The Defence of Baby Reindeer’s Real-Life Villain: Are We Justifying Bad Behaviours On Account of Mental Health and Addiction?
In the last few months, there have been conversations online about the Netflix mega-successful series, Baby Reindeer. If you’ve been under a rock, the series depicts the allegedly true encounters of writer and director Richard Gadd with his stalker. It did not take long for the internet to track down the real-life stalker. When Fiona Harvey outed herself by coming on the Piers Morgan Uncensored show, it became evident that the behaviours of the stalker character in the series were accurately-portrayed indeed. Since then, other victims have come forward to share their stories about being stalked by the same woman. By all accounts, she is a dangerous perpetrator capable of harming and assault.
Harvey is now suing Netflix for $170 million for falsely stating it is a true story and failing to protect her identity, which she claimed has led to harassments and other costs to her wellbeing.
I am appalled that so many people online are siding with or feeling sorry for the alleged perpetrator, on account of her “mental health”. Someone who is exhibiting such behaviours must be suffering from mental health problems, they argue. That may be true, but why does it override everything else?
Mental Health and Accountability
Today, mental health has become the be-all-and-end-all. Someone just has to utter the words “mental health” and everyone else either retracts their viewpoint or tip-toes around the subject being discussed.
In the past decade or so, there has been an exponential increase in mental health awareness. On the whole, this is a good thing. Having suffered from depression at a time when there wasn’t much awareness and being told to just “snap out of it”, I sympathise with those still trapped in such afflictions. No doubt, this is progress.
But where it is not a positive outcome is, we are suddenly overly sympathetic. I see individuals continuing to abuse those around them and getting away with it because society thinks we should be more tolerant of those “struggling with mental health”.
There is no excuse for bad behaviours, mental health or not.
One of Harvey’s victims, Laura Wray, reported that with Baby Reindeer being aired the nightmare she endured were brought back to her mind, triggering her trauma around it. It is clear that this person still suffers from anxiety from those events years later. Yet, her abuser has not been held accountable.
Does society’s consideration of Harvey’s mental health supercede the damages inflicted upon the lives of those she has victimised?
Harvey may indeed have a case against the streaming giant in the court of law. But are we rewarding people for their bad behaviours just because of the law? For real justice to prevail, I would hope that the court also weighs the damages she claims against those of her victims.
There is an argument made that she may be clinically delusional and genuinely believe her own illusory reality. In other words, she does not intend to be harmful to others. This is giving her the way out too easily. Even if that was true, if we don’t hold people accountable for their actions, there might never be a chance of them waking up from said delusion.
Our consciousness is a powerful thing; with the right promptings, we will remember who we truly are. Deep down, our truest core is one of love and mutual expansion. The modern medical field does not recognise this simple yet profound Truth; if they did they have sciencified it to death, spitting out a version so devoid of its magic and scope of healing powers they might as well not acknowledge it at all. Dysfunctional, destructive behaviours such as stalking ultimately come from having been misaligned from our core humanity. By enabling such behaviours, through not calling them out (let alone reward them with huge sums of money), the individuals will remain comfortably in their delusions.
Indeed, there could be a component of mental health influencing her behaviours, but one should not excuse such behaviours automatically by this reason.
One of the key arguments against Baby Reindeer is that it portrayed Harvey as having been convicted for stalking before. It is one thing to portray someone as a stalker and another as a felon. I disagree with this argument. Many perpetrators escape the law and never get to a stage of being tried and sentenced. It is silly to make a moral judgement on the right-or-wrong of an act simply based on whether one has been convicted. There are so many variables that result in someone being convicted or not.
More often than not, the punishments meted out by courts of law do not correlate to the crimes committed and the damages inflicted on victims. This leads to the subject of how we calculate the damages. There is an intangible domain that needs to be considered when determining the costs to a victim. This leaves a lot of room for considerations of the various aspects in the process of arriving at the final verdict, and I imagine at times at least this is what transpires and partly the reason why court cases are long drawn-out. So, why can’t the same considerations be made in the court of public opinion?
In the first instance, why do people assume that Fiona Harvey is suffering from a mental health condition? Are we so quick to excuse away bad behaviours – including those that border on being dangerous – that we simply decide, “It must be a mental health issue”?
In any case, so what if it is. There needs to be an equal consideration for the victims but where we are in society today the sympathy tends to be extended quicker to the perpetrator, oh sufferer of mental health.
Mental health cannot be the be-all-and-end-all. From a higher plane, this is the swing of the pendulum at the moment, as mass consciousness is over-compensating for when mental health sufferers were ignored, dismissed and neglected. This extreme degree in correction could be brought to a balanced place sooner than later, before more harm is suffered collectively. I, for one, am not joining in the mass consciousness enabling the perpetrator, mental health or not.
The Dangers of Enabling the Perpetrator
When we react by immediately showing sympathy to someone on account of mental health seemingly to the exclusion of all other considerations, we imply that an individual is completely helpless against their mental health diagnosis.
