How is mental health and well being represented in popular culture

Within the confines of the article, I will analyze how well-being, specifically happiness and emotions, are represented in popular culture using Disney''''s animated movie Inside Out 2015,

MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS DIPLOMATIC ACADEMY OF VIETNAM

POPULAR MEDIA CULTURE ASSIGNMENT ESSAY

Lecturer: Dr Vu Tuan Anh Student: Nguyen My Trang Student ID: TT47A10585 Class: TT47A2

Essay topic: How is mental health and well-being represented in popular culture? Using ONE example drawn from popular culture, discuss how it chooses to engage with mental health and well-being How do they position themselves in relation to the issue? Is their position hegemonic or counter-hegemonic? What kind of discourses do they deploy? What kind of discourses are used to frame them?

WORD COUNT: 2298

Hanoi, 2023

As people are increasingly concerned about well-being and mental health in the midst of pressure, popular culture has been exploiting this content in many forms as a way to meet their demands and indirectly “educate” the audience about human psychology Within the confines of the article, I will analyze how well-being, specifically happiness and emotions, are represented in popular culture using Disney's animated movie Inside Out (2015), which simultaneously shows hegemonic and counter hegemonic ideals about happiness via its characters and how we acknowledge and manage our emotions.

Well-being is defined as having both an awareness of your emotions and the ability to manage and express those feelings in a healthy and age-appropriate manner It includes having both good mental and physical health, happiness, prosperity, life satisfaction and a sense of meaning or purpose (WHO).

According to this definition, mental health is a state of well-being, more than the absence of mental disorders Meanwhile, mental Illnesses are specific, diagnosable health conditions In other words, mental illness is a narrower concept mental health (WHO)

In general, the three concepts have a close relationship, that which one is narrower than another depends on the frame of reference we define, which can be described through the image above:

Popular media has been bringing the issues of happiness and emotions to the big screen and media publications Instead of being represented as their inherent nature as a purely emotional thing, happiness becomes hegemonic ideals Duty to be happy is a duty to live your life in a way that would make others happy (Sarah, 2010) Happiness is being used to make a social norm, a social convention because that's how we can make something to be good by making it appear to be the cause of happiness Happiness and emotional control become a social pressure that directs individuals towards certain life choices (Sarah, 2010), a ‘right way to live’ even if it makes them depressed or leads to mental illnesses Hegemonic ideals also limit each gender's emotional range The film Inside Out (2015) directed by Pete Docter will be an example of how popular media culture embodies hegemony and counter hegemony ideas simultaneously.

The film tells the story of the 11-year-old Riley She and her family navigate a move across the country from Minnesota to San Francisco when her father landed a new business here More centrally, Inside Out describes how five emotions Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger balance the control of her mind Inside Out bases its emotional theory largely on the work of Paul Ekman Ekman posits that there are seven basic emotions, the ones featured in the film and two that were omitted: surprise and contempt.

Figure 2: Five emotion characters inside Riley’s mind (Pixar)

Duty to be happy to make others happy!

The very first period of moving to San Francisco was a tough one for Riley as she couldn't forget the memories in Minnesota, being away from her best friends and having a rough start at new school and ice hockey team But her mother put pressure on her and expected Riley to always be happy and she should do it for her father, who goes through a difficult period at work:

“You stayed our happy girl Your dad's under a lot of pressure but if you and I can keep smiling it would be a big help We can do that for him, right?”

Figure 3: Riley’s mom expect her to be happy for her dad (Pixar)

This scene shows the hegemony that individuals must become happier for others, it is not so much a right as a responsibility We have a responsibility for our own happiness insofar as promoting our own happiness is what enables us to increase other people’s happiness Responsibility to be happy for others, or even simply from the idea that there is a necessary and inevitable relationship of dependence between one person’s happiness and the happiness of others (Sarah, 2010).

The sense that happiness is actually rendering those who were not happy responsible for their own misfortune, that it was obscuring ongoing relations of inequality and injustice Riley is not happy and doesn’t want to smile but she

respects her mom’s wishes and doesn’t share her feelings Therefore, instead of expressing her feelings, Riley felt guilty when she showed that she was not fine.

