Mental Illness in Media Can Be Therapeutic: Angelica Jade Bastien

I’ve written before about my admiration for writer Angelica Jade Bastien, who writes beautifully and with great passion about film and television, especially about the portrayal of black and female characters. She also writes forthrightly about her own struggles with mental illness. In two recent essays she pays tribute to portrayals of mental illness on the large and small screen that are more than authentic; they are therapeutic.

One is a classic, Bette Davis’ Now Voyager, one of my favorites as well. It was an early depiction of the struggle of Charlotte Vale, a young woman from an upper-class Boston family, who has so much anxiety over feelings of being unloved and unworthy that she has a breakdown. With the help of a sympathetic psychiatrist played with enormous patience and compassion by Claude Rains, she has one of the cinema’s great transformations, inside and out. Bastien writes:

Now, Voyager remains a timeless portrait of a woman who pulls herself back from the edge of madness to create a life she’s proud to live, with the help of both psychiatry and her own willpower. The film is buttressed by sleek, highly efficient Hollywood production and the moving performances of the cast, notably Davis and Claude Rains as Dr. Jaquith, who helps usher Charlotte into this next phase of her life. Most poignantly, Now, Voyager is a curious outlier in the pantheon of American cinema that concerns itself with women living with mental illness. Few films offer the kind of blistering hope and empathy that has made Now, Voyager endure.

Unlike the “emotional distance” in other movies about mentally ill women, whether they are treated as villains (Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction,” Fairuza Balk in “The Craft”) or quirky misfits, Bastien says that “Now Voyager” “centers on Charlotte’s interior life, including her mental illness, above all else, and how Davis capably brings this to life.”

She also wrote about a view of mental illness made 75 years later, Rachel Bloom’s television series “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.”

It has an elasticity few other shows come close to, let alone pull off with such regularity, in the way it melds cutting emotional truths with audacious musical numbers that reference everything from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to 1980s hair-metal bands. But I was always left cold by it. It took until season three, which takes a gimlet-eyed approach to Rebecca’s mental-health concerns, for me to realize that my chilliness toward the series wasn’t a mark of any inauthenticity I witnessed in its narrative. In fact, it isn’t that I didn’t see much of my own journey with mental illness on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend; I saw too much of myself in the overachieving, myopic Rebecca Bunch.

One of the greatest pleasures of the series is watching Rachel Bloom inhabit this character. She is at her best when she interrogates Rebecca’s mania, capturing the seductive quality of a manic episode. Its garish, bright intensity fools you into believing this is your best self as you dive headfirst into a series of self-destructive and often exhilarating behaviors. I can see myself in Rebecca’s relationship with mania, the vivacity of her daydreams, and her fraught relationship with her mother….In Rebecca’s shifting emotions, I saw my own history: the giddy elation of a new diagnosis she believes can solve everything, the buoyant mania that often follows a suicide attempt, the careful navigation that comes when you’ve tried to set fire to your own life and still have to move forward.

As is increasingly recognized, representation matters. Bloom has been frank in acknowledging her own mental health issues and her determination to present, even in a heightened, comic setting, an authentic depiction of a character for whom mental health is just one of her character attributes. That, in and of itself, can be therapeutic in educating the members of the audience who do not understand these issues and validating the experience of those who understand them only too well.