Angela Merlo Presents: The Stigmas of Mental Illness in Fiction—PSYCHO

Hi. I'm Angela Merlo, author of the DEVIL'S LAKE series and the short story MOTHER which made TNT's top 35 list in their Horror Fiction Contest in 2016. The short story revolves around a teenage girl tormented by a vampire who feeds not on blood but on happiness. When she turns to her mother—who's faced such vampires in her own past—for help, the girl's plight triggers feelings of inadequacy and shame that the mother covers up by refusing to believe her.

Since the story began more as a reflection on my own self-perception during adolescence, I was rather shocked when people began asking me how my mother felt about it. "Were her feelings hurt?"

But in the time that's past since writing the piece, I've realized that the mother in the story is as much like her as I am like the girl. That is to say, its a dark reflection not just on us but on how mental illness stigma affected us. (Somethings that's perhaps clearer when I reflect on my mother's actual actions, though is less obvious in the story) The point is, no one wants to become the villain of a story. We all want our trials to turn into a hero's journey. And sometimes when that vision of ourselves is threatened, we can frantically cling to it in a manner that harms others.

The Stigmas of Mental Illness in Fiction—PSYCHO
WARNING: There will be spoilers to Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO

The film itself contains quite a fair portrayal of Disassociative Identity Disorder (previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder), a rare and controversial illness that mental health professionals still hold disagreements about. This is especially significant considering the film came out in 1960 and is thus limited to outdated Freudian psychological theory to explain Norman's actions. But contrary to the view that the film is merely a great scare at the expense of the mentally ill, the film is actually a pretty good reflection on the human condition.

For the sake of simplicity, I will be applying the current psychological theories of dissociation to Norman. I will not be diving into the possibility of it being an offshoot of Borderline Personality Disorder. While I don't think Norman's behavior contradicts the possibility of that view, I do think the inner world we're presented with refutes it. (For the record, I am not a mental health professional. I'm just an author with a degree in English and a tendency to over-research everything. BTW, I love literary criticism)

A Tale of Two Crimes

What the film presents us with are not one but two stories—two crimes that meet in the middle and parallel each other, Marion's theft of $40,000 ($400,000 if we account for inflation) and Norman's murder of Marion. Indeed, even the characters' names are near anagrams of each other, emphasizing that we are to reflect on the parallels between Marion's actions and Norman's. Each story ends with the character smiling into camera as a voiceover portrays their thoughts—thoughts that are their imaginings of other character's statements. Marion imagines a conversation between her boss and the man who brought in the $40,000. Norman's thoughts are that of his mother explaining why she "lied" to the police.

In both cases, the characters are dissociating from their own thoughts. As Marion imagines the conversation, she reacts to it with a subtle smile as if she were listening to it. Now, Marion is mentally healthy, so reflecting back on it, she would know that she never actually heard any such conversation. Norman, on the other hand, has pushed his dissociated thoughts so far from himself that he no longer acknowledges they are a part of his imagination. Like an actor applying the technique of method acting to his performance, he takes on the role of his mother, smiling as she would. His smile is an old woman, something strangely familiar—strange because it appears on a young masculine face. This strange familiarity is what Freud called 'the uncanny' and sometimes falls into theories about this uncanny valley humanoid androids and dolls can enter when they appear just a bit too human without actually looking human.

Stealing from Wikipedia: "The uncanny is the psychological experience of something as strangely familiar, rather than simply mysterious.This experience is accompanied by a discomforting effect and often leads to an outright rejection of the object." A Vsauce video, Why Are Things Creepy?, explains the effect as "an adaptive response to the ambiguity of threats from others. Creepy things are kind of a threat . . . maybe, but they're also kind of not. So our brains don't know what to do. Some parts respond with fear while other parts don't and they don't know why. So instead of achieving a typical fear response, we simply feel uneasy, creeped out."

But for as much as Norman creeps us out, what causes him to murder Marion is quite normal and has nothing to do with his mental illness however much we want to blame it on that. Just prior to the classic shower scene, Marion has dinner with Norman in his office. The conversation is actually a point of connection for them for a time (despite the excessive taxidermy). He explains his hobby, and Marion mainly is curious about all the time he has on his hands. At first, she only seems uncomfortable with him possibly discovering her crime.

https://youtu.be/I9mJ2oBONug

To what awareness Norman has of his mental condition is unclear (or perhaps inconsistent) in the film, but this scene sits us in relative safety. We aren't made to feel fearful of Norman yet. He has boyishly good looks and his mannerisms are easy-going. At most, we get a hint of his social isolation, perhaps the result of both social stigma and mental stigma, in addition to the emotional abuse he experienced by his mother who kept him isolated from the world.

