Stop watching “Hoarders”: Our lurid reality TV obsession with mental illness has crossed a line

www.salon.com|Rachel Kramer Bussel

For a long time, I actively avoided watching “Hoarders.” I am one, so I didn’t think I needed to see others engaging in my own vice. Plus, at the height of my hoarding, I had a feeling that I would approach the show only as a way to make myself feel like my hoarding wasn’t that bad compared to what I saw on my screen, even though I couldn’t even get through my apartment door without shoving it mightily to push some of the belongings littering my floor out of the way.

Now that my hoarding tendencies are far more under control, thanks in part to living with a partner who calls me on it when my stuff starts to spill out everywhere, I’ve let my curiosity take over. I wanted to find out: Is “Hoarders” actually helping the people it showcases, or is it simply reveling in their mental illness in order to court viewers?

We need to talk about Ben: Kylo Ren, “Star Wars” and the media narrative of the mentally ill school shooter

www.salon.com|Lauren Duca

Before Kylo Ren was a modern iteration of Darth Vader, he was Ben: the problem child of Leia Organa and Han Solo, who murdered a group of his Jedi trainee peers. On-screen in “The Force Awakens,” he’s all theatrical evil and Pantene-commercial hair, but it’s the off-screen arc that is the most disturbing and fascinating facet of the character. Zooming in on his sinister back story, Kylo Ren presents a sci-fi version of the “mentally ill” school shooter with whom we’ve become all too well acquainted in the news.

Nearly 9 percent of people with incomes below the poverty line (around $20,000 for a three-person family) said they suffered from “serious psychological distress.” That means that between 2009 and 2013, the years during which the survey was conducted, nearly one out of 10 of these people — and there are more than 40 million of them — felt debilitating levels of anxiety and depression. In contrast, barely more than 1 percent of those whose incomes exceeded the poverty line by four times or more said they felt similar mental anguish.

A new report from the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that women in every single age group are much more likely than men to suffer from serious psychological distress (SPD). So, the weight of systemic oppression is actually having effects on our brain chemistry, who would have even thought that was possible? The study also found that SPD puts people at greater risk for a number of medical conditions including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and heart disease.