Granted, my views on diagnoses formulated on the premises of psychology/psychiatry are unconventional. But since treatments based on such diagnoses are rarely effective (superficially perhaps, but the underlying problems will tend to remain unhealed), more unconventional methods are called for. The very basis of orthodox medicine including the field of psychiatry is restricted and anything that cannot be accounted for by science is simply assigned a name and in so doing that name becomes the absolute. Our society is too keen to pigeon-hole everyone and these diagnoses are no different, by plastering a label onto someone and effectively locking them into a prison decided by someone else. Everything from then on is filtered through that categorisation.
Where then do we draw the line? In the cases of dangerous criminals, for instance serial child rapists, are we going to focus on their mental health before the wellbeing of their victims? Admittedly, it may be useful to trace the history of such criminals to help make sense of what drives them, for the purposes of future prevention. But that ought to be secondary to focusing on the plight of their victims, who are at risk of now being the ones ignored, dismissed and neglected.
Carte Blanche for Bad Behaviours
Today, when someone mentions mental health, we see others start to walk on egg-shells. Collectively, we are brainwashed into thinking it is not okay to pull up or challenge bad behaviour because someone has mental health issues. When did we become so sensitive? Yes, there is advancement in understanding the role of mental health in influencing someone’s wellness, but it has crossed into an extreme territory where bad behaviours get justified in the name of mental health.
Mental health is not a disease, it is a symptom of a deeper misalignment – beyond brain chemicals. It is a soul sickness. And we have the power to heal it within ourselves. We may require the support from outside initially, but most of the actual healing will take place internally once the individual is strong enough. A medicated life is one that is half-alive. Pharmaceuticals can have its place in soothing the intensity of moods and emotions in the initial stage, but true healing takes place beyond managing one’s moods.
Therefore, to focus overly on mental health and to give it so much power to define us is extremely limiting.
My own journey with mental health earlier in my life substantiates my knowing that being given a label does not help one to come out of it. It keeps one in sickness and dilutes one’s life to a lesser version of its true potential. My whole Life Work to guide people to their inner power so that they can bring more juiciness into their lives is borne out of my own affliction and relentless search for a way out.
This stance of mine extends to addictions. In the field of addictions, from my observation, there is an over-empathising with the addict, a pandering to the addict, when their family members have suffered so much yet are expected to give leeway to the addict. This is likely due to the very premise of the 12-step model, the mainstream model of treating addictions, which postulates that addiction is a disease. It’s a fundamental premise that I challenge in my work as an addiction therapist and having struggled in addictions myself. Whilst I can understand the power it has in getting an addict to accept their sickness, enough to agree to getting help for it, the disease label condemns them to not ever getting out of addictions. That’s why being “in recovery” is a thing in 12 Steps; one never recovers but remains in recovery for the rest of their life. Their behaviours are managed through attending meetings that keep reinforcing their identity as an addict, removed from the possibility of true freedom from addiction. [Read My Approach To Addictions.]
But they can’t help it, addiction is a disease.
It’s not him, it’s the disease.
I’m not saying those who believe in the disease model do not call out bad behaviours, they certainly do. But underlying it is a strong belief that at the end of the day, they are all doomed by this disease called addiction. Beyond the ostensible, the doctrine is perpetuated on a subtler level that dooms the addict to never break out of the prison of their label.
Addiction does not excuse one’s behaviours. There is too much tipping on toes around the addict when – well, frankly they should grow up and take responsibility instead of feeling entitled for others to feel sorry for them. This is not just a diss but to point to a deeper motivation behind addictions. Often, those in addictions behave immaturely, driven from a place of their wounded inner child. The “growing up” denotes a call for healing this and other wounds, to restore to wholeness where there are soul fractures.
Whether it is addiction or mental health, yes it is a condition but the sufferer is not completely helpless in taking responsibility for their lives and how they impact those around them. It is also not empowering to see the individual as powerless, a victim.
For beneath the condition is a bright soul wanting to be recognised. To see them as a helpless victim is to perpetuate them being powerless, dismissing there is something more powerful: a warrior spirit waiting to arise and be in command of Life.
This means that for the Fiona Harveys of the world, excusing and God forbid rewarding their behaviours would lead them down further into their path of destruction. By extension, what this contributes to mass consciousness is a decline when it comes to merging back to our divine core, as we’re implicitly endorsing that which is depraved.
Instead, let us hold these individuals accountable whenever they attempt to loot public resources to gain attention, fame and riches at the expense of their victims. Instead of exploiting the weaknesses of the legal system or simply resigning to “that’s just the way law works in this country,” let’s use it as an opportunity to make corrections to the law so that it can better serve justice. Above all, let us stop this nonsense of glorifying bad characters just to create shock value for our personal gratification, consciously or otherwise, and instead aggrandise the divine in all of us.
Our awakened consciousness, en masse, can deliver more light into this world, healing that which needs to be healed.
