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October 08, 2004

Monk: Adding to the Stigma

by Dr. Leon Levin

Monk is a popular TV show about a detective who has been dismissed from the police force because of the obsessive-compulsive disorder which came on after his wife was murdered. He has every obsession, compulsion , and phobia that anyone has ever has or could imagine. Nevertheless, he continues to function as a freelance crime solver, demonstrating Sherlock Holmesesian perceptiveness and deductive logic. He has a female assistant, like most fictional private eyes, but in his case her function is to keep his illness from incapacitating him by sometimes reassuring him and sometimes running errands such as making sure the gas was turned off. She treats him like a mother of a gifted but embarrassingly eccentric child prodigy.

On the positive side the show demonstrates that a person with a severe mental illness can work at a high level. But the total effect is to make a joke out of the mental illness by exaggerating all the symptoms to the point of parody. This is cheap humor. The detective Monk has an infantile obliviousness to all the trouble he causes other people. On the contrary, the vast majority of people who suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder struggle against their symptoms, often trying to hide them, and are painfully aware of the problems they cause themselves and others. Monk seems to justify himself by showing how he is smarter and therefore superior to everyone else. The real suffering behind obsessive compulsive symptoms is completely avoided.

Posted by admin at October 8, 2004 11:13 AM