How Shonda Rhimes taught me to empathize with King George III
And other perspectives on mental illness in stories
My relationship with patriotism has always been a wee bit mixed.
I don’t get tears in my eyes at the pledge of allegiance or the national anthem. (Or for Kentucky folks, “My Old Kentucky Home.”) But stories and documents from the American Revolution really do get me in the feels.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Paul Revere, every time I read it to my kids.
The previously annual Fourth of July reading on NPR of the Declaration of Independence, inclusive of the list of grievances. (They paused in 2022 to examine its history. By then I was working 100% remote with no commute and didn’t notice they had stopped.)
Stories of spy rings that included women, as well as freed and enslaved Black men and women.
Hamilton.
So it surprised me that after four decades of living with an almost equally mixed view of mental illness, Shonda Rhimes finally taught me empathy for King George III.
My mom lived with schizophrenia her whole adult life, and that impacted her children in some major ways.
Now, I was vaguely aware of King George’s mental illness. I appreciated the double meaning in “You’ll be back,” and the way the song fought stigma by talking about it in the form of an upbeat, classic-Broadway-style tune. But I never bothered to find out more about his story. Because it was King George III of the 27 grievances.
Then I watched Queen Charlotte, the latest Bridgerton story from Shondaland.
King George’s mental health treatments, from the inhumane to the humane
In the Netflix series, the wider Bridgerton world is set during the reign of King George III, but with a twist: instead of being enslaved, Africans immigrated and joined the ranks of the nobility and royalty. Racism is still in high effect. The writers don’t fully explain the backstory. But it sets up a viewing experience that is full of anything-is-possible energy, while also acknowledging the awful realities of history.
Queen Charlotte is a prequel. We discover the story of Charlotte and farmer George from their wedding day. It’s both personal and a level removed from personal because the characters are treated as titles more than people. (Which provides a whole other meta layer when you compare it to modern British royalty.)
India Amartiefio as young Charlotte and Corey Mylchreest as young George are marvels. Their performances invoke a sense of vulnerability, impossible situations, and somehow still hope.
But the telling of their story also uses that blend to emphasize the terrible tragedy of King George III existing in a time when mental illness was stigmatized, shamed, and punished. His illness is a state secret kept from Parliament, and even initially his wife. The treatments he received amounted to torture.
When you love someone who lives with schizophrenia and you watch a depiction of paranoid hallucinations, it’s like watching highlight reels of your memories. That makes the treatment scenes feel personal in the most gut wrenching way possible. My feelings were boiling inside of me and I clenched my fists every time that terrible doctor came on screen.
At the same time, I’m heartened because the more personal, accessible stories are told about people with mental illness, the more people will develop understanding and empathy.
I now empathize with King George III and Queen Charlotte in ways I never thought possible. And now I’m also contemplating the previously unimaginable: reading a biography of the king who featured so prominently in the Declaration of Independence.
Cool, but what about all of the other ways mental illness is represented?
There’s something more to this. One of my former colleagues, Sean Daniels, wrote an amazing, on point post for Salon about the power of the arts to conquer the addiction crisis. When I shared it on LinkedIn someone commented to ask me if there were any movies that address recovery. I don’t think there are many that do this well, which was Sean’s point. There need to be.
And it reminded me that I had the first part of this blog post already written down but not published several months ago. (Life moves pretty fast, and if you’re trying to navigate your kids’ school system having a bus transportation disaster and staggered start times wreaking havoc on everyone’s schedules you can miss it.)
There aren’t enough positive examples of people living with illnesses that are stigmatized. That includes addiction, which I am not qualified to speak about. (You should follow Sean.) And it includes mental illness, which has impacted every moment of my life. (I’m still not qualified from the perspective of treatment so if that’s what you’re looking for check out places like NAMI.)
Mental illness is really frigging hard. It’s hard on the person living with it. It’s hard on their families and friends, who are also impacted by it, and in essence are also living with it.
Because of my mom, I have devoured examples of people’s personal experiences with mental illness. It’s often ugly and heartbreaking stuff. But it’s important that these stories are told.
As I did the exercise to think about examples of mental illness in art, these were the movies and plays that popped into my head, and my thoughts on how mental illness is represented in them. I’m specifically skipping movies that depict the criminally insane, because nope.
