The typical format of shows like My Strange Addiction, Hoarding: Buried Alive, and Intervention include the introduction of a mentally ill person with a problem. After a reveal of how dire their need for help is–because usually a relationship is on the line–a specialist is brought in to address the individual, and the audience is left to watch the drama unfold.

Who yells at who? Who breaks down first? Will they ultimately change? Will they not?

As a kid, my mom ate this stuff up. I’d occasionally watch them with her on humdrum Saturday mornings, lounging around with a grilled cheese and TLC’s tag lines playing in the background. I never really liked them, however. They made me feel funny on the inside and a little more than guilty for peeping in on something I thought should be private.

The assigned video made me remember why I wasn’t fond: everything, even the altruism displayed, felt either insulting or artificial.

For instance, the video follows the aforementioned format. A man struggles with his hoarding addiction. He has a girlfriend who’s naturally dissatisfied and is considering leaving him despite still feeling attached. A behavioral therapist and a professional organizer are brought in to help solve the “problem,” camera crew in tow. Little progress is made in six weeks when he halts the cleaning up process. To me, this enforces the negative stereotype of the mentally ill being stubbornly “unfixable” (as if it were their fault) even when the resources to “get better” are made plainly available. It’s not that simple. Emerging from a mental illness, especially one as long-held as this man’s compulsive hoarding, is a back and forth system full of advances and setbacks over years which a television show can’t possibly capture. Another thing television shows can’t possibly capture is the emotion behind the mental illness. Despite one or two vignettes where the individual recounts the trauma rooting a disorder or venting about how difficult life is in their shoes, only superficial attention is given to their torment. It doesn’t show the sleepless nights of pacing back and forth, listening to little voices in the back of your head, or anything past what’s necessary to evoke pathos in the audience. Such a simplification is frustrating, creating the same two dimensional figureheads of mental illness created by a poorly done horror film’s “psychopath.”

Second, the visual styling of the show made me queasy. Conducted in the same format as reality television about rich families, Hoarding: Buried Alive once more downplays the severity of these mental disorders. To no fault of the audience, we’re led to view these people as nothing more than intriguing cases for our pleasure, entertainment. The handheld camera zooming in, the intermittent interviews, the background music, and advertising all evoke memories of Keeping Up with the Kardashians  or–even worse–since it equates making over someone’s house to making over someone’s mind–Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. (Click the links for examples.) It’s grossly corporate for something which should be honestly portrayed as a call for awareness.

The most perturbing thing, however, was the advertising used in the video. For instance, blurbs would pop up over its course–Twitter posts made by someone I assume is part of the production team. They end with “#Hoarders.” While this is a reference to the show’s name, the concept of someone using a word associated with legitimately mentally ill people in the same way as “#fashion” or “#like4like” horrifies me on a personal level. Can you imagine a depressed person flicking through the internet for relatable content and instead coming across a post advertising a show on TLC with the hashtag “#depressed”?  Additionally, the My Strange Addiction webpage baits audiences with the headline “You Won’t Believe How Strange These Addictions Are.” While I admit it’s a part of our inherit psychology to be fascinated by The Weird, it doesn’t mean we should go ahead and exploit living, breathing people with such a sterile glove.

Basically, I’m saying is if you want to see something strange, go ahead and take a tour of Ripley’s because–believe it or not–mental illness isn’t entertainment.

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Schizophrenia is a mental illness causing a set of negative, positive, and cognitive symptoms; however, the hallmark characteristics the disorder calls to mind are the positive symptoms, hallucinations and delusions. Hallucinations involve the introduction of non-real elements into a person’s perception of reality. These can occur in all the different senses. Some, for instance, will smell strange odors or feel bugs crawling on their skin–though the most common hallucinations are auditory and visual. Delusions, on the other hand, are false beliefs a person is convinced are certainly true. With schizophrenia, these are typically preposterous and paranoid. Many schizophrenics believe the government is out to persecute them.

Since these symptoms appear in media, we often have preconceived ideas about what constitutes a schizophrenics mind. Graduate student Alexandra Logan refers to thriller movies such as Black Swan, Shutter Island, and Friday the 13th, saying these movies support negative stereotypes like “people with mental illness are violent, unpredictable, untreatable and… evil.” While I can’t say I personally have this point of view, I can say I love thriller movies and sadly have rarely considered this harmful perspective.

Through watching a video  attempting to accurately portray the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, I sought to gain a new understanding of how a schizophrenic individual might see the world during a psychotic episode. The scene opens with a regular, domestic day bathed in tranquility. Then, steadily, voices begin to creep into the audio. They call me worthless and lazy, taunting and telling me I’d be better off dead or how to never trust anyone, even the pizza delivery boy at the door. Food is poison. Medication is poison. The weather is out to get me. After a while, an eerie sensation begins to sneak up o me, and I realize how difficult it would be to disobey these voices because of how sure, how commanding they are. As we learned in previous units, humans are hardwired to go along with an authority figure’s commands even if we believe them to be morally reprehensible as demonstrated by the Milgram experiment in which an incredibly high percentage of adults “electrocuted” a (thankfully nonexistent) opponent on the command of a researcher. This video reminds me not only would I be pressured into doing the same, but how frustrating a life lived like this would be. If you ignored the voices, you’d get in trouble as perceived by your reality. If you listened to them, you’d consider yourself a monster.