Figure 4: Riley feel guilty for being not good (Pixar)

Even Riley's mother, who is putting pressure on her, is at the same time trying to be a "happy housewife" for her husband In the film Riley’s mother stays at home after moving to San Francisco to support Dad’s new job This female support of patriarchy is common and even expected in contemporary society (Everingham, 1994:15) There is an interesting detail in the movie that if Riley's main emotion is Joy, then her mother's is Sadness and her father is Anger Anger’s actions are always directed outwards, Sadness’ actions are directed inwards making it a matter of her essence (Hansson and Norberg, 2013:446) This representation of gendered emotion supports patriarchy because it teaches women to direct their emotion inwards and suppress any anger they may be feeling, forcing them to remain submissive or happy just because it makes her family happy and stable These representations enforce the societal norm that women must compensate for mens anger through internalized

emotion (Brydon, 2008:132) Now, happiness is just used as a way to justify oppression (Sarah, 2010).

Our goal is happiness so we have to try to be all-time happy?

Society places pressure on individuals to always be positive and happy, placing an unrealistic ideal that consequently stigmatizes sadness It's like how Inside Out described Sadness isolated it in a tiny circle drawn by Joy, symbolizing that we are trying to control our emotions.

Or in another scene, when the Bing Bong rocket was swept away, Joy tried to distract him from his sadness with her silly antics:

Figure 7: Joy is trying to distract Bing Bong from negative emotions because of the loss of his and Riley’s rocket (Pixar)

The above details have shown that in today's society, each individual has to endure hardship in a stubborn, silent, aloof and individual way Because others are not tolerant enough to those who express dissatisfaction, difficulty, or unhappiness Everyone falls victim to the “happiness race” No one likes being labeled unhappy Anyone who is unhappy must feel guilty and suppose they have problems.

Why is happiness so "highlighted" that it puts people under pressure to always pretend to be happy and try to suppress their negative and sad emotions?

Firstly, one of the fundamental presumptions of histories of philosophy is that happiness is good, and thus nothing can be better than to maximize happiness “Everybody wants to be happy There is probably no other goal in life” (Frey, B., & Stutzer, A, 2002: vii) Many Western cultures place a high ideal on happiness It is now common to refer to “the happiness industry”: happiness is both produced and consumed through these books, reality TV shows, etc The media are saturated with images and stories of happiness as a way to hit the audience’s desire and pain The unavoidably catchy songs “Happy” by Pharrell Williams or Don't Worry Be Happy by Bobby McFerrin were smash hits We constantly hear: “don’t worry, be happy!”, “look at me, I’m happy”, etc

All the research and press about the importance of happiness in recent years also make this message much more potent and frame the power of happiness So how is it framed? We can start with the concept of "positive psychology" The foundation of positive psychology is the humanistic movement by Abraham Maslow, Rollo May, James Martin, and Carl Rogers, which encourages an emphasis on happiness and positivity Positive psychology supposes "happiness may rise with increasing financial income" (Seligman et.al, 2005) Happy persons are more likely to be found in the economically prosperous countries (Veenhoven 1991: 16) The mass media emphasizes fun, positive thinking so that the public can believe that becoming richer makes them happier That is how the US government directs people to focus on material happiness instead of other factors (mental health, labor exploitation, etc) to continue the economic development strategy that people are condemning Because what they really need is political stability, security and justice in society, etc which America is lacking It is proven by the U.S’s ranking in the World Happiness Report Since 2012, when the report was first issued, the US has never entered the top 10.

Secondly, Western culture has a long history of anxiety about emotions Thinkers from the Classical period to the Modern have pitted emotion against reason as opposing forces vying for the mind's control An emotional person was seen as weak and has least resistance to base desires ruled by capricious feelings The strong on the other hand would rule their emotions with reason.

Figure 9: Each individual has to endure and hide his or her true feelings (Nerdwriters1)

Disney also personified this struggle in a short 8-minute cartoon from 1943 called “Reason and Emotion”: "Within the mind of each of us, these two wage a ceaseless battle for mastering."

The short is a lightly disguised propaganda piece hardening Americans against fear tactics used by the Axis powers in World War 2 But it was nonetheless a point of reference for the Pixar team led by director Pete Docter, responsible for the film 'Inside Out'.

Inside Out (2015), on the contrary, integrates a counter hegemonic ideal that negative emotions in general and sadness in particular have their place and shouldn’t be avoided Returning to the scene of Bing Bong, it would be difficult to stand on the edge of negativity like him Joy's choice at that time is to distract him with humorous stories But that's not the way to really get him over the sadness as it is a temporary distraction or run away from such negative emotions When the smile fades away, the thoughts of sadness will come back and become even stronger On the contrary, Sadness’s action then was probably not an easy choice, even like rubbing salt in an old wound but sometimes all we need is a face-to-face with regrets, pain or the fact that we are not feeling well in order to listen sincerely and honestly to our inner emotions That is the way when Bing Bong accepted his sadness, he only needed one more big cry to get up and move on.

