Respectful representation in media is important for every minority group to make its members feel like they belong in society and to train young people of all demographics to accept those who are different from themselves. This is especially true when the topic of mental illness or other neurodivergencies are broached in media.
Heather Stuart of Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada wrote iabout the effects of mental illness portrayal in the media “Long before people ever meet someone with a mental illness or encounter a mental health professional, they have formed opinions and developed prejudices. The media create and perpetuate mental health stigma and discrimination through repeated use of negative and inaccurate images of the mentally ill, mental health professionals, and mental health treatments,” Stuart wrote.
That being said, she also believes that if used properly with respectful and accurate portrayals, the media can be one of the mental health community’s greatest allies in combatting stigmas.
As someone who suffers from PTSD, I believe there are two respectful recent portrayals of note in the lineup of films and shows based on Marvel Comics: “X-men: Days of Future Past” and the popular Netflix show “Jessica Jones.”
As a short introduction to terms used, PTSD stands for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder which is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a psychological reaction that occurs after experiencing a highly stressing event (as wartime combat, physical violence, or a natural disaster) outside the range of normal human experience and that is usually characterized by depression, anxiety, flashbacks, recurrent nightmares, and avoidance of reminders of the event.” Dissociation, often experienced by those with PTSD, is defined as “the separation of … discrete mental processes from the mainstream of consciousness or of behavior with loss of integrated awareness.”
I am a lifelong fan of Marvel Comics, having grown up reading from my dad’s box of vintage comics. I read the “Days of Future Past” storyline that the movie was based off of long before the movie came out. Initially ,I had been skeptical whether Fox, which has been notorious forf bungling Marvel storylines and characters, their most recent release “F4ntastic” garnering only a 9 percent rating on rottontomatoes.com, would be capable of doing the pivotal story justice.
My feelings for the rest of the movie aside, though I personally believe the movie told the story more appropriately than the comics it was based on, there was one scene in particular that stuck out to me and proved the writers and director had done their research on PTSD. In the scene, main character Wolverine had such an intense PTSD-induced flashback that he dissociated so much he nearly went back to the doomed future he’s from. It was a simple glance at the man who would later become his abuser convulsing from a shock from a Taser that triggered Wolverine. His world spun around him and he could not separate his memories of torture from what was happening around him, making him unable to function or even remember who the people around him were. The young Xavier, who did not know what PTSD was, assumed “[Wolverine was] on acid; somebody gave [Wolverine] really bad acid”.
The first time I saw that scene, I paused the movie to take it all in and said, “That is me.” I nearly started crying because despite the sci-fi elements, it was a media representation of nearly exactly how it is for me to live with PTSD. To have a character whose greatest superpower is his real-world popularity crumble on the big screen from his disability which is often brushed in the real world off as over-reacting or being thin-skinned was incredibly important. A very popular character just showed the millions of people who saw it (the movie earned $747.9 million in the box office alone, according to Box Office Mojo) a glimpse into what it is to suffer from PTSD and helped internally validate the experience of those viewers who have experienced the effects of PTSD themselves.
A much more recent and more in-depth example of a respectful portrayal of someone, specifically a main character, suffering from PTSD is the Netflix exclusive series “Jessica Jones.” Jessica’s PTSD does not have merely a single scene of relevance, rather the entire series is focused on how her PTSD has changed her from a generally happy albeit sarcastic young super-powered woman to someone who refuses to form social connections for fear of hurting someone and attempts to drink her trauma away and how her entire life now revolves around her trauma and her attempts to move past it.
What I found unique about PTSD portrayal in Jessica Jones was that Jessica employs real-world therapy techniques to attempt to prevent herself from dissociating, with varying success. She even later forms a support group for those also traumatized by the main villain, who was her own abuser many months prior. The lighting of the scenes change when Jessica is in or going into a flashback. Everything becomes tinted purple, the villain, Killgrave’s, favorite color and a not-so-subtle reference to Killgrave’s comic book alias of “The Purple Man”. Some of the things which trigger her include a specific hotel, a specific table at a certain restaurant, and many other otherwise mundane things that the average person would not bat an eye at but cause intense and often debilitating flashbacks for Jessica. I experience triggers what most people would find silly such as glass-encased rooms, doctors offices, certain classical literature, and certain casual thoughts. The flashback sequences in Jessica Jones were eerily real and believable. So much so, at times, that I had to make multiple attempts at watching a few of the episodes.
The series also highlights that Jessica has both healthy and unhealthy coping mechanisms for dealing with her trauma. Some of the less healthy methods include heavy drinking which could be classified as alcoholism and aggressive but not always violent outbursts. Her healthy methods include helping others, talking with her adoptive sister, and a form of cognitive therapy where she chants the names of the streets in her childhood neighborhood, her last truly safe space.
She is broken, yes, but refuses to completely back down and die. She refuses to lose her free will again, which causes her to initially want to flee when she realizes the villain has returned, but her conscience prevents her from allowing Killgrave to harm others if she can prevent it.
Patricia Grisafi of bustle.com gave Jessica Jones a glowing review for it’s realism in portraying an abuse survivor as an abuse survivor herself and compares Jessica’s experiences to her own “When I share my story, sometimes people ask why I stayed. I can offer few reasons … These reasons never feel satisfactory – to me or to others. We have agency, right? We are free to make our own choices. When Jessica argues with Killgrave about control and free will, he references a moment from her past. While under Killgrave’s control for months, Jessica had a single eighteen second window of agency in which Killgrave lets his power expire; eighteen seconds to make her escape.”
Having respectful representation of characters with mental illness in media is an important trend which allows these fictional heroes to be heroes in real life by fighting stigma against those who suffer from mental illness. I am looking forward with cautious optimism for what the next batch of superhero media will bring.
