Read my latest flash, Venison, at 52|250.

After seeing previews that led me to believe the show would either be intriguing or awful and exploitative in its appropriation of the experience of madness or mental illness/injury, I went ahead and watched the premier of Mental last night. I have decided against continuing to watch, though not for the reasons I expected. I don’t have the experience to say whether the portrayal of schizophrenia in the episode was realistic, but it did seem to keep to a minimum the number of scenes which would provide an opportunity for more callus viewers to enjoy the show as an opportunity to gawk at “freaks” (though some of the graphic visions shown are dramatically awkward and demeaning).

Indeed, the show’s positives largely flow from the new director and main character, Dr. Jack Gallagher, treating patients as whole human beings. He uses empathy instead of resorting to tranquilizers when a new patient, Vincent Martin, is having a severe paranoid delusion. He invites patients to sit in on diagnostic meetings and allows them some choice in how they are medicated. He takes a small group out to dance so that they can enjoy themselves instead of only becoming “productive” through routine. He respects individuals’ creativity. This may not seem radical, and perhaps is not in TV-land, but in real life, those deemed mentally ill often struggle to be seen as whole people. By setting the show up to be a bit too much like House-in-a-mental-hospital, the real daring of the show has been obscured.

The show also included some indication of the problems of dealing with pharmaceutical companies, which will probably be dealt with in more detail in upcoming episodes.

Unfortunately, Mental has major gender issues. While I do wonder why, once again, the main brilliant and iconoclastic character must be male, that isn’t the biggest problem. The main case in this episode was that of a schizophrenic man who had stopped taking his meds because he wanted to regain his ability to draw. The show, then, revolved around the story of a mad male artist and the doctor’s efforts to allow him to create and to get the female relative who was serving as his caretaker to give him that chance. It was painted as a big deal that Vincent was willing, if necessary, to sacrifice his artistic talent to be with his niece and nephew, but we never saw what their mother sacrificed to raise them (or to take care of him, for that matter). 

It would have a been much less cliché story had the genders been reversed. To make matters worse, the teaser for the next episode showed a hysterical pregnancy. Maybe Mental will get better, but I don’t see any reason to give it another chance.

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This evening, one of my students from last year told me that many of the seniors she knows have gone on dramatically restrictive diets– eating a piece of fruit at each meal– in order to improve their chances of finding a job.  Apparently, many employers believe that attractive people represent their companies better and, when it comes to women, attractive means very thin.

The job market for recent college graduates is tight, so for the most part, these young women don’t think about protesting the unfairness of these standards, even when they do recognize how unhealthy restrictive diets can be.  This, of course, goes to show how economic problems can have very gendered.  I also have to wonder about the degree to which the beauty standards involved have been influenced by imported Hollywood movies.