1 Some Touch of Madness

So, I went crazy for a year. Mad, cracked, cuckoo, nutso, batshit, psycho, insane, fucked in the head.

In the months before I had found myself in a square-peg-round-hole situation and, wedged in deep, thought the answer was to cut off my corners, a painful and ridiculous solution that left me scarred and solved nothing.

Plagued by paranoia and crippling self-loathing, I hardly emerged from my bed let alone the house. Because I wasn’t doing anything with my days, I seldom slept at night. With so many hours awake, there was more time to think and those thoughts sanded, and sawed, and hacked. Gripped in the teeth of depression distraction became essential, but I couldn’t hold focus on books or television, so I turned to the one thing that had always brought me joy and listened to speculative fiction.

I promised myself that I could only do this if I got out of bed and accomplished something. Anything. So, I listened to podcasts of short fiction and interviews; I immersed myself in The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxyand Lightspeed, mostly, but also Escape Pod, Starship Sofa, and Clarkesworldwhile I brushed my teeth, while I walked through my neighbourhood for hours, while I knit, while I vacuumed. And the more I listened, the more I found hope.

This genre of time travel, cylons, and electric sheep, of fantastical science and exploration, questions more than any other what it means to be human. It positions us against what is unhuman and imagines a better world by examining, subverting, and challenging our racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and cisgenderism. Feeling subhuman those long dark months, the hope in our ability to reach our fullest potential inspired me, slowly, painfully, to grow back those corners as if I was alien myself. Yet the more I listened the more I realized ableism remains less challenged, particularly around mental health.

Like physical health, we all have mental health. I have learned we can struggle with it acutely, like breaking a bone, or we can strive to cope with a chronic condition, like diabetes. Most of us can engage in activities that will improve our mental health and all of us will have a universal life experience that will challenge it, such grieving over the loss of a parent.  With so many similarities between us, it amazes me how the entertainment industry, particularly stories told in the speculative fiction genre, continues to villainize mental health concerns.

Even my nine-year-old nephew, who is beautifully innocent and gorgeously wise beyond his years, has written a fantastic story about a protagonist being chased by ‘the bad guys’ in a world where all the humans are crazy, and the anthropomorphized animals are saviours. It goes a little something like this:  our main character finds himself in another land, being chased by The Crazies (in his description over the phone I imaginedReaversfrom the Whedonverse, all slobbery and incoherent). On the run, our protagonist befriends an elephant, who offers a ride on his back.  The pair arrive at a body of water and the elephant tries to ward off the attackers by spraying them with water from its trunk. It delays The Crazies for a while as they recover, stunned from the blast, but the chase resumes. The elephant and the boy then arrive at a pile of rocks. The elephant then tries to stop The Crazies by throwing rocks at them with his trunk.  This also doesn’t work.  As they continue to flee, the two nearly run smack into a giant spider’s web. The spider tells them to stand behind the web, visible to the antagonists. When The Crazies arrive and try to get at their prey, they get stuck in the web and the spider has a meal that will last her for days on end.

Please don’t misunderstand, I love the story. This kid does try/fail cycles better than many adult writers. What I want to point out is the villainization of The Crazies, who have no other descriptors.  The boy is the catalyst, the elephant is the helper, and the spider is the genius. A nine-year-old already believes these experiences are mutually exclusive.

Sadly, there are far too many examples of villainized mental illnesses to explore each of them, but there are a few that stand out to me. My friends have heard about my frustrations with the world of Batman and all the villains createdin Arkham Asylum.  I can easily pull out my soapbox and delve into a diatribe about my theories on social capital and post-traumatic resilience in Harry Potter.  Even Luke and Vader can be located at opposite ends of a dichotomy that conflates evil with illness and hero with health.

I understand the idea of being in battle with our health, having been pinned down by my own.  Being ill has been scary, risky, and often reminds me of my ephemeral existence.  On manic days I have done things I’m ashamed to admit, on depressive days I have slunk to new lows, and during both I’ve had complete disregard for my body. Many of us experience a mind/body split when it comes to our health or abilities, either physical or mental. This, too, becomes a universal experience, and thus so many speculative fiction fans identify with the struggles in these stories. But it hardly makes me, us, evil.

I imagine most of these stories want to question what it takes to break the human spirit, to understand our boundaries of resilience, and what it means to be no longer human once past these boundaries. If we lose enough of ourselves, our values, our mental health, the corners of our identities, do we become something lesser or greater than human?  Despite my experience, I don’t have an answer, but that’s not important; it’s the question itself that makes me so uncomfortable, particularly when it is mental health that frames it.

Mental illness is never addressed as such in the genre and it’s assumed we understand through implication. Antisocial disorders are most often and detrimentally villainized, which I find hugely ironic in a genre with a fanbase known to misunderstand social cues. With villains like the Joker and Joffrey, it’s impossible to imagine the lacking nuance and humanity behind these stock characters. That’s the point, to terrorize and entertain audiences with their lack of empathy. I can promise the terror of my mental illness never once entertained.

But mental illness is far more than a lack of empathy, erratic behavior, or hearing voices.  It is also being overly concerned with the welfare of others or constantly, to our detriment, questioning our place of power and privilege in this world. It’s about feeling we are less or more than others, less or more than human, in a way that has us interrogating ourselves rather than the problem we face. What I learned from that year of doubt and intolerable agony is that I can thrive with a mental illness, but it is messy, complicated, and often means an investment in building the skills of accurate critical reflection, self-worth, and community.

These skills are the values we should explore when examining mental illness in the speculative fiction genre.  Not what happens when we ‘lose our minds’ and blow shit up, inwards or outwards, but rather the result when mental illness becomes a barrier we can survive, cope, or thrive with. Why haven’t we figured out our resilience is exactly what it means to be human?

By no means am I suggesting there isn’t work required in the other realms of anti-oppression, even in the worlds of speculative fiction. What I propose is we continue to use the framework of intersectionality in our storytelling and ensure that we recognize ableism when we see it.  Would Luke have been a betterJedi without his prosthetic? Would Batman have been a different kind of hero without his post-traumatic stress disorder?  Would Voldemort have tried to take over the world if he had the social capital in childhood to address his complex trauma?

Sure, we need character flaws and inner turmoil to create great fictional identities, but mental illness is not inherently a defect or weakness. It can be a challenge, most certainly, and a fascinating plot point or MacGuffin, but it is not the equivalent of evil.

The word ‘crazy’ has become synonymous with frantic, bizarre, ridiculous, erratic, scary, unrealistic, fantastical, violent, thrilling, intense, awesome, wild, absurd, outrageous, unacceptable, fathomless, dangerous, and foolish.  I want to engage in speculating that accurately portrays mental health and illness with the right words. I want to read about a character, back to the wall, being convinced to saw off her corners and overcoming the insurmountable. I want to continue to hope.