Guest Blog: John Wilcox

I'd love to tell you that the first time I met John Wilcox, I knew that we would be lifelong friends. But what's closer to the truth is that the first time I met John Wilcox, I vowed never to be in the same room with him again if I could help it. Fifteen years and many, many rooms later I'm happy that I broke that promise to myself and even happier to discredit both Emily Post and everyone's grandmother by telling you that first impressions don't mean a thing.

John is best described as wicked cool and wicked smart (if you are hearing me say that in a loud, way-off-the-mark fake Bostonian accent that sounds ever-so-slightly Jamaican, I thank you for knowing me so well). In fact, the only bad thing I can dig up to say about him after all of these years is that he lives entirely too far away from me and pulls off the "crazy old person on a college campus" routine off much better than I do. And that's saying a lot for someone who once drunkenly threw up all over my feet (I picked a terrible day to wear flip-flops but they didn't belong to me, which proves there is always a bright side to everything). Enjoy.

John Wilcox: Why Silver Linings Playbook Sucks Even Though Jennifer Lawrence (and I Guess Bradley Cooper) is Ridiculously Good Looking, and Other Stray Observations About Mental Illness

I recently watched Silver Linings Playbook, the movie about mentally ill people acting zany, rejecting medication, and finding love.  It was kind of like A Beautiful Mind 2: Stuck in Philly, or Garden State 2: This Time We Dance.

You can tell both characters are suffering from mental illness from the stubble and constipated expression

I  liked Silver Linings just fine. I, of course, fell a little bit in love with Jennifer Lawrence's character. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl type (defined by Nathan Rabin at The A.V. Club) really does it for me, like Natalie Portman's character in Garden State. I'm a sucker.

But this isn’t about my habit of falling in love with fictional characters, or even worse, fictional character types.  No, this is about…

…

(the ellipses build suspense)

Mental Illness.

More specifically, this is about mental illness in movies and the evil atrocity those movies commit (other than predictability that borders on criminal negligence.)

Of course, a blog about mental illness wouldn’t be a blog about mental illness without slightly uncomfortable self-revelation.  But that’s kind of the point of this whole thing.  Either by forming or reflecting cultural values on mental illness, Hollywood has painted such a consistent portrait of the mentally ill that it is difficult to talk about without first: 1.) defending mental illnesses as an actual disease and 2.) explaining away all of the weird stereotypes that almost every movie with a mentally ill character promotes. 

So, some slightly uncomfortable self-revelation!

Obviously, I wouldn't care about this as much if it didn't somehow affect me personally. About a year after I left the military, I started getting treatment for severe anxiety. The treatment was probably a lifetime overdue, but it became necessary when I spent that first post-military year sitting in my buddy Mark's house doing 

absolutely nothing, afraid to make any kind of movement in my life. I didn't go out, I barely reconnected with friends. And I sure as hell didn't make any moves towards my stated goals of going to college. 

This was pretty much my life for over a year.  Proud time

And here is the first part where, often in conversation, I feel like I have to defend myself, rightly or wrongly. I understand that change is scary for everyone. And if you saw my lifestyle for that year, you would probably accuse me of being nothing more than a lazy ass. (I'm always a lazy ass, so that argument is moot.) The fact is, though, that any time I would do something like start the registration process for college or seriously consider a job search, I would get physically ill. Sorry to be gross, but not just a little rumbly in the tumbly, but straight-up puking in the toilet physically ill. 

So I decided it was time to get treatment. I went to a psychiatrist who agreed with the diagnosis I had received earlier in the military of severe Generalized Anxiety Disorder with minor depression as a symptom of the anxiety, and started me on a regimen of medication that the hack, useless psychiatrist in the military hadn't bothered to try (and that's a whole other story worth telling sometime, psychiatrists whose primary client is the military rather than the patient. Another day,  perhaps.) 

Now, the only reason that I'm going to reveal exactly what medication I'm on is because this relates directly to my problem with Silver Linings Playbook and the whole genre of movie it represents. My competent psychiatrist prescribed me Fluoxetine (Prozac) and Clonazepam (Klonopin). I started taking the medication after dealing with severe reservations about taking psychiatric medication. A week after I started taking the medication, I was registered for college, had all of the paperwork filled out correctly with the federal government and Veteran's Affairs (that's a LOT of paperwork), registered for classes, ordered my textbooks, and made contacts on campus. After more than a year of sitting on the couch and doing literally nothing, in a week I accomplised more than I had in the entire year preceding it.

I chose my college solely on aesthetic appeal.  Good ol’ St. Scholastica

And I stayed on the medication for a while, started college and kicked some ass. I was a horrible student in high school, but a straight-A student now in college with very real prospects of getting into a PhD program in the next year. But after being on the medication for more than a year and doing better than I ever have in my thirty years of life, for some reason, I decided to quit. I figured, now that I had a clear idea of what kinds of thoughts were the "mentally ill" thoughts and which ones were my own, I would be able to distinguish between them and only pay attention to the healthy ones. And as stupid as this sounds, and it will probably make you lose respect for me, the reason I thought I could do this was because MOVIES TOLD ME I COULD.

