Web Letters | The Nation

Fiction and reality in ‘Homeland’

In your opening sentence you ask if it is fair to criticize Homeland for its tenuous relationship to reality—and the answer is no. As a person who works in nonfiction, it always irks me when people hold fiction to the same standards as nonfiction. Fiction is not realty—it is a place where we explore what-ifs. Nonfiction is where we explore what is.

I am a huge Carrie fan—as a fictional character. She is a woman, and I like seeing female leads. She has been diagnosed, and I like seeing a person diagnosed with a mental illness as something other than dangerous, violent, incapable of navigating reality and a victim, which is how people diagnosed with mental illness are traditionally treated in fiction and in nonfiction.

Secondly, in my opinion there is much misinformation in your article about “the mentally ill.” One fact would be that those diagnosed are less likely to be dangerous and violent than the general population. The real issue for me is that so many people are afraid of “the mentally ill” and that they view all people who are diagnosed through the filter of fear. Fiction writers can take their characters wherever they want—but your view that Carrie’s story would end after her ECT treatment “in reality” (yeah, that could happen) doesn’t ring true for me, because many people who are diagnosed go on to recover, have jobs, marry, own homes, pay taxes and work all kinds of miracles against great obstacles.

Lise Zumwalt

New York City

Apr 14 2013 - 10:19am

Embarrassing ignorance

I would like to request that The Nation reconsider its publication of this article. The author speaks with false authority about mental illness, and risks perpetuating dangerous stereotypes with her inaccurate statements. The following quote is from the last page of her article: “Stigmas originate in fear of the unknown; when they are abandoned, it is because a quorum of right-thinkers recognizes that the libels against the feared population are false. To be racially black is not to create or inhabit darkness; Jews don’t drink the blood of Christian babies; gay teachers won’t change the sexual orientation of your child.”

This quote portrays the author as an informed liberal who knows about past fights for civil rights and religious freedom. But she continues with the following: “But in a way that is profoundly different from race, sexual orientation, gender or creed, the stigma surrounding mental illness contains a dark unknown that is real rather than socially constructed. Some (and by no means all) mental disorders, no matter how much light they may generate, contain voids darker than a terrorist’s hidey-hole. Manic flights, voices, paranoia, suicide—these are not just the outside pressures of a treacherous social landscape. They are contained within the self, and the traditional rhetoric of diversity and inclusion cannot accommodate them. The minds of people with mental disorders are not just like ours, especially, as Carrie can see even from the depths of her self-estrangement, when we are the ones who are ill.”

With this paragraph, the author pretty thoughtlessly diminishes the status of people with mental health issues by indicating that they deserve their marginalized status because they are different. This position is offensive and even a little embarrassing in the same way that comparably ignorant articles from the past about people of color, women or gay/bisexual/transgendered people are offensive. I expect that in ten or fifteen years, statements like this, “the stigma surrounding mental illness contains a dark unknown that is real rather than socially constructed,” and this, “the traditional rhetoric of diversity and inclusion cannot accommodate them,” will be scorned as ignorant in the same way as are pre–Civil War articles that say “black men are less than human and could attack you like a savage beast, thus we must shackle them to the barn”; or pre-suffrage articles that say, “it’s OK for the freed-slave men to participate in elections but women are inherently unstable thus we cannot trust them to vote or hold political office”; or, “unlike people of color and women, gay people are unnatural and offensive to God so we cannot let them serve in the military.” We know now that such statements are ignorant and discriminatory. Some people know that similar statements about people with mental health problems—even when couched in introspective rhetoric—are comparably ignorant and discriminatory. I entreat The Nation to break new ground and be an early joiner of the right side of history. Please retract the discriminatory sections of this article (or the whole thing) and make room for all people to enjoy equal rights in America.

Anonymous

Brooklyn, NY

Apr 13 2013 - 10:34pm

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