Last night’s Horizon, titled How mad are you? seems to have stirred up some feeling. If you didn’t see it, think Big Brother only with crazy people… hmm, maybe not.
The premise is this: ten people, five with diagnoses of various mental illnesses, and five allegedly normal, have been ensconced in Hever Castle, along with a panel of three mental health experts. The experts have to tell, by observing the inmates doing a variety of tasks, who has which of their list of mental disorders. Will they label perfectly sane people as mentally ill? Will people with mental illnesses convince the experts that there’s nothing wrong with them? I think we can probably guess that the answer to both of those questions is “yes”.
Many of the complaints I’ve seen about the programme - and most of them were before it was aired - have been along the lines of “how the label is going to damaged this person’s life”: being called bipolar or depressed or socially anxious on national television is, it’s said, far far worse than being thought only eccentric, individual or just plain odd. And what if a normal person gets labelled mad? Back in the closet with you, mentallists!
In the event, the strongest argument against this was the participants themselves. Two were ‘outed’ on last night’s first show: the experts spotted Dan with OCD, who said he ordinarily made no effort to conceal it, washing his hands fifty times a day and refusing to touch other people, and - if not exactly proud of his condition - then he was absolutely not willing to be ashamed of it. Good for him.
Their diagnosis for Yasmin, on the other hand, was wrong. They diagnosed her as not mentally ill, but she is (we haven’t found out yet what her real diagnosis is), and she was delighted to have fooled the experts. She might have a mental illness, but she’s every bit as normal as the rest of us.
Did it trivialise mental health issues? Though the slightly game-show format isn’t the best, I still don’t think so. When the typical mad person in the media is a released-from-hospital-too-soon schizophrenic who’s committed murder or worse, it was very nice to see some people who were a less flamboyant kind of crazy: ordinary, functional people who just happen to have this diagnosis. And it was very, very nice to see that a diagnosis of a mental disorder isn’t some kind of death sentence, but something that might, in fact, have its uses in understanding just what’s going on in that head of yours.
I’m sticking the rest of this post - the “where I’m coming from” part - behind the cut, so that those who want to avoid perhaps TMI about the inside of my head can do so. The second part of Horizon: How mad are you? is on next Tuesday on BBC2, and the first bit can be watched online, at least by those in the UK.
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November 12th, 2008 20:13 | Category: self-indulgence | Comments (7)