Figure 11: Sadness is the emotion that grasps sympathy and empathy (Pixar)

At the end of the film, Sadness is the one who lets Riley cry for all her bad things she experienced When all the problems have been rooted out, sadness is no longer scary Riley's harmonious smile as the harmony in the emotions gave her a deeper form of happiness Emotion experts call this “mindfully embracing” an emotion It means rather than getting caught up in emotional reaction, a mindful person kindly observes the emotion without judging it as the right or wrong way to feel in a given situation, creating space to choose a healthy response.

Inside Out encourages people to let their emotions out and accept that sadness and happiness are neither polar opposites nor too far apart Sadness or any emotion is an inevitable part of each of us Even with Joy we see somewhere in her the blue of sadness in her hair and in her eyes This animated movie is a shining example of the power of the media to shift viewers’ understanding and awareness of the human experience and against hegemonic ideals that are framed by things beyond pure human emotion.

Figure 12: The main color of Joy is yellow but her hair and eyes are blue which is the color of Sadness (Pixar)

Gender and the limitation of acceptable emotions.

Although the film received a lot of praise for directing viewers to overcome political hegemony, in terms of feminism, Inside Out still has a problematic choice

regarding the gender and personality of each emotion and how this choice limits both gender’s range of acceptable emotions.

First one is the juxtaposition of Anger and Fear as the two male emotions in Riley’s mind Inside Out’s portrayal of Anger as full of testosterone, possessing large muscles and butch attire, depicts him as an over-conforming hyper masculine male (Dunlap and Johnson, 2013:73) As Anger’s aesthetic represents a model for masculinity (the way the media drive our understanding of what it means to “be a man”), Fear, as a thin calculating and weak male, represents his antithesis Using this comparison, Inside Out induced men into believing that being afraid is an undesirable and unmasculine emotion.

Figure 13: Fear and Anger (Pixar)

Additionally, throughout the film it is made obvious that in Riley’s mother and father’s head Sadness and Anger control the tables respectively This enforces the conventional wisdom that anger is a male emotion and if women do get angry they cannot show it (Kring, 2000:211) The hegemony expands the gender gap, it is expected for men to express anger while women are expected to express sadness when they experience negative emotion It is acceptable for women to cry, whilst

men experience social stigma if they do so That led to the decoding that this film is limiting each gender's scope for acceptable emotion.

Fortunately, the movie does convey the comforting message that everyone has a range of feelings inside their heads that can adapt to a number of gendered shapes by depicting mixed gender emotions in Riley's This decision can also be read as a triumph of second wave feminism.

In summary, aspects of well-being (happiness and emotions) have been mentioned in many forms by the popular media including movies It can be said that Inside Out (2015) is one of the most highly appreciated films on this topic as beyond the context when it was released that America saw a rapid increase in the number of depression cases in adolescents, the film help audiences everywhere understand how to find true happiness through accepting and facing both sadness and negative emotions of oneself, which goes against the inherent hegemony in the media Although the issue of well-being is still hegemonic in some ways, at the end, Pete Doctor lets viewers understand the harmful effects of those, thereby letting them realize and choose a happy life just for themselves./.

1 Brydon, S 2009 Men at the heart of mothering: Finding mother in finding nemo Journal of Gender Studies 18(2), pp 131-146.

2 Dunlap, R and Johnson, C 2013 Consuming contradiction: Media, masculinity and (hetero) sexual identity Leisure/Loisir 37(1), pp 69-84.

3 Everingham, C 1994 Motherhood and modernity: An investigation into the rational dimension of mothering Buckingham: Open University Press

4 Frey, B., & Stutzer, A 2002 Happiness and Economics Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press)

5 Hansson, H and Norberg, C 2013 Lady Audley’s secret, gender and the representation of emotions Women’s Writing 20(4), pp 441-457

6 Jo Adetunji 2015 Inside Out shows well-being isn’t just about chasing happiness The Conversation, link:

https://theconversation.com/inside-out-shows-well-being-isnt-just-about-chasing-happiness-43629?fbclid=IwAR3UrmTZrVwz3zOgZONM8SWmlSklZtDrfWAY qYy_Bb-17Lf5BZ_7k4vPQCU

7 Jo Nash, Ph.D 2015 The 5 Founding Fathers and A History of Positive Psychology Positive Psychology, link:

8 Kring, A 1999 Gender and Anger In: Fischer, A Gender and Emotion: Social psychological perspectives New York: Cambridge University Press, pp 211-231.