How about “Mentalnormativity” ?

            Most LGBTQ people know that The American Psychological Association once classified Homosexuality as a mental disorder and that in 1986 it was removed completely. While the gay community celebrated this, very few realized that there would now be a stigma against mental disorders. Many LGBTQ people have heard about the “It Gets Better” Project and know that there is a high rate of depression and suicide in gay teens.  In my last post I discussed how depression and suicide last well into adult LGBTQ lives and now I will discuss how obvious mental health issues are ignored in the gay community by looking at the TV show The L Word.

            The L Word was the most popular lesbian themed show at its time and you will be hard pressed to find a lesbian who hasn’t seen at least one episode.  Jenny starts off being portrayed as a straight girl who comes out as bi and then gay. As the season progresses we begin to understand that she has a history of abuse and is very self-destructive.  She is impulsive, narcissistic, manipulative and selfish. She has relatively severe manic and depressive swings, all of which point to Borderline Personality Disorder or at the very least Bipolar Disorder.  All of these other characters who claim to be her friend at some point or another seem to have no deep concerns for her lack of mental stability. Even if they didn’t understand what was wrong with her, in season 2 and 3, she does start self-harming and ends u sent to a psychiatric ward. So how is it possible that, by season 6, every one of them is angry enough to have killed her? We are shown through season 6 all the different things Jenny has done that make her a bad person, but any of them can be contributed to her state of mental health. Her life falls apart, repeatedly, and these other women have no sympathy for her. No one questions her motivations, they are simply angry.  It’s only been 3 years since she was in a psychiatric ward but everyone seems to have forgotten all about that.

            Of course, this is television; it’s not real life. It’s dramatized; most of us do not have a bunch of friends who all have equal reasons to want you dead.  However the ignorance of mental health in the gay community is not dramatized at all.  Rich notes lesbianism -often includes “role playing, self-hatred, breakdown, alcoholism, suicide and intra-women violence” but “we romanticize at our peril what it means to love and act against the grain”  (Rich, 192). We focus on the wonderful aspect of being gay and different, but do not acknowledge the pain and suffering associated with it.  The “It Gets Better” project constantly tells teens that they “may be depressed now” but when they get older and move out and get away from homophobic friends/classmates/teachers/parents/churches, all their depression and sadness will magically go away.  They will be more normal and happy once again.  It’s “the very notion of a normal psyche which is in fact part of the West’s own heterosexual family romance- a narrative space that relies on the normalized, even if perverse, domestic space of desire supposedly common in the West” (Puar/Rai, 124). Even if you are going to be “different” and be gay, you still must be “normal” and “Western” by being psychologically sane.

            It’s not difficult to understand why this has happened in the LGBTQ community. For so long we were associated with “mental disease” that it seems relatively natural to pull away from being associated with a mental disorder. Lesbians, like Jenny, which psychological disorders are “giving gays a bad name” or “making it look like the homophobes are right; we really are crazy”.  This doesn’t even touch on the issue of the stigmatization of mental health disorders in Western Society at large. By rejecting those who are “disabled”, “mentally diseased”, “colored” or any other form of different, the LGBTQ community is tying itself to the idea of heteronormativity. For even if you are gay and abnormal, you still must be normal in every other way, and then society will mostly accept you. Maybe we need to introduce the concept of mentalnormativity, the assumption that everyone is mentally healthy. The L Word, although dramatized, is the perfect example of how the LGBTQ community assumes everyone is mentally healthy and does not recognize the intersectionality struggles of being gay and having a mental disorder. Personally, I believe Jenny killed herself because of her mental disorders, but that possibility that was over looked by even the show, since hey, gay adults don’t have mental disorder, right?

The L Word.  Ilene Chaiken. Showtime. 2004-2009. Television. 

Puar, Jasbir. “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots” in Social Text 72 Vol. 20 No. 3, Fall 2002.

Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”  Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature. Ed. George Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmermann. New York: modern Language Association, 1995.