The Dilemma of Horror and “Insanity”
In any facet of culture, people belonging to stigmatized groups will find themselves at the opposite end of a pointed stick. Imagine, if you will, this stick pointed at your eye. The assailant is unknown and unknowable, but you understand, vaguely, that this assailant isn’t a person. You never liked your eye; it’s lazy with heavy cataracts and you would prefer if it functioned normally. Still, it’s a part of you, and you’d rather keep it than have the stick thrust forward; the pain and potential further damage isn’t worth it. If you try to bat it away, the crowd that has now formed will cry out “what’s the matter with you? Goodness gracious, it’s just a stick!” You have the feeling that explaining that your eye doesn’t deserve to be stabbed won’t do much either. Ugly prose is just one of the many ways of trying to get to the heart of the issue, and this time the issue is about, in a roundabout way, mental illness in video games. The scientific world has made leaps and bounds in the past century concerning the understanding of mental illness; in a few short years we have progressed from electroshocking homosexuals to using computerized imagery to track blood flow in various areas of the brain to isolate variations between mentally ill and “neurotypical” people. Now that science has made some semblance of progress, there is a waiting game left for culture’s role in perpetuating harmful stereotypes about mental illness.
In Patrick Lindsey’s article “Gaming’s favorite villain is mental illness,” he says “Developers perpetuate the societal disparity that breeds harmful stigma when they resort to generic, undefined, almost pseudo-mystical “insanity.” It’s a brush-off and a hand-wave, painting mental illness as a magical black box we can neither see into nor ever hope to understand, rather than as a condition that real human people with brains and feelings and mortgages live with on a daily basis” (Lindsey p.7). He has had the insight to recognize that even in cases where a mentally ill person is not a cut and dry villain, there is an element of mysticism in the way a very vague sense of “insanity’ is portrayed. This is not to say it’s completely harmful; auditory and visual hallucinations and other psychotic symptoms can be very common in many illnesses, including schizophrenia and even anxiety and some kinds of depression. I find there to be an issue, though, when this experience is dumbed down to a general “insanity” level. What on earth these games consider to be insanity is anyone’s guess, but I suppose the less sensational aspects of mental illness, such as everything aside from hallucinations, would make for a particularly thrilling adventure. Still, I don’t think layman’s guide to insanity is ideal either.
Horror games struggle on this front. If it’s not an “insanity” meter it’s sure to be a bloody mess of a man in a straight jacket running towards you or jumping out from corners à la Outlast and many, many others. However, this week’s presenting group and Patrick Lindsey have both clarified that all hope is not lost; some games, even in the horror genre, handle this topic incredibly well. Something that I had played that came up in class was The Town of Light, in which you play an adult woman revisiting the asylum where she was kept as a girl. The narrative is achieved mostly through walking around the asylum and discovering things that help Renee piece together fractured memories of trauma. Another that has been on my mind, and was mentioned in Lindsey’s article, was The Cat Lady. Here, it is the player’s duty to guide the character Susan through the world in a way that helps others and punishes the senselessly cruel. Sometimes it is horrible and debilitating to be taking control of the depressed and suicidal Susan, who inhabits a fearsome and drab world, but that’s exactly what was intended. In both these games, the horror is not in the mental state of the victim and what they may or may not do; the horror is in the world that abuses them and many others.
In Lindsey’s words, these games “serve as a window into what living with mental illness is like from the perspective of those who suffer from it. They attempt to actually invoke empathy rather than discourage it, and to remind players that mental illness is as real as it is severe” (p. 28). While the “window” may be more or less accurate depending on the depth of research and the developers, the important thing is that these cultural depictions are unwavering and frank about the true horror of mental illness. 10% of the population is living with a diagnosed mental illness, and I consider this number to be an understatement of the true value. Diagnosis in and of itself is a costly and time consuming endeavor, and our parameters for diagnoses sometimes are, in my opinion, arbitrary nonsense, which is the cost of mental illness not even having a clear cut definition. That aside, there are more people struggling with mental illness than we think or can possibly know, so to continue on with stigmatization for shock value is doing a disservice to every person on the planet. It will take a long time until cultural representations are able to go out on a limb and add something to the conversation, but the fact we even have the privilege of playing games with a mentally ill protagonist that we suffer with is evidence that perhaps soon we can open this up and stop speaking in hushed tones.
