of unworthiness” which is often overlooked when discussing stigmas and stereotypes in the field of psychology. In the world TV and film, however, there seems to be an easy solution to this problem: writers and directors and producers need to actually talk to individuals who suffer from the mental illnesses they want to depict and/or a professional who actually understands them.