Now hear me out.  Every single movie that I can readily think of has the mentally ill protagonist learn to deal with his or her disease without the help of medication.  And not only that, the movies I’m thinking of actively demonize medication.

In A Beautiful Mind, mathematician John Nash (Russel Crowe’s character) deals with severe schizophrenia with nothing more than willpower and the help of his loving wife.  When he is forced into treatment, he loses is magical mathematical powers, so has to learn to deal with his hallucinations to be his truly genius self.  Of course, in real life, it was revealed soon after the movie that the real John Nash never stopped taking his medication, but that was just a minor blip in the news. 
 

Silver Linings Playbook takes it even a step further and makes the old claim that psychiatric medication turns the characters into “zombies” and in one scene lists several medications that countless people rely on to function, and laugh at their horrible effects, including both medications I took (although I had stopped taking them before I saw the movie, so it’s wasn’t the movie’s fault I stopped my medication or anything of the sort.)  The movie, along with almost every other movie that touches on the subject, implies that the medication somehow fundamentally changes the people for the worse, or robs them of their “true essence.”     

Garden State, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Girl Interrupted, hell even Good Will Hunting… this is just off the top of my head.  If I thought for another ten minutes I could probably name another ten movies that demonize psychiatric medication and treatment.  Think about all of the scenes of wily characters squirreling their medication in their cheeks only to dispose of it later.

So with this cultural context firmly embedded in my skull, I had stopped the medication that had so dramatically improved my life.  And guess what happened?  Life started sucking again.  I was missing assignments, and towards the end of the semester I started getting physically ill again when I tried to leave my apartment.  I started contemplating dropping out of college because I couldn’t handle what was happening.
Thankfully, some of the contacts I have made on campus are truly Good People, and one of them helped me get back to treatment before the end of the semester.  And again, just like the first time, a week after I re-started the medication I went into kick-ass overdrive, caught up with almost a full semester’s worth of work, and somehow scraped by the end of the semester maintaining above a 3.75 GPA.  And even though that was the worst I had done so far in college (totally bragging, unabashedly,) I had never been prouder. 

I guess this is the point, finally.  If you have never dealt with mental illness, or if you are dealing with it now and refusing medication because you are afraid it will make you a different person, don’t believe the movies. 
Now, getting on the right medication is often a long process for people suffering from mental illnesses.  And sometimes, the medications they try have negative effects like making that person feel sluggish and slow, or disassociated.  But that’s just because it’s the wrong medication.  Not every medication does that to every person.  Getting treatment for mental illness is not wrong somehow, it does not make you weak, taking medication isn’t a sign of defeat.  And not only that, but sometimes, medication is absolutely totally necessary to successful treatment of mental diseases. 

Because that’s exactly what we’re talking about.  Treating diseases.  Real diseases.  And that gets me to my last little minor point with this beast.

One thing I realized as an adult dealing with a mental illness is that I have to be open and honest about the whole thing.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t usually advertise it (other than, you know, this blog or whatever,) and it is not a common topic of conversation in my everyday life.  But it sometimes is necessary to bring up.  In my academic life, I have found it much easier to be honest with my professors about what is happening than trying to hide it, because even on medication there are some bad days (very very few, but some.)  And predictably, the reactions differ.  Almost all of the professors accept what I tell them, perhaps ask some questions, and we move on.  However, there are the few people that, although they nod, I can tell think that I am just another person making an excuse.  That “mental illness” is just another word for “lazy” or “disorganized” or whatever it may be.  

And I guess that is any individual’s right to believe what he or she chooses to believe, but I’m pretty sure that medical science has gone pretty far to prove that mental illnesses are real and identifiable.  Diseases to be treated.  I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure the experts agree that mental illnesses are real.  But some people think that billions of people emitting noxious gases doesn’t affect the atmosphere, so you can’t expect everyone to accept mental illness either.  So even though it is very uncomfortable to talk about sometimes, if someone suffers from some random physical disease, let’s just say Lupus for the hell of it, she may not like talking about it, but if it interferes with her life, she is probably not too hesitant to explain what is happening.  (And the feminine pronoun isn’t just culturally progressive, but accurate to Lupus because that’s how I roll.)  And that’s how I have to look at my own illness.  If it gets in the way of a successful life, I need to explain what’s happening.

And to wrap a bow on it, I can’t think of any movie that demonizes treatment for physical diseases.  So stop it, Hollywood.  You’re fucking people up by promoting this idea that treatment is bad.  It’s a goddamn disease.  Get treatment.  Don’t be afraid to talk about it.  Even though those movies pretend to be “sympathetic” to mental illness, they are a bunch of crap.

I suppose that's it. I've been thinking a lot about mental illness advocacy. I don't know. Just something on my mind. My recent struggle with medication (and lack thereof) and then watching Silver Linings Playbook made me realize that there is a lot of work to be done with de-stimatization. I guess this is my opening salvo. We'll see where I go from here. 

Yes I did.