At no moment do I recall any person offering suggestions about mental health. I am mostly certain the word mental health was never uttered during all that time in school, to eighteen years of age.
Thinking back, I received no flyers or any handouts with helplines or instructions on them. Basically, there was no guidance counselor either.
I left high school lacking any resources or means to address those common or uncommon pains that afflict the thinking part of our bodies. This is no good at all. Now, many shortcomings have been addressed, but do I have faith that every rural area of America has been enlightened? No.
The point is not to complain but instead share these deficits and talk about what they mean to so many Americans. A conversation would not hurt, if anyone is interested.
My mental health sensibility, for at least half my life, was shaped by only two factors: entertainment and local opinion. Word-of-mouth, rumor, and gossip could each be separate, but let’s file them under opinion or even more simply: stuff people say who are not professionals in the field.
That covers literally everyone in my tiny world until about age 30.
“I know I have something,” I often secretly told myself. Speaking up was never viable and was sure to make others raise eyebrows and snicker when you were not around. This was the best-case scenario if one were to open their mouths and ask for help for anything “mental.”
Television was one of my best friends. Movies too. Like everything in life, entertainment filled that gap where school learning stopped and embarrassing curiosities began. Television is rarely a good teacher.
By the way, there were fewer channels in total and very little to nothing we might call educational in today’s context.
Sitcoms and parodies provided most of what I thought I knew about mental problems, people who have them, and the doctors/mystery people who treated them. Psychiatrists? No one knew what that meant.
Fraser Crane was on a show called Cheers and then later his own show. By far, this fictional person exemplified who a mental doctor was and what he spent his time doing. Cheers was one of my favorite shows ever.
So, television was keen on making Fraser somewhat unlikable, too smart for his own good, neurotic, and perpetually scattered. It made “mental doctoring,” a sketchy and not entirely legitimate enterprise. If the doc was so questionable, then the patients must really be beyond help.
Remember, these were my only lessons about mental health.
With Fraser or any TV character (psychiatrist? I still don’t know) whatever-you-call-it, one image stands out as encapsulating what that whole thing was about: a mental patient laid out on a couch with the doctor looking on, asking questions and taking notes.
This set up is instantly recognizable, and it tells us that the patient is so unstable that he needs to lay down to calm himself. Every Fraser on TV is the Sigmund Freud of the moment, able to dissect someone’s entire life with just a few questions.
It is all absurd (and funny). That is alright for television, but it is not ideal for an impressionable mind with a self-diagnosed mental problem.
People who needed psychiatric care were predictably barely hanging on to reality or complete trainwrecks. Messages matter. The clear message from TV was that people who went to Fraser for help were pitiable screw-ups and unsavory creeps. They were not people with a mental illness, they were the walking crazy with a person attached.
What about the Rorschach Test? Every Joe and Jane Average has seen some rendition of it. The idea here is that disturbed folks will see some killer or brutal act in an inky, surrealist, smattered image. The correct answer is always a butterfly, unicorn, or something comparatively whimsical.
How was I to know any better? Overall, TV nonsense left us with the idea that mentally ill equals wrong, deviant, and dangerously unpredictable. But I was not eating couch cushions and howling at the moon.
As a result, I actually believed that I could not even get “crazy” right. I failed at failing.
There are so many false ideas that became ingrained in the public’s consciousness about mental health. Besides Fraser, Saturday Night Live and other comedy shows routinely featured “the man on the couch” satire. I remember a film called Analyze This about a mafia boss who sometimes sobbed uncontrollably. This list is very long.
There is a notion that probably is still out there, and it goes like this: the purpose of psychiatry is to locate the mystery object that is both the source of all pain and thus the panacea solution that restores sanity. It is something like hiking the trails of the mind to find the X-marked spot that covers over the darkest dysfunction.
A therapist is less a scientist and more like a fortune teller with a crystal ball. Well, that is close to correct but maybe not exactly how I stated it.
Entertainment treated mental problems as something like a hidden wound that, once found, can be doctored up and healed as if it never existed. TV therapists are always searching for clues for the “aha!” moment of discovery.
People believe what they see on television. Remember the horror classic “Psycho?” Do I really need to say anything about this one, as it relates to the non-fictional mental health community?
Obviously, what the average person thinks and advises about mental health is impacted by what they consume from film and television. Things are better now than during my most impressionable years.
In terms of inpatient treatment, I remember the phrases: “nut house,” crazy house,” and other combinations of the same ilk. In my imagination, there was no sense of any steps between diagnosis and life in the nut house surrounded by people who had “lost their minds.”
I had heard those words “criminally insane” before, as well, and worried about where these people lived.
A mental problem was never an okay thing to have. It was not unusual to hear a marginalized person in the community referred to as crazy or insane. It was an off-handed comment that left no community member alarmed or surprised.
Therefore, people with eccentric ideas, or who were socially awkward, were grouped together in this large mix labeled as some form of disturbed or crazy. This is a bad result for everyone in society.
Such beliefs link mental illness with stubbornness and a perceived inability to get along with others. In short, it makes mental illness into a choice made by bad people with surly attitudes.
If the offenders just listened to alternatives, or were made to do such things, they can be cured — so went the logic of the average Joe’s and Jane’s. Offender is the right term for what I describe. I believe this because people who transgressed in any manner against the norms found themselves characterized as lunatics or something similar.
We should not forget that the social misfits often do have a mental illness that is not improved by community ignorance.
The many misunderstandings and calamities that unfold from this mentality are numerous and intricate. There should be a book, and probably is, on all that.
I wish at least one part of my Fraser-formed point of view on mental health occurred more often in life. Never have I seen or rested on a couch in the office of any person treating me for mental illness. In fact, just in my experience, psychiatrists like to prescribe medicine and then usher me out the door as quickly as possible.
I hope everyone can be “the man on the couch” once or twice each month. Yes, how can complex, life-long difficulties and disorders be addressed without wading through the past with an expert guide?
Seriously, I wish this to happen at some point.
Overall, while writing on this subject, I wondered if using the past tense more than the present is the accurate approach to take. In other words, how much of what I have presented is the way entertainment and popular opinion used to be, and how much is just documenting an ongoing thing?
I cannot give a full answer, but I do not watch television that much anymore. That itself is pretty good therapy.