The scene shifts its tone when mental illness is suggested, and we observe the effects of the social stigma on both characters. We watch as Norman goes through a series of feelings—sympathy for his 'mother's' illness, offense at Marion's lack of sympathy, frustrations with the stigma of mental illness, his fears of 1960s mental health practices, and so on. It's important to understand that there is both a social stigma and a self-stigma associated with mental illness. Both characters play out how these stigmas would realistically affect them, and the reality is, we're not just afraid of the mentally ill, we fear losing our minds, and losing our freedoms to a mental institution. 

https://youtu.be/Nv88ASiLmgk

Toward the end of this scene, Norman picks up on the fact that he's making Marion uncomfortable. He longs for the long-missed social connection and tries to undo the damage. This is where he tries to fake his emotional responses. Bad acting is rooted in the disconnect between the mind and body language. When we try to deliberately smile, it isn't as fast as when it springs from our sincere emotions and thought. And other people can read this on our mannerisms and facial expressions. That's why masks can be scary because suddenly you can't read them, this sense of "I don't know their true intentions" makes us afraid. When you have this unnatural delay, it makes you appear shady, as if you're trying to hide something. And it's this delay that makes Marion more uncomfortable. What is Norman hiding? Certainly, we may suspect the worst as Marion's behavior took on similar mannerisms when the police officer pulled her over. She was afraid of being caught for her shady business of stealing money.

But what he's hiding in this scene may be more simple and innocent despite his later actions in the film. Notice how he's realized in expressing his anger at how people have treated him has gone too far. It's frightening Marion, and as a lonely man with no social connections, he pulls back and tries to undo the damage to keep her company. From this point, his mannerisms come off as creepy because they're forced. His heavy breathing indicates his anxiety and hurt while he tries to come off as well-adjusted and friendly to preserve this glimpse of social connection he longs for. And this creeps her out further.

Then, he comes to the theme of the story, saying with a bit of anger, "We all go a little mad sometimes." And indeed, herein lies the point. Norman is mentally ill. But the persona of his mother—of Norma—actually is not. She is simply 'mad' (angry), and Norman's mental illness is a way of disassociating himself from those 'mad' feelings. Those mad, angry feelings he developed when his mother stopped giving him attention when she took on a lover led him to murder his mother and her lover. And this action traumatized him. It left him even more socially isolated and filled with thoughts over how bad he was, thoughts influenced by his mother's verbal abuse. She used anger to scare him into submission, to suppress 'bad' behavior. She never taught him how to deal with his emotions in a healthy manner. All he knows is repression, and it doesn't always work. That 'madness', those strong passionate feelings, will escape out of his control.

As such, he is mentally ill because of his violence. He is not violent because of his mental illness. And the fact that he deliberately put Marion in cabin 1 to peep on her, illustrates not superficial 'bad intentions', but the fact that he lacks confidence in his ability to form a social connection. He still invites her to dinner, but past experiences have taught him this doesn't work out. As such, that peephole in the parlor is his way to gain some connection with others, looking in on her world through the outside and allowing himself at least an imagined social and sexual encounter with him.

But both as he approaches his peephole and afterward, he seems filled with immense guilt. Now, the explanation given as to why the persona of his mother comes out in the film is very Freudian, filled with the idea that sons secretly want to murder their fathers to have sex with their mothers. Thus his relationship with his mother is portrayed as a bit weirdly sexual. If we remove the outdated Freudian psychology, I offer that his guilt is experienced as the echo of his mother's voice shaming him.

We get a hint over what this 'voice' says to him in a previous scene where he vocalizes an argument with his inner-mother.

Norma
I won't have you bring strange
young girls in for supper . . . 
by candlelight, I suppose, in the
cheap erotic fashion of young men
with cheap, erotic minds!

Norman
Mother, please . . .

Norma
And then what? After supper, music?
Whispers?

Norman
Mother, she's just a stranger . . .
hungry, and the weather is bad . . .

Norma
Mother, she's just a stranger!
As if men don't desire strangers, as 
if . . . oh, I refuse to speak of
disgusting things because they disgust me!