That feeling when your Mom has something in common with a Nobel Prize winner …
A Beautiful Mind is the movie that always, always comes to mind when I think about mental illness in art. It’s one of the truest things I’ve seen to represent what someone who is paranoid schizophrenic goes through. Obvs my Mom was not a mathematical genius and didn’t invent game theory. But the rest of it …
Hearing voices and imagining it’s a real person and rationalizing who that is? Check.
Spinning a narrative and obsessing that bad people in that narrative are going to hurt you and your family? Check.
Importantly, at the same time managing to be incredibly smart, not prone to violence, and able to have rational conversations about many things you care deeply about? Check.
Also likely to randomly say something that’s seriously bananas mid-conversation, like John Kerry’s secret service detail are following you? Check.
“Crazy” and genius are not interchangeable words, people.
Proof was originally a play, and was later adapted into a movie, I’ve never seen the movie, but have read the play and watched a stunning production at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, RI, while I was interning there. It’s a beautiful study in relationships: father-daughter, sisters, mentor-mentee, possible romance. And it won a Pulitzer Prize.
I both love and hate how this play portrays mental illness. A Beautiful Mind manages to avoid the “crazy genius” trope, but Proof dips its toes into it over and over. It doesn’t necessarily equate genius and mental illness, but it comes awfully damn close.
Mental illness is not romantic, except when it’s part of a romance.
My mother at various points was diagnosed as bipolar, paranoid schizophrenic, and manic depressive. Mr. Jones is the latter. Because this is a romance, I think it tends to romanticize what happens with manic depression. But I always felt like there was a lot to the way Richard Gere portrays the manic episodes.
From the observer point of view a manic episode appears to be larger than life and the level of non-stop energy that lights a fire under the most basic activities like speaking can be frightening. It feels uncontrolled and uncontrollable to watch. (And for what it’s worth, I think it often felt that way to my mother as she experienced them. She hated the side effects of her medication, but she also did not like the manic episodes.)
I did not live with my mother after the age of six. I did not see her in-person between the ages of eight and eighteen. But, except for a period of a year or so when she was homeless, my Mom both called and wrote letters weekly. I knew her voice and its rhythms like my favorite alternative songs. When she was going through a manic episode the energy traveling through the phone crackled and scared the shit out of me.
Side Note: A 2019 movie by the same name is also worth watching, and gives you a sense of the horrors Ukraine went through during Soviet rule.
Resenting mental illness has a funny way of turning into guilt.
All Hail Hurricane Gordo by Carly Mensch premiered in the Humana Festival of New American Plays, and was directed by Sean when we both still worked at Actors Theatre of Louisville in 2008.
I remember reading the script and finding so many things relatable about what it’s like to have a close family member with a mental illness. [To be clear it’s never really revealed what is going on with Gordo.] Watching the play brought so many things into stark reality. The guilt of being frustrated by a family member’s mental illness was chief among them, and I was processing a lot of feelings while sitting in the audience.
Queen Charlotte models how to meet people where they are.
You know, all the stuff in the first part of this post. But I’ll also add the way it portrays Queen Charlotte’s feelings are heartbreaking to me as well because I recognize pieces of myself and my family. You can love someone so much and hate the illness and what it’s doing to them. And you can also resent the way the person is acting — even though you know they can’t control it. That’s the awful truth.
But you also figure out ways to meet them where they are. Charlotte crawls under the bed and lays down next to George to share the news of their son expecting their future grandchild (Queen Victoria!). It’s not convenient or easy, and it’s likely to be misunderstood by other people. But it means a lot to the person with mental illness who cannot overcome a blocker.
Who knew I had something in common with two members of English royalty?
It wasn’t until season three of The Crown that I realized this. And it completely turned around my ability to empathize with Prince Philip. He’s mostly a jerk. Then season three, episode 4 had tears rolling down my cheeks.
There was a kid who was not much older than me when I experienced the same thing: watching your mom be taken away from you to a mental hospital. In case you’re wondering, that is a super traumatic experience for both the child and the parent.
The movie that I’m afraid to watch because it hits too close too home.
I have been waiting to watch Infinitely Polar Bear when I can do it by myself and am feeling up to it. It’s about a father who has bipolar disorder who needs to “step up” and be more present for his kids when his wife has a work commitment. They refer to his illness as “infinitely polar bear” because they are young kids and don’t understand what bipolar disorder is.
I was about 3 when my mom’s paranoid schizophrenia started flaring up in really disturbing ways. I had no clue what was going on until I was older but by older I mean 5 or 6. I fully expect to sob cry while watching most of this movie because of how close to home it hits.
