Horror Movies and Lunatics

A teenage cancer patient, deranged by pain, escapes from her chemotherapy treatment. On the run, she hides in a local school where she passes herself off as a "normal" pupil. Befriending another student, she persuades him to take her back to his house where she incites him to trash his brother's bedroom and proposes a wild irrational plan to run away together. But when she realises that the police are on their way, she becomes agitated, arms herself with a pair of scissors and hides herself in the house. In a nail-biting sequence straight from a classic horror movie, her bewildered new friend searches the house for her, only to be taken hostage at scissor-point in the bathroom. Meanwhile his parents, both of whom work at the school, have been alerted that a cancer patient has escaped. Realising immediately the danger that this poses to their son, they rush home in a desperate attempt to rescue him. Fortunately the young man, showing unexpected reserves of heroism, persuades the cancer patient to drop the scissors, give herself up and return to custody.

This is (almost) a plot line from an episode of Waterloo Road, aired in the UK on Wednesday night on BBC1. Except that it didn't, of course, feature a cancer patient: it featured a young woman with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. And the ward she escaped from was not a chemotherapy unit, it was a psychiatric unit. The plot relied on a classic stock characterisation of psychiatric patients as scary, violent, unpredictable and irrational. They deliberately invoked fear and suspense as the "victim" searched through the house and was then abducted at knife point. They resolved the tension and reassured their audience by locking the bogeyman back in the asylum.

Waterloo Road is a prime time soap popular with younger viewers in the UK because of its fast-paced, if improbable, plot lines, and the familiar school setting. Now in its tenth series, Waterloo Road regularly features guns, drugs, teenage pregnancy, alcoholism and inappropriate relationships between pupils and teachers, often all in the same episode. It treads a line between entertainment and uncertain, sometimes rather preachy, education. To its credit, in 2012, Waterloo Road worked with Mind to develop a storyline in which a character develops schizophrenia after smoking cannabis.  But who knows what advice the writers followed in developing Wednesday's plot line: it is hard to believe that any mental health charity or service was involved this time.

Borderline personality disorder is little known outside the world of mental health services. This may be the only information that most viewers have about bpd. The information they have been given is that patients with bpd are violent and devious. The response of adult characters in the drama was particularly significant: when alerted to the fact that a patient from a mental health unit is at large, all of the adult characters express fear and alarm. This is no calm, common sense response, no concern for her welfare, and the situation immediately escalates to full-scale emergency. Teachers at the school express concern that she has infiltrated the school, passing as "normal" and posing a "risk" to other pupils.

Nobody bothers to explain that patients with bpd are a far bigger risk to themselves than to anyone else. Nobody bothers to explain that a character with bpd is far more likely to be just a regular pupil at their school than the long-term resident of any psychiatric facility.  With an incidence of about 0.7% of the population, in an average sized school with a thousand pupils, there are likely to be around seven pupils with bpd, or who will go on to develop bpd, at any given time. Nobody bothers to explain that people with bpd are no more likely to behave irrationally or violently than people with cancer.

Julie has two questions:
1. Now her friends have seen this episode, how can she tell them that there are doctors who have diagnosed her as having bpd? Will they now be afraid to be in the same room as her?
2. Would you employ this girl as a babysitter for your children?

Shame on you BBC.