I am no stranger to mental health struggles. I was diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety two years before my 30th birthday and have dealt with the ups and downs of that ever since—the struggle to get out of bed out of both an empty and unwavering inability to care and the fear of what would happen if I did, the weight of the future and the past on my shoulders, and the loneliness that often ensues even in a room crowded with friends.
The current system is designed to give people like me—or people dealing with much more severe mental illnesses—little to no real and significant help. We are turned to publicly funded psychotherapists that have waiting lists that last well into our golden years and forced to play fast and loose with our bodies when a new prescription is handed to us from across the tiny room we’re meant to spill our guts in. We are trapped in an endless loop of talking about what ails us, secretly knowing that even our shrink isn’t really listening. They’ve heard all before—probably a few times that day—and to those that don’t understand, we’re all the same. They are paid whether we get better or not. They take home their paycheque even if we don’t get over the mountain that stands in front of us, taunting us while we force ourselves to climb on two broken legs and with our entire lives on our shoulders.
The worst-case scenario of our society is perfectly portrayed in Joker, the new “superhero” film starring the ever-talented Joaquin Phoenix. In the film, Arthur Fleck sees himself released from a mental health facility and put into the care of a publicly funded state-run therapy course. He is prescribed medication and given the task of writing in a journal to help overcome his negative thoughts. As an aspiring clown with low-paying gigs and unsupportive co-workers, we see as he is tortured by the world and his own mind. We see him beaten down time and again by strangers in the street simply because they were bored. We see him try to care for his mother all the while trying to keep himself from slipping into the negative recesses of his mind. And we see him fail completely as his illness takes over. He is forgotten by the world, dismissed by the government-funded program after a pull of the budget and robbed of his much-needed medication because he can’t afford it. That’s when his true descent into madness really begins. He was sick, violent, and unable to find help in a society that pushed people like Fleck into the gutter so they simply didn’t have to look at them.
It’s hard to say if a fictional character who’s arc depends entirely on him succumbing to his illness would have fared differently if society hadn’t of kicked him while he was down, but it’s not hard to say that in the real world, he would have had a much better spot if the world around him had tried. We see Arthur Fleck as a monster and a murderer, which he is. But he was also just a man who couldn’t take the ugliness of society for one more minute. His mind could not handle the horrific world around him and so he began to make his own world in his mind where he could bend reality to suit what he’d like it to be, not just what it was. The dismissive jokes designed to make others laugh only poked at his already wounded state. The complete disregard for his existence snapped something in his brain. Today’s society reflects that all too well in its comfort with mockery and false success.
Joker takes a modern-day society and amplifies it to portray exactly what happens when the mentally ill get thrown by the wayside. People who suffer from mental illness don’t often graduate into violence, murder, and madness at the level of Arthur Fleck, but in today’s day and age, society has already graduated to that level of disregard. Human beings have lost their humanity, and in a world where salvation lay only within a community of individuals working together to make things better, it’s a slippery slope bordering on the brink of no return.
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