Hollywood Speaks Up for Children’s Mental Health

On Thursday and Sunday, PBS stations in the New York City metropolitan area will air a Metrofocus episode including clips from our 2014 Speak Up for Kids event A Leading Role: How TV and Film Can Change Kids’ Lives. You can check out the PBS presentation at these times and locations:

Thurs. 12/11 @ 7 p.m. on WLIW21 http://www.wliw.org/

Thurs. 12/11 @ 10:30 p.m. on NJTV http://www.njtvonline.org/

Sun. 12/14 @ 7 p.m. on THIRTEEN http://www.thirteen.org/

We wrote this blog about the original event:

Last May in Los Angeles as part of Speak Up for Kids, producer Brian Grazer convened a panel of Hollywood leaders to discuss the depiction of mental illness in the media, and it highlighted the fascinating union of lived experience and pure entertainment that our best storytellers bring to the screen. In addition to Mr. Grazer, the panelists were director David O. Russell, TV showrunner Jason Katims, and Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos.

As moderator Willow Bay pointed out, contrary to her journalistic training to be “very careful about my gender biases,” these men are “fathers using their voice.” The fact that dads are speaking up to “advocate on behalf of children and families struggling with these issues, to give a voice, a face, to give a story to the challenges of mental health,” she continued, “is very well worth noting.”

And the whole conversation is well worth watching, which I encourage you to do so here. But if there is one takeaway for me, it’s a combination of Russell’s response to an audience member’s question and something Sarandos said earlier in the event. The question: will it take “more sharing of stories” to address the stigma of mental illness? Mind you, Katims and Grazer have sons with Asperger’s syndrome, and Russell’s son has bipolar disorder. Yes, they agreed, visibility will reduce the shame. But Russell hit home just how damaging that shame is: it interferes with people being “responsible for themselves and their own behavior.”

He related this to the main character in his film Silver Linings Playbook. “Because of the stigma he didn’t want to take his medication. And that’s a big struggle for a lot of people.” Russell’s son also has behavioral plans to manage his symptoms. “Real simple—that’s the driving manual for my son’s life, his future. And when he masters that, he can go, just like someone who takes insulin everyday.”

But how do we get to the widespread understanding that can normalize chronic mental illness to the extent that symptoms and treatments alike are acceptable—so that they can be owned and managed without shame by our sons and daughters? Unsurprisingly, the panel put faith in the screen. Sarandos put it in particularly honest terms.

“When I was a kid, we learned almost everything in high school,” he said. “Now, kids learn almost everything on television.” That’s not a bad thing for Sarandos, who has high school kids of his own. “When I was in high school, the kids with disabilities were corralled off somewhere else, we never saw them, they had a different lunch hour. We’d pass them like this,” he said, miming a quick glimpse in the hallway, “who was that?” I remember the same thing when I was in elementary school. “There was no opportunity to get to know them, their stories, their lives.”

So Sarandos is happy that media is opening its eyes to the marginalized and stigmatized—because the younger generation is watching. And why wouldn’t they be? “Parenthood is a great show,” he concluded. “Silver Linings Playbook, you can’t even talk about it without laughing.”