Ledger’s Joker attacked for mental illness stereotype

Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker, for which the actor was awarded a posthumous Oscar, has been lambasted by mental health groups for its unrealistic portayal of schizophrenia.

The report for the Time for Change campaign, which is backed by charities Mind and Rethink, says Hollywood films like The Dark Knight show characters with mental illnesses as either stupid or evil.

The Screening Madness report singles out Ledger's role for particular criticism, describing it as an "incorrect stereotype" in which schizophrenics are given multiple personalities and one of them is evil.

Dr Peter Byrne, a film expert and consultant psychiatrist at Newham University Hospital in London, wrote: "Batman describes the Joker as a schizophrenic clown, and when the film's second hero Harvey Dent becomes 'Two-Face' and embraces evil, the familiar stereotype of schizophrenia is activated.

"This is omnipresent in cinema misrepresentations – the psycho killer is immortal and sadistic, motivated by madness and in almost all psychosis films, that character will kill."

He laments that "mental health stereotypes have not changed over a century of cinema". He says that the 2000 comedy Me, Myself and Irene, starring Jim Carrey as a man with multiple personality disorder, was a low point. There have been positives says Byrne who praises Russell Crowe's performance in A Beautiful Mind as more realisitc depiction of schizophrenia.

The Jack Nicholson film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest remains the film most remembered by the public for characters with mental illness acting violently or strangely, the study also said.

A survey commissioned for the report, revealed that 49 per cent had seen people with a mental illness acting violently on screen and 44 per cent of those asked believed that people with mental illnesses are more prone to violence.

Ledger's death from an overdose of sleeping pills in January 2008 came shortly after he finished filming The Dark Knight, and it was reported that playing the Joker had taken its toll on him mentally and had led to bouts of insomnia. ·