As I mentioned in Home, within popular media, mental illness is utilized in order to explain character motivations without fully building who they are. Within video games, this trope is most prevalent in action games so that a character is inherently evil, rather than having something traumatic driving them to perform the things they did. However, the use of tropes surrounding mental illness do not stop there. Oftentimes the language and situations surrounding the presentation of mental illness is just as harmful as the overused cliches and stereotypes about mental illness.
In media, mental illness—especially that of violent characters—is presented and described using words such as “psychotic,” “psychopath,” “psycho,” “insane,” “mad,” and “crazy.” The selection of this language can be particularly damaging especially in relation to psychosis and psychopathy. According to Jennifer Hazel—founder of CheckPoint, an organization promoting accurate presentation of mental illness in video games—psychopathy refers to the inherent personality of people who have low empathy, large egos, and dis-inhibition. On the other hand, psychosis is a condition that causes to people to have hallucinations and be delusional, all while not realizing that something is wrong with them.
Such improper presentation is prevalent in Far Cry 3, wherein the secondary antagonist Vaas Montenegro (pictured above) is described as being psychopathic (i.e. his nickname The Psychopath). The character himself and other NPCs refer to Vaas as insane and crazy, which is damaging as it links him directly to mental illness causing misinterpretation of what he suffers from. However, his mental instability or personality has no reason to be what it is. His backstory is that he has always been violent and that it stems from this mental instability of his. This creates a misconception that mental instability can and will make people inherently violent. However, this is not true as there is always some other motive behind someone’s actions. According to Tracii Kunkel, mental illness used in this way “is a cop-out, a cheap tool used to get right to the violence, because the assumption is that people with mental illness have no control of their behaviors.” The perpetuation of this trope continues to enforce the stereotype that those suffering have no control and tend to exhibit violent behavior, whenever the reality is far from that.
On the opposite end of the psychotic/psychopath terminology, is the game Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. Within Hellblade, the player controls Senua, a Celtic warrior on a quest to retrieve the remains of her lover’s soul from the underworld. However, Senua suffers from psychosis which widely impairs her perception and view of the world, which is represented throughout the gameplay. As seen in the video below, during the combat in the game the screen is blurred and obstructed along with the audio becoming distorted. On top of this distortion of the audio, a multitude of voices are heard in the background, which are voices within Senua’s head. While Senua’s story still perpetuates the stereotype of violent behavior in the mentally ill, there is clear reason for her to react this way, unlike Vaas. Hellblade‘s story openly shows the perception of mental illness and the harsh actions others take in response to it. It shows that others views on the topic are usually more destructive than the actual illness itself. Senua and the community surrounding her did not properly understand what she was going through, and instead Senua felt ostracized and exiled herself when her mental illness was not an immanent problem for the entire village.
From the nuanced differences between these two games, we can see how the presentation of the mental instability of a character can differ. While Vaas’ presentation was harmful due to the lack of grounding or reality, Senua was executed in a way that showed the dangers of misunderstanding in a believable and unobstructed view.
Mental Health in Video Games 