His guilt comes in the form of self-anger as his inner-mother scolds him for his actions. And so he does something quite ordinary, something that happens quite frequently in ordinary society. He redirects his guilt and blames the victim for his actions. His mental illness, though, gives him simply another level of disassociation from his feelings. First, he becomes convinced that this voice condemning him actually is his mother. In this persona, he is able to act out his redirected anger onto her. And thus, he is able to avoid the direct guilt of having committed the crime (It was mother, not me), as well as to to remove the guilt off his mother by blaming her illness (Mother is ill. She is mad. I don't hate her. I hate the illness).

What We Miss in His Name

Certainly, Norman succeeds at creeping us out. Hitchcock does well at foreshadowing his revelations, and thus we are able to point and say 'Oh! The signs were there! I just missed them." But neither strange hobbies, awkward social ticks, nor other traits Norman displays are definite warnings that a person will become violent. They simply put his character within the realm of the uncanny.

Norman is ill, but his feelings and motivations are normal. In fact, both he and his alternative personality, Norma, are motivated out of normal feelings. The crime is an impulsive act of passion.

The film actually is an attempt to help us reflect on our own prejudices against the mentally ill. In it, Hitchcock shows us how our prejudices—these insights we think we have, positive or negative, when we actually know very little—are rooted in the same psychology as mental illness. It is a coping mechanism to mentally shift the danger away from ourselves. It gives us the freedom to feel safe in some environments, to let our guard down, and isolate our anxieties onto whatever group of people we're stigmatizing. We aren't actually reacting to real threats. We are associating these small things with past experiences and learned perspectives. We isolate ourselves from those people as Norman isolates himself from the world. Its aim is to challenge our perspectives. Marion's crime isn't simply a device to allow a way for the story to discover Norman. It is to challenge us to recognize that violence (or crime) is a part of the human condition and can come from those we least expect.

As the film ends, we are presented with that scene of Norman smiling into the camera as the voiceover of his mother says the following, "Let them see what kind of person I am. I'm not even gonna swat that fly. I hope they are watching. They'll see. They'll see and they'll know, and they'll say, 'Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly.'"

And it is then we are supposed to recall the parallel scene with Marion's strange smile and a similar voice over. She imagines her boss saying, "A girl works for you for ten years; you trust her . . . I still can't believe it. It must be some kind of mystery." While meanwhile, she imagines another character speculating that the lack of signs that Marion would do such a thing are the result of premeditation. In fact, her theft—much like Norman's violence—was impulsive.

And as we then shift to the scene of Marion's car being pulled out of the lake, we hopefully recall the lack of warning in Marion's attack. The door to the bathroom didn't creek, there were no sounds of footsteps to be heard over the running water. While we see the shadow through the shower curtain, Marion doesn't. She's vulnerable, completely naked and defenseless when the shower curtain springs open, and then it's too late.

Don't believe me that the door doesn't creek? Check it out.

https://youtu.be/0WtDmbr9xyY

Thus, the film is intended to push us away from directing our fears to the victims of our social stigma. And for perhaps only a moment, we feel that deeper fear, that fear that gives us an even greater sense of the loss of control. We shift our focus back to ourselves—to humanity in general—and acknowledge that violence can come from those you'd least expect. Indeed, it can come without warning. But if we miss these clues and simply find Norman to be one of the scariest villains in cinema, we not only miss the point but fail to identify why it's so hard for other films that attempt to mimic PSYCHO's tropes still fail to scare us to the same degree.

Reducing Today's Stigmas

In recent years, there's been a lot said about improving the portrayal of the mentally ill in fiction to reduce stigma. Certainly, I think its an acceptable challenge, but something that may be more complicated than we appreciate. So I challenge you. How might we update and build off of Hitchcock's analysis? What new reflections do we have to offer? Are there some stigmas he didn't address? What about the other stereotypes and common tropes that don't involve the horror genre?

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I want to thank Kelly Anne Blount for hosting another Wattpad Block Party and inviting me to be featured again. Thank you so much for all the time and effort you put into hosting these.

And dear reader, if you enjoyed my analysis of Hitchcock's PSYCHO and enjoy fiction with psychological themes, I invite you to check out my work. You may enjoy MOTHER or the DEVIL'S LAKE series. You can find my on Wattpad .

https://youtu.be/9CTMh3ghDFE

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