I’m Picking on Batman, Again

Posted on July 21, 2011 in Stigma

I’ve gotten in trouble for this before — taken to task not only in the comments section of this blog, but also on Twitter. But what needs to be said needs to be said. Batman is teaching people awful things about mental illness, things that are not true. Take The Joker for instance. How many times have Gotham City authorities thrown him into the Arkham Asylum? Does he really belong there? Psychiatrist H. Eric Bender M.D. thinks not:

“Someone who is ‘psychotic’ is experiencing symptoms of psychosis, a mental disorder, which can include auditory hallucinations, such as hearing voices; visual hallucinations, where they see objects that are not truly there; or have delusional thoughts, despite evidence to show that such beliefs are incorrect — such as believing that one’s movements are being tracked by deep space satellites — or disorganized behavior,” Bender said. “In the vast majority of depictions, the Joker is not experiencing such symptoms; rather, the Joker has shown symptoms of psychopathy.”

Bender says psychopathy is a personality construct and not a diagnosis of a mental disorder.

“Psychopathy reflects interpersonal characteristics and behavior that are often rooted in a lack of empathy,” Bender said. “In the comics, television shows, and films, the Joker is much more akin to a psychopath and is not psychotic ((More here)) .”

What our comics and what our cinema say about mental illness transfers to the minds of people who are too lazy to pick up a genuine work about abnormal psychiatry. These same people vote and the representatives they choose make decisions that affect my life. So it behooves me to be aware of what comic books promulgate and to challenge their errors wherever possible.

Art is not above criticism for its values. It is not to be ignored when it suggests bad policy. To go by Batman, you would think that most criminals of the like of The Joker trick the system into putting them into mental institutions. Nothing is farther from the truth. As the same article notes, only 1% of all criminal cases center around legal insanity pleas and, of those, only 20% actually succeed. So we’re not in danger of giving the criminal masterminds of this world an easy ride.

What is actually happening is that many of our mentally ill end up in prisons where they are victimized by the real sociopaths. We have closed down our asylums ((Remember that word means “place of refuge” — except as run in the past, it often was not.)) and thrown the psychotic out onto the streets. To get treatment where community mental health centers have not appeared as promised, some of these have resorted to petty crimes. In jails, they get the meds they need to function, but they also get beat up and raped.

When this happens on the outside, people who might otherwise have helped turn their back because they have learned to equate the mentally ill with serial killers or other violent denizens of the demimonde. Some go past indifference to outright hostility: they beat those who are sick. And when it comes to the community, there are those psychopaths who have risen to places of power. Their lack of empathy results in policies that prevent the mentally ill from getting the treatment they should have for their sake and the sake of the economy.

I hope that when the new series starts coming out in September, Batman will become a new kind of Caped Crusader, one who knows the difference between the psychopath and the psychotic. As one of the latter, I am tired of getting the blame for crimes I don’t commit, much less imagine.