6 Mental Illness Myths Hollywood Wants You to Believe

6 The Magic Key/Instant Cure

On the Season 6 premiere of House, our hero discovers that a catatonic patient is constantly staring at something in the nurses' office. Anyone without House's keen intellect would've assumed that "something" was a ham sandwich, but House discovers that it's actually a music box which, when played, brings this particular patient back to the land of not pissing on herself in the corner (keep in mind this is something the staff has failed to notice for years, but Hugh Laurie spots in a single goddamn day).

But it's not just in medical dramas. We've seen this in pretty much all of the Hannibal Lecter movies (figuring out the one thing that makes the killer an insane murder machine allows the cops to predict who, when and where he'll strike next) and in every film where the primary villain gets talked out of his psychotic master plan by a hero that "understands" him.

Hell, that's even the ending of Spider-Man 2: Spidey talking Doc Ock out of his murderous insanity. "You're completely right, Spider-Man, I did say that people need to let dreams go sometimes. To Hell with my dead wife and everything else that I've lost, I'm totally pulling this fusion reactor on top of myself to save the lives of all the people I was hell-bent on vaporizing mere seconds ago."

In the medical community, this phenomena is known as "complete and utter whale shit" , but in Hollywood it's call it "the magic key."

See, Hollywood is convinced that sometimes there is just one specific thing that has to be discovered in order to cure a person of their shoelace-eating lunacy--or at least unravel the mystery behind it--long-term treatment and medication be damned.

Why It's Bullshit:

Simply put, psychology is not a game of Jenga, wherein one crucial block can bring down the entire tower of mental illness. No one factor made the person snap, and shoving one thing back into place won't make them whole. If it did, this mental illness stuff would be easy.

In the real world people with severe personality disorders are about as predictable as the weather, and so far the fact that we all know what causes lightning hasn't helped us figure out when and where it's going to strike with any kind of certainty.

For instance, think about all those cinematic serial killers brought to justice by the cunning insight of a psychological profiler. In real life that shit only leads to arrests about two percent of the time. The linked Malcolm Gladwell article took a comprehensive look at serial killer profiling and found that it's nothing more than cold reading - a parlor trick utilized by old-timey magicians and psychics to con people into thinking their mind was being read. People want to believe that Sherlock Holmes and his modern day incarnation, Dr. House (or Ben Matlock for you high-brow types) really exists. In reality, the only cases of successful psychological profiling were heavily doctored by the profilers themselves to make their predictions seem more accurate.

5 A Day With a Crazy Badass Shall Cure Them All

There's seemingly one person in every silver screen mental hospital who's there either by choice or because the squares on the outside couldn't deal with how "real" they are. See Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted; or Michael Keaton in The Dream Team. Once they get inside, the rebellion starts small--screwing with the staff, shaking the other patients out of their passivity and generally doing things that in any other situation would brand you a totally disruptive penis.

Whether it's by getting them to refuse to take their medication, taking them on an unsupervised adventure through the city or getting one of them laid, the rebel does more to help these poor nuts in one day than all their doctors and nurses with their fancy big city book learning have done in years.

Why It's Bullshit:

This isn't just idiotic, it's insulting. It plays to that stupid Hollywood notion that decades of schooling and experience with thousands of patients means nothing compared to one tough guy ready to give them a good old fashioned kick in the pants.

See, if you could really break somebody out of a psychological shell with a single unsupervised trip led by a gruff tour guide in a leather jacket, we would fucking do that. That's way easier than what we're doing now.

But it's not the implied insult toward the mental health profession that makes this so irritating. It's the implication that in each crazy person, good mental health is lurking about one-inch beneath the surface, ready to be cured in a couple of days. So when somebody raised on these movies actually runs into an actual mentally ill person, they can't help but wonder why they don't just get over it already.

4 Electroshock Treatment is a Savage, Primitive Treatment

According to movies like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Shine, A Beautiful Mind and Changeling, electroshock treatment (electroconvulsive therapy or ECT) is the equivalent of treating testicular cancer with thumbtacks and a crescent wrench.

A bunch of savagely indifferent doctors strap some poor bastard down and try to shock the crazy out - leaving the victim docile, slightly charred and with a bucket of fried chicken where their brain used to be. The portrayal of ECT is so overwhelmingly negative that it frequently gets picked last for kickball, behind Nazis and child molesters.

Why It's Bullshit:

In reality, ECT works and it's safe. It's painless and has the same level of risk as general anesthesia, and has been used successfully for years to treat depression. Patients who undergo the treatment typically find themselves more engaged, more active and altogether happier people.

The only negative thing is that they have to keep getting the treatment to stay healthy. And as for the screaming, struggling patient being dragged down the hall to the electroshock room? Unless the patient is catatonic and their life is in immediate danger, ECT can only be administered with informed consent.

See, Hollywood always leaves out the part where the doctors sit down and carefully explain the benefits and risks of ECT to their patient so a rational decision can be made. Then they drag them down the hall to shock their balls off.

