Mentally ill people are not a horror movie plot

Rating: 1/10 (28 January 2017)

Tired old trope of using a person with a mental illness as a plot for a scary movie. Unoriginal, and ableist.
Mental illness, especially misunderstood illnesses like dissociative identity disorder, are incredibly stigmatized in our society. They're often seen as scary, and the people suffering from them are often labeled as dangerous, making it difficult for them to receive help and support. Movies like "Split" further this stigma.
There is very little media representation for people with DID, many people don't know much of anything about the illness, so when movies present it as something that makes people dangerous, others have no reason not to take this as a fact.
In reality, people with DID are not abusers, but people who themselves have been abused. DID is an illness that develops after long term exposure to trauma occurring before the person turned nine years old. It develops because the trauma is too much for the young person's brain to handle, so their personality "splits" off into different parts, so that they don't have to. Movies show these alters as violent, but really, people with DID are usually only a danger to themselves. Showcasing them as the kind of people who would kidnap and abuse teenage girls is a gross inaccuracy, that again, wouldn't matter so much if it wasn't basically the only media representation of this illness.
Because of the belief that these people are violent and dangerous, not only is it difficult for them to find support, but societal biases are often internalized.
Mentally ill people are not violent abusers. But the stigma furthered by these movies contributes to the belief that they are. Mentally ill people need support, they need to be normalized, they do not need any more horror movies that use them as the scary abuser. I hope that in the future we can move past movies like this, and towards acceptance. Mentally ill people deserve better.