Handling Mental Illness In Horror

Handling Mental Illness In Horror by Christopher J. Ferguson

Certain topics and locations are inherently creepy and scary.  Nunneries, graveyards, orphanages (ahem)…but also asylums.  It’s politically incorrect to say, but we’re naturally frightened of severe mental illness…and for an understandable reason.  Severe mental illnesses do elevate violence risk by roughly three to five times (despite what you might have heard from activists). And historic asylums were often dank, difficult places.

In addition to being an author, I’m a clinical psychologist and psychology professor.  Of course, most mentally ill people don’t commit violent crimes.  To be fair, this observation depends on what we mean by “mental illness”. Nobody thinks someone with a spider phobia is particularly at risk for violence (except maybe against spiders).  But major mental illnesses such as schizophrenia do increase violence risk, even as they also raise a person’s risk of being a victim of violence (often at the hands of another mentally ill person), homelessness, or suicide.  Today, most mental hospitals in developed nations are safe, clean, well-run places, not the horror shows of, say, Shutter Island.

I’m generally not an advocate for political correctness or even a rigid adherence to strict accuracy. 

Split, for instance, is a great movie even if it’s not literally true that multiple personality disorder involves multiple people or identities living in one head (it doesn’t).  Multiple personality disorder is actually a controversial diagnosis. And it’s not even clear it really exists (as opposed to being something faked by individuals who have a different attention-seeking disorder such as borderline personality disorder).  It shows up in movies, books, and video games far more often than it appears in real life (in my professional career I’ve never met anyone with a legitimate multiple personality disorder).

So asylums are scary places, yet our societal fear of them probably has created more problems than they fixed.  For instance, the portrayal of asylums in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest may have contributed to the deinstitutionalization movement. Though how much media impacts people’s opinions as opposed to merely reflecting them remains an open debate.  The deinstitutionalization movement closed down many asylums. With the expectation many mentally ill people would return to productive society once on medication.  Instead, it led to vast homelessness problems in the US and other developed nations. Contrary to some beliefs, homelessness rates for the US and other developed nations are not all that different.

I don’t think authors should avoid these topics in some self-censorious pursuit of political correctness. 

There are good reasons we are afraid of asylums and, to be frank, there are good reasons we are afraid of people with severe mental illnesses.  At the same time, it can be helpful to remember the human being behind the mental illness.  No one chooses to have schizophrenia and people are not merely cardboard cutouts of various diagnoses.

Some of the best books I’ve read have explored the horrors of various mental illnesses themselves.  I remember reading one (the title is now lost to my foggy memory…it might have been Skull Session but may be misremembering). That focused on Tourette’s Syndrome and, in the context of excellent horror, also brought compassion to the disorder.  And I don’t mind more Silence of the Lambs books of lunatics in the asylum. But more thoughtful explorations of mental illness would also be welcome.

I hope you’ve enjoyed and maybe been inspired by my thoughts on mental illness in horror fiction. 

Even better if you’re inspired to grab a copy of my newly released YA gothic horror novel The Secrets of Grimoire Manor. Which focuses on ghosts in that other classic horror setting…an old orphanage.  

The Secrets of Grimoire Manor

At fourteen, Nevine Turner thought foster care was the worst thing in the world, but she learned better when she was sent to the Grimoire Manor for Orphaned Girls.  In The Secrets of Grimoire Manor, Nevine discovers that Grimoire Manor is filled with cranky teachers, abandoned attics and four generations worth of anguished and tortured Grimoire family souls haunting their former home.  Nevine is barely able to settle in before she is mysteriously whisked to the city of Prague in the year 1888.  There she is saved from a murderous ghoul by Xanthae Halruaa, an eccentric physicist and ghost-hunter.  From Xanthae, Nevine learns the trade of ghost-hunting.  Together they work out the secrets of the haunting of Grimoire Manor, the Ghoul of Prague, and the mysterious connections between the two that force Nevine to flip between Grimoire Manor and Prague when she sleeps.

 

Christopher J. Ferguson

Christopher J. Ferguson is a clinical psychologist and psychology professor at Stetson University in Florida.  His new novel The Secrets of Grimoire Manor was just released this July, He has also written the novels Fury (a fantasy novel set in the Greek dark ages) and Suicide Kings (a mystery novel set in Renaissance Florence).  He has also written the non-fiction books How Madness Shaped History, Catastrophe! How Psychology Explains Why Good People Make Bad Situations Worse and Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games is Wrong.  He lives in Orlando, FL with his wife and son.

WEBSITE LINKS

The Secrets of Grimoire Manor: on Amazon

Grimoire Manor Substack (where I talk horror, science, Dungeons and Dragons, etc):

Website

Twitter: CJFerguson1111

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