How overwhelming. I understand the high suicide rates associated with schizophrenia on a first hand basis now.

Additionally, the video caused me to consider how difficult social situations would be when your sense of reality is so shaky. Never knowing when a person’s actions are a hallucination or due to a delusion would make it almost impossible to trust anyone. I was also alarmed by the lack of safe space to retreat to. During a psychotic episode, nowhere is safe, not even when you close your eyes.

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I chose to do the first option and watched the video simulating what it’s like to be a person with schizophrenia.  Watching that video was a very surreal experience for me. I don’t know how I would be able to deal with those complications in my everyday life.  From the negative voices in my head telling me that I’m worthless and that they hate me to the paranoia with normal things such as the pizza guy or my coffee, I honestly don’t think I would be able to function whatsoever. There are a number of movies that are centered around characters with schizophrenia and they are portrayed usually as tragically sad with some characters being redeemed in the end by their “gift”. Many movies and TV shows portray schizophrenia in a comedic way though. These characters usually deal with voices in their heads too but instead of being hateful like the ones in the video, they tend to cause the character to do something hilarious and crazy. Or other times they are seen walking around and talking to themselves or inanimate objects causing comedic  discomfort to the other characters of the show. These portrayals, in my opinion, take a lot of the seriousness of schizophrenia away. I know that until I took this class, I had never really given much thought to what it would be like to be schizophrenic. After reading more about it in the book and watching this video, I have a much clearer understanding of schizophrenia and the effects it has on people’s lives. I think the media really needs to work on how they depict people with schizophrenia. By downplaying the symptoms and making them seem humorous and harmless, many people never even realize the gravity of what people with schizophrenia go through every day.

Schizophrenia defined by our psychology textbook is “a mental disorder characterized by disorganized thoughts, lack of contact with reality, and sometimes auditory hallucinations.” ( Comer and Gould G-11). The video that I was to watch for this prompt, explained to me that this is how a day in life would be of a person with schizophrenia. The video also warned me that if I felt uncomfortable to stop the video since it some of the material shown could be traumatizing. From here I started the video…

In this simulator representation of schizophrenia, it the beginning it looked as if the person was living in the home by themselves and they were having a fairly good day. The second that the schizophrenic part started, the video got darker and the voices in the persons head got very negative. I was surprised that the voices in the persons head were all negative, there was not a single good thing that any of those voices said and I feel that the voices are a big part in why this person was not able to do a lot of his daily activities that could have possibly made him feel better. Some of the things that I noticed was the person wanted to take his medication but the voices said not to, he wanted to drink some of the coffee but his disease made him think that the coffee was bubbling and was poison, he wanted to eat pizza but the voices made the pizza bubble and the voices also made him think that the pizza was poison.

Schizophrenia in the media is portrayed as this really crazy disease where people are not able to lead a normal life where they can not do daily activities and their every moment is affected. Generally in the media, the person acts in a crazy manner and is usually taken care by someone because they cannot take care of themselves. Yes, this is true that some cases of schizophrenia are more severe than others but there are many people out there that lead very normal lives even when they have this disease. In reality, the voices that the simulator showed are very true and do happen in real life but I’m sure that that they are not so many all at the same time. I also watched other videos on youtube of people with schizophrenia, I noticed that they go through phases why they hallucinate. For example, there was a boy who for sometime saw animals, then for sometime didn’t see anything, then went back to seeing animals and large numbers and letters.

I think that all in all, schizophrenia is a very tough disorder and it definitely affects the person with the disease and the the people around them. The media does over dramatize the daily life of a person having schizophrenia versus how they are in real life.

Work Cited:

Comer, R. J., & Gould, E. (2013). Psychology around us (Second ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

The simulation that I was required to watch really opened my eyes about schizophrenia. The video warned me about visual and auditory effects that were designed to demonstrate the multiple hallucinations and delusions that someone with the mental health issue experiences on a daily basis. It used a first person shot, so that the viewer could experience the video from the perspective of the patient. This helped the voice-overs to represent the “voices in his head” and the illusions portrayed to seem more realistic.

The video reminded me of a horror video game, which are programmed with certain features that are meant to thrill the player. The first person view was similar to video game design as well as the voices talking to me and telling me what to do. It was even more intense when the voices would contradict themselves and what the character was doing. Another effect commonly used in games is bizarre altercations like the bubbling pizza and the altered letters on the box that read “Poizzon”. My favorite part which really freaked me out the most, was when the weather man started talking through the tv to the main character, telling him that the weather was out to get him and mocking that he wasn’t going to do anything about it. The multiple voices arguing at once was very distracting and made it difficult for the character to perform actions that he wanted.

In the media schizophrenia is commonly seen as so out-of-control that the patient needs constant attention and a safe location such as a mental hospital. The hallucinations are thought to be so extreme that the person is unable to live in reality at all, when actually the person is situated in reality with a few additions that make it difficult to perform actions without fear.

The media has used movies like A Beautiful Mind, The Soloist, and Donnie Darko to portray schizophrenia in film. This has the effect of over-exaggerating and adding things that are “sexy for the screen”, and don’t accurately portray the realities of living in the mind of a schizophrenic. I have not seen any of these movies, nor any other movie (as I am aware) that demonstrates the mental disorder. This may or may not have effected my reaction to the video watched. I have never really learned in much detail about the mental disorder, schizophrenia, I just always knew it was a struggle for those who suffer from it.