As the debate about Thorpe Park’s Asylum experiences is on the cusp of moving into its second week, I am beginning to reflect on the value of mental distress to a culture predicated on image and entertainment. I want to identify where in the political and social landscape those who have a mental illness can situate themselves and what value they have in contemporary culture.

 So what does society have to tell us about mental health and mental distress? The easiest barometer for public opinion is the media. The media can generate and assign value to individuals and situates them in a framework of input and output regarding acceptable behaviour: it creates fascination and fear. It organizes people into units of social and political currency. It differentiates the spaces where ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ people can operate. By creating polarized spaces, the media controls how we perceive difference. It determines function and functionality. And it sends mixed signals about mental ill health.

Mental health as entertainment, as a figure of horror and fascination is not new. What is new is the arena in which people can share and reflect upon mental illness as a set of frightening and unpredictable symptoms. Multi-channel television packages, social networking, instant transfer of information (and misinformation) is too fluid, too difficult to moderate. Everything is ‘out there’ for all eyes to see and all minds to be influenced by an increasingly muddied culture.

There is a gross voyeurism in contemporary culture. A voyeurism that often masks itself in the rhetoric of inclusion and universality. But choosing to make an issue of mental health, although admirable inasmuch as it raises awareness, highlights the schism between the ‘well’ and the ‘sick’. Just as making an ‘issue’ out of the traveller community in such programmes as My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, explores an interesting and important community through the lens of an almost base assumption that ‘they’ are different from ‘us’. Perhaps I am being less than charitable, but when I see or hear of a programme where a character has a mental illness my heart sinks. My heart sinks because I feel a sense of dread about public reaction. Should I feel grateful that Eastenders gave a voice and a face to Bipolar Disorder? Does the BBC think that tokenism is permissible if they have grander aspirations to educate and inform the general public about mental illness? Should I feel proud to see Carrie Mathison launch from one erratic state to another because she has such a gift for routing out terrorists and unearthing terrorist threats to her Homeland? Quite frankly, I often feel a sense of suffocation when watching portrayals of mental illness because I too am part of the problem. I too have assigned a unit of entertainment value to the depiction of symptoms rather than people. I want to see it. I crave the opportunity to live or relive the torment of mental distress. It is precisely because of its ‘otherness’ that I want to see it. Even if this ‘otherness’ lies within me also.

The media instructs the movement of entertainment through genre and exposure; it moves voyeurism into all spaces of social and cultural life.  It fuels the interest and disinterests of the public. It creates trends. But where trends exist so too do spaces where voices can talk with each other anonymously. The social capital of distress is easily observed on social networking sites. If the BBC claims altruism and public service when depicting mental illness both in a fictional setting and through documentary, it cannot control the public’s reaction to these representations of mental illness. The ‘chatter’ on sites such as Facebook and Twitter reveal more about public attitudes to mental health than the programmes themselves. Only today it took me less than two seconds to find a comment under #Homeland on twitter that demonstrates the disconnect between education and entertainment: ‘Kerry matheson is batshit crazy, and I dig it #homeland’ It is much better to be entertained than it is to reflect on the struggles and the obstacles of others. When I see Carrie Mathison, I am impressed by Clare Danes’ attention to detail, but I also recognise the unit of value that her character serves within the interplay of truth and fiction. She is captivating and she is flawed and this is extremely engaging. I am complicit.

So why was I so surprised when Thorpe Park chose to appropriate this charismatic distress? I am not surprised because ‘surprise’ does not begin to express the furious disappointment I feel. And this is not simply a disappointment with Merlin/Thorpe Park; I am disappointed in us as a society because we allow and create demand. We have assigned intrinsic value to distress as a component of entertainment. We trade in assets of distress. The media intensifies the rate of transaction of these assets. We live under the illusion of a moderated, regulated space, but where are the real checks and balances? I am thankful to Mind, Time to Change and the courageous bloggers who do step into the social marketplace and demand truth and honesty; they underscore the moral imperative incumbent on a society to represent and support its citizens fairly. But these entities and people cannot remove the impulse to trade in distress, distress as a cultural cornerstone. We cannot reconfigure our social spaces whist our impulse to be entertained overrides our desire for truth and representation.

But it doesn’t mean the bastards should win.