Health

How 'Mad' Are You? tries to be sensitive about mental illness. So why does it make me squirm? | Fiona Wright


The single most helpful thing I ever did for my mental health was stop trying to pass as “normal”.

I stopped trying to do the things that people around me can do without thinking – go out for dinner, say, or take a slice of the birthday cake being passed around the office – that make me so anxious that my brain starts to stutter, or my chest clamps up, or I’m suddenly unable to properly breathe. I stopped trying and failing to do these things, and my life suddenly became so much less complicated. My illness stopped being so difficult to live alongside.

So, if a person like me were to appear on a show like How ‘Mad’ Are You?, the gig would be up pretty quickly. And this is where my discomfort with it lies.

How ‘Mad’ Are You? bills itself as a social experiment, where 10 people spend five days together in one house, and complete a series of challenges and psychological tests, overseen by a team of psychiatric experts. Five have a history of mental illness, five do not, and the experts are tasked with sorting out precisely who is who.

A still from the two-part SBS TV show How ‘Mad’ Are You? which examines the presentation of mental illness in ordinary Australians.



The participants of How ‘Mad’ Are You? Photograph: SBS

The show is doing everything it can to be sensitive. The psychiatric professionals are always incredibly careful with their language – they say things like “in your background” or “at one time you may have had a diagnosis”. They repeat that there’s “a fine line” between illness and health, between personality and pathology. They acknowledge the role that social factors like gender, race and sexuality can have on mental health. They talk about how mental illness can happen to anyone, and how “you just can’t tell” if someone is unwell by the way they look or behave.

Indeed, they only correctly identify one participant – the person with a history of anorexia nervosa, the same illness I’ve been living with for something like 15 years now – after a scientific test that measures unconscious movements of the eye, a measure far more quantitative than any of other activities and tests. (I had this person pegged much earlier, for speaking words that I had also learned in therapy).

Everyone else passes for “normal”. Or at least for showing traits of a different illness than the one they actually have or have had.

But when the big reveal happens, when the five with a history of illness “tell their story”, as one psychiatrist puts it, the responses from the panel had me squirming. “You’ve done superbly,” one says, and “you’re amazing”. “I want to pin a medal on those therapists,” says another. And then, “you’re an inspiration” and “you’re a star”.

A still from the two-part SBS TV show How ‘Mad’ Are You? which examines the presentation of mental illness in ordinary Australians.



Participants complete a series of challenges and psychological tests, overseen by a team of psychiatric experts. Photograph: Jackson Finter/SBS

I can’t deny that this is true – it is remarkable that these people have recovered from their illnesses, or have them under enough control that they no longer affect their way of being in the world. And these things – recovery, control – don’t happen without a lot of hard work, a lot of effort and pain, and a lot of expert guidance (to say nothing of expense), but they don’t happen for all of us.

And I don’t know where this kind of language – amazing! inspiring! – and this kind of narrative leaves those of us who don’t get better, who don’t become “indistinguishable”, no matter how hard we try.

I do know that I spent a long time feeling like I’d “failed” because I wasn’t able to cross back over that fine line. That I somehow wasn’t trying hard enough, or didn’t want it badly enough. That not getting better was somehow my fault.

“It’s not a life sentence,” so many of the participants say. Except that it very often is, and that’s also OK.

I do appreciate the frankness with which How ‘Mad’ Are You?’ talks about mental illness, the diversity of its participants, the work that it is trying to do around destigmatising conditions that are less understood, less frequently spoken about – like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anorexia – rather than only those for which a great deal of this work has already been done, like anxiety and depression. I do appreciate what it’s trying to say about the invisibility of suffering and of illness. This is an incredibly important conversation. I just wish it were handled here with more nuance, more of an understanding that not all of us are able to – as one psychiatrist so breezily puts it – “dip back out of the extremes”.

How ‘Mad’ Are You? is showing on SBS on Thursday at 8.30pm



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