Prevention Is Better than Cure: Anachronistic Therapists and Toxic Wellness

Horror as a genre traditionally has a deep distrust of psychotherapy and other types of “wellness” therapies. Part of this stems from its innate suspicion of anyone in authority and of the scientist in general. In horror, power almost inevitably corrupts and the pursuit of knowledge can corrode even the most virtuous into immoral, cruel and monstrous beings. The archetype of the “mad scientist” has been written about extensively, but there is limited critical engagement with the role of the psychotherapist in horror texts. In the context of this paper, psychotherapy is the umbrella term applied to psychiatry, psychoanalysis or any other kind of wellness counselling; any kind of treatment between a patient and a therapist for psychological distress. Typically, this either takes the form of a psychiatrist and a patient who has been declared mentally ill (or its literary equivalent “mad,”) or a patient plagued by supernatural events who everyone else believes to be paranoid. These patients tend to be diagnosed with a fictional form of schizophrenia—which appears to cover a whole range of vague symptoms and has become the more contemporary version of shorthand insanity or literary hysteria. Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder) has more recently become a frequent trope in psychological horror or thrillers, with at least one of the resultant identities revealed to be malevolent. Anxieties about psychiatry and those who practice it, therefore, have deep roots in storytelling that still negatively affect how they are considered today in real-life and particularly on film. Fears about cruel and arcane treatments still linger; sickening memories of past dehumanisation, abuse and neglect consistently resurface as threats to twenty-first-century psychic agency. These threats manifest in the brutality of treatments, their juxtaposition against contemporary ethics or settings, or reformation as dubious—even alarming—“wellness” treatments. This paper will examine how this toxic remembrance of the “horrors” of psychotherapy still informs many of today’s Gothic and horror texts, as well discussing how nostalgia for earlier kinds of “well being” is Gothicised as a result.