Babadook Mental Illness Essay

From the stigma that Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho created to Jennifer Kent’s portrayal of depression in The Babadook, the horror genre has had a long history of portraying mental illness. Even dating back to the 1800’s, as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has been misappropriated as an example of bipolar disorder. The quality of this representation varies, as the examples show. Mental illnesses are often used to scare the audience and create stigma around disorders. It is necessary to examine how and why horror creators use mental illness to instill horror, and how this affects the mentally ill. By examining the horror genre through the lens of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, audiences will see how exactly

Misconceptions often minimize the illness's effects, reducing OCD down to hand washing or tidyness because one enjoys those actions. Similarly, intrusive thoughts have also been misunderstood. There are numerous online accounts of someone saying they spontaneously dyed their hair or bought a car because their “intrusive thoughts'' told them to. In reality, intrusive thoughts are unpleasant, distressing, and deal with topics such as harm or death, going against one’s morals or desires. The International OCD Foundation specifically describes OCD as a cycle of intrusive thoughts, images, or impulsives and behaviors, that can only be (temporarily) stopped by repetitive behaviors or thought patterns, also known as rituals. While most people have obsessive thoughts and behaviors, an OCD diagnosis can only be made if the obsessive-compulsive cycle is extreme and outside of one's control. OCD patients often know that these thoughts are illogical, but the fear, doubt, and belief that actions have to be done in a way that’s “just right” overpowers rational thought (“What is OCD?”). OCD is not a desire to be neat, but an upsetting cycle of thought patterns that take over and control one's