10 pop culture characters who accurately depict mental health issues

Danai Gurira as Michonne – The Walking Dead _ Season 9, Episode 7 – Photo Credit: Gene Page/AMC

With an almost overwhelming amount of modern media, here are a few pop culture characters who accurately depict mental health.

It’s the end of Mental Health Awareness Month; however, mental health definitely isn’t over at the end of May. Many comics, television series, movies, and more have open-ended mental health discourse in the form of specific character arcs. While a lot of pop culture characters are far from being the epitome of non-stigmatized and healthy portrayals, there are several pop culture characters who accurately depict mental health.

Before we touch on some of the recent characters who’ve helped extend real-life mental health conversations, we need to get real on some of the omissions and problems that are somehow still lingering in pop culture. In an era where representation is arguably, albeit slowly, getting better, there’s still a disparity on whose mental health stories are told and how they’re told throughout comics, movies, television, and beyond.

You can probably already tell what we’re referencing. So, few entertainment productions showcase mental health arcs for characters of color. To mirror the reality of lived experiences, pop culture needs to amp up the mental health discourse in direct conjunction with disability, race, culture, gender, and sexuality — and it needs to do so at a much more accelerated rate.

Representation for healthy, earnest, and simple genuine (because healing isn’t always devoid of relapse) portrayals of mental health are slowly spreading throughout our media. However, there’s still an overwhelming amount of productions that utilize trauma and mental health conditions as jokes or worse: villainous origin stories.

For certain entertainment productions, depictions of mental health have come a long way, there are less harmful stereotypes in mainstream and indie pop culture media. So we’re focusing on 10 pop culture character who have helped portray actual illustrations of mental health.