Mental hospitals are not nice places, even when they aren’t all bad.
Girl, Interrupted is based on a memoir of the same name by Susanna Kaysen, and I read the book in college or shortly thereafter. I watched the movie with my husband, I think before we were married. A bit into the film he commented that the mental hospital as depicted in the movie seemed like a nice place. I broke down crying because all I could think about was the state institution in New York where I visited my Mom and how awful it was. It was an older building with terrible fluorescent lights, and you could hear people shouting curses, moaning, and even screaming in the surrounding rooms.
It’s not to say that all mental institutions are awful. But I do think most movies depict them in either a very superficial way that does not begin to paint the picture of how horrible and depressing they are, or in an over the top Arkham Asylum kind of way.
Something you should know about the toll mental illness takes …
Speaking of terrible mental health institutions … One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest makes my blood boil about lobotomies. But it also surfaces something that may not be well understood about the toll mental illness (and treatments for it) takes on the human body. Everyone in the movie is worn down and at their limits, for good reason.
My mother died of sudden cardiac arrest at not quite 65. In the grand scheme of things 65 is pretty young to die. Because she was found in her apartment by a friend, a full autopsy was automatically required by New York state law. I spoke with the medical examiner, who was very kind. He explained that they did discover she had cardiomegaly (enlarged heart). We talked about her history of mental illness, and that she had been on and off psychotherapy drugs her entire adult life. He shared a hard truth with me.
Most people with severe mental illness do not live long lives. (John Nash living to 86 was super impressive.)
It’s not necessarily officially known why. But I have to imagine the stress it puts on someone’s body is huge. Paranoid schizophrenia in particular can cause feelings of fear that may seem unreasonable to you and I, but are excruciatingly real to the person experiencing delusions. Add to that who knows what treatments and drugs my Mom received in the 70s and 80s. I’m honestly surprised she lived as long as she did. So it goes.
Let’s have more relatable stories about mental illness, please and thank you.
I loved The Silver Linings Playbook so much because it felt quirky and real. And let’s be real. Not everyone with a severe mental illness invents game theory like John Nash. Most people are living “ordinary” lives and struggling with the day to day whether they are mentally ill or not.
This movie juxtaposes the main character’s bipolar disorder and how it manifests against the obsessive nature of Philadelphia Eagles fans. So there’s a lot of relatability here that I think normalizes mental illness in a way I’d like to see more of. There’s also a huge amount of reducing stigma by having characters start to talk more openly about their mental illness and model families trying to psychologically support loved ones.
Relapses are part of the healing process.
Benny & Joon is the most hopeful story to me. In a lot of ways I think of mental illnesses like manic depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder the same way I think of conditions like ADHD or autism. There’s a really wide spectrum. Some people are able to make adjustments and live full lives while also experiencing mental illness. But it’s not a unicorns and rainbows thing.
As Sean Daniels pointed out in his other recent OpEd about Matthew Perry for the LA Times, relapses happen, and that can and should be treated as part of the healing process. Relapses is an interesting way to think about the cycles of mental illness.
People with severe mental illness often go through periods where the symptoms quiet, and they are able to live relatively “normal” lives. And then everything can spiral out of control as the symptoms come back with a vengeance. Many things can trigger this. In Benny & Joon, Joon is starting a rare romantic relationship and her brother speaks in anger that is rooted in his concern for her and fears about what will happen. My mom went through cycles every time she went off her meds.
Side Note: The opening scene set to “I’m Going to Be (500 Miles)” is beautiful.
Understanding what it’s like inside someone’s head.
Movies are mostly voyeuristic: you’re watching someone’s story. Books often thrust you into the story with first person narrative. So Valencia and Valentine was my first real window into a bit of what it must have been like inside my mother’s head.
My mother did not have obsessive compulsive disorder. But I still felt the way the book unfurled how mental illness can play out within an internal monologue was revelatory (as were some plot twists I won’t spoil). It made me appreciate so much more how hard my mother’s life with her illness must have been.
Let’s tell more stories.
If we want mental illness to be treated and something people can live with, then we need to stop stigma. The quickest way to do that (and make more people comfortable openly talking about mental illness) is to tell more stories that show realistic portrayals of people with mental illness. More stories means opening a window to more understanding and empathy. Let’s go.