3 Having a Mental Illness is a lot Like Being a Superhero

Hollywood, appealing to our innate sense of fairness, has long suggested that for every faculty taken away by mental illness (reason, rationale, bowel control), there is at least one super power left behind as compensation.

Laboring under the idea that mental institutions and halfway houses across the world are actually the secret headquarters for The Socially Incapable Justice League, movies have given us dysfunctional people that can outwit impossible prisons (Cube); developmentally disabled man-boys that can transform into super-powered aliens (Dreamcatcher); autistic kids who can crack top secret government codes (Mercury Rising); and, of course, autistic men who are awesome at blackjack (Rain Man).

Why It's Bullshit:

There are people called savants that are able to retain vast amounts of information, usually involving numbers but not always, and perform mental feats that most people can only dream of, but only about 10 percent of people with a mental disorder are anything close to what could be called a savant. Savants without a mental handicap are uncommon (probably because there are way more normal people than mentally disabled people), but the point is you don't have to suffer from a mental deficiency or a crippling psychosis to clean up at the blackjack table. And, in fact, that probably makes it way harder.

In real life, autism is a highly variable neurological disorder that impairs social functioning and communication, leaving those that suffer from it struggling to lead a normal, fulfilling life. In the movies, autism means little more than being really good at math, dressing like a nerd and having to put up with Tom Cruise and Bruce Willis (which might be a super power, but there's no conclusive proof). And as far as our research can tell, no mentally handicapped person has ever turned into an alien.

2 The Charming and Witty Psychopath

In Hollywood, nobody has more fun than a murdering lunatic. Whether you're the Joker, Hannibal Lecter, the Sheriff of Nottingham or Scar from The Lion King, you're typically the most erudite, charming and interesting person in the room.

Moviemakers love the idea of a sociopath brutally murdering people one minute and making hilarious observational comments the next, so it comes as no surprise that these characters are often times the most endearing people in the entire damn film. They even went so far as to essentially turn Hannibal into a Batman-like vigilante in Hannibal Rising, fully embracing the fact that every audience was going to root for him anyway.

Then, Showtime took the next logical step and cast a sociopath as the hero in Dexter.

Why It's Bullshit:

First, in movies the terms "psychotic" and "sociopath" are traded more often than genital infections at Flava Flav's house. But psychotic behavior is when someone attacks the mayor because Satan appeared on a box of Crunch Berries and told them to do it. Sociopathic behavior is when someone lies, doesn't feel bad about it and can't understand why anyone else would.

People who suffer from anti-social personality disorder (the closest thing in real life to a Hollywood "sociopath") almost always come from backgrounds where they're barely given enough to eat, let alone a well-rounded cultural education. Generally speaking, they aren't charming, aren't educated, aren't even particularly bright and couldn't come up with a devious scheme to save their boring ass lives. Most of them aren't even violent.

And it's actually pretty hard to rise to the top of your field if you have the typical sociopath's problems relating to other human beings. Yes, even in politics. So while Hannibal Lecter is a world-class sophisticate, a brilliant doctor and the epitome of old world charm and grace, the average real world sociopath is an isolated failure that spends his lunch breaks from Pizza Hut scribbling obscenities on the condom machine in the bathroom at the Shell station.

1 "I have amnesia! I just need to get my memories back!"

Hollywood loves itself some good old-fashioned amnesia. Any time your central mystery could be solved with a phone call or two, give your hero amnesia and boom, you've just filled two hours. Hollywood has been using this plot device since 19 freaking 15. At least 10 films in the silent movie era were about people with amnesia, and they haven't let up since.

Back in the day it was the old-fashioned kind of amnesia, as seen in soap operas and numerous wacky comedies. In these cases, a blunt force head trauma erases the main character's memory, and often another skull-crushing blow will set things right again (seen as recently as the Dana Carvey movie Clean Slate which, ironically, you almost certainly don't remember). Amnesia is also a job requirement for high-end assassins (see The Long Kiss Goodnight and the Bourne movies).

There's a cheesy, almost Three Stooges quality to this one so you probably always knew it was bullshit. But even if it's not caused by a bonk on the head or a secret agency wiping your memories, there still has to be some truth to it, right?

Why It's Bullshit:

In reality, it's more like Momento than Bourne.

Pretty much every other film that deals with amnesia picks and chooses what symptoms work best for their plotline from a myriad of actual cases to form a Frankenstein of medical inaccuracy. The causes of the disorder in the real world are strokes, heart attacks and infections, not hits to the head. And the result isn't a brain that hides every memory behind a curtain until the day you find the secret files on a government assassin database that brings it all rushing back.

No, real amnesia is much more horrifying. The victims usually can't form new memories, so while their personality is intact and long-term memories are there, they are continually having the reset button punched at random.

Yes, one of the most realistic depictions of amnesia was Dory the fish in Finding Nemo.

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