The indie "dramedy" Shrink, starring Kevin Spacey, is scheduled to hit theaters this weekend in a limited release. Spacey plays a psychiatrist to Hollywood's elite who, after his wife commits suicide, turns into a pothead increasingly unable to manage his private life or help his patients. For a synopsis of the movie, read the New York Times article "On the Screen, the Shrink Has Shrunk."
Just another therapy-bashing film by Hollywood, which has a long history of negative stereotypes of therapists and mental illness. Take last year's The Wackness, in which Ben Kingsley, as Dr. Jeffrey Squires, lights a bong while trading his psychoanalyst services to Luke Shapiro for pot. Kingsley, a long-haired, cranky narcissist, spends the sessions living out a vicarious horny adolescence through his patient.
I know .... they're just movies. But the media and entertainment industries' often negative and inaccurate portrayals of psychiatrists, psychologists and other therapists - as well as the therapeutic process itself - have a profound impact on the public and patients themselves, their family members and policy makers. Not only do such depictions give a distorted view of mental illness, they also diminish continuing efforts to combat its stigma.
The mental health community appears to be fighting back. Mental Health America's Stigma Watch program tracks news and entertainment coverage of mental health issues for fairness and accuracy, with the goal of correcting and preventing stigmatizing portraits. You can even submit a "stigmatizing incident report" on a website.
It doesn't help the cause when celebrities make off-the cuff, disparaging remarks about psychiatry and psychology. That would include our Hollywood Scientology cultists such as Tom Cruise who believe that psychology and psychiatry are not only ineffective, but evil. I didn't, however, expect to hear a bashing of the therapeutic process from Larry David, but there it was in a recent Wall Street Journal interview.
Here is a snippet of David talking with WSJ's John Jurgensen about his film Whatever Works.
Jurgensen: What is it about your work that makes people want to psychoanalyze it so much? This armchair analysis often extends to you....
David: I don't mind that. I've been in therapy. I know enough about myself now to know that I really don't need to know anymore. I get sick of it.
Jurgensen: But you're not in therapy any longer?
David: No, I don't need to do that. It's such a self-indulgent activity that when I was doing it made me kind of sick. It turned me off to myself. It's so self-indulgent to talk about yourself for 45 minutes to an hour.
Considering the handsome living David makes off of playing misanthropic and neurotic characters (mostly himself), it makes sense that he wouldn't want to cultivate a more likeable persona. Working out his anger means he'd be out of work.
You have to look to the music industry to find affirmation for psychotherapy. Singer-songwriter Dar Williams is one of the artists who has lent her support to Musicians for Mental Health, a campaign that's using the power of music to change youth attitudes. Her song, "What Do I Hear in the Those Sounds? is the most accurate and soulful ode to psychotherapy I've ever heard. She makes no secret of her emotional struggles. Said Williams in an interview, "I make it perfectly clear in many of my songs that I have experienced clinical depression, that it was a disease I survived, and that therapy is nothing to be afraid of." that enlightens and educates people about the process.
If you haven't heard it, I've posted a video performance of the song as well the lyrics.
DAR WILLIAMS: WHAT DO YOU HEAR IN THOSE SOUNDS?
I don't go to therapy to find out if I'm a freak
I go and I find the one and only answer every week
And it's just me and all the memories to follow
Down any course that fits within a fifty minute hour
And we fathom all the mysteries, explicit and inherent
Wh
en I hit a rut, she says to try the other parent
And when I talk about therapy, I know what people think
That it only makes you selfish and in love with your shrink
But oh how I loved everybody else
When I finally got to talk so much about myself...
And I wake up and I ask myself what state I'm in
And I say well I'm lucky, 'cause I am like East Berlin
I had this wall and what I knew of the free world
Was that I could see their fireworks
And I could hear their radio
And I thought that if we met, I would only start confessing
And they'd know that I was scared
They'd would know that I was guessing
But the wall came down and there they stood before me
With their stumbling and their mumbling
And their calling out just like me, and...
The stories that nobody hears, and...
I collect these sounds in my ears, and...
That's what I hear in these sounds, and...
That's what I hear in these,
That's what I hear in these sounds."
