#310: Josué, Lara, and Link talk about Titans and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and the complexities of getting diagnosed and medicated (in real life and in fiction).

Josué Cardona 0:11
Welcome to GT radio on the Geek Therapy network here at Geek Therapy. We believe that the best way to understand each other and ourselves is through the media we care about. My name is Josué Cardona. And I’m joined by link Keller.

Link Keller 0:21
Hello,

Josué Cardona 0:22
and Lara Taylor.

Lara Taylor 0:23
Hey,

Josué Cardona 0:24
welcome to episode 310. Of GT radio. Today, it’s my turn. So I want to talk explicitly about,

Lara Taylor 0:36
is this an explicit episode?

Josué Cardona 0:38
They’re all explicit. But we’re gonna explicitly talk about representation of mental health in media, which we talk about all the time, but I don’t think we’ve focus solely on on that topic. And at the very least, we haven’t talked about it in a very long time as the main focus of an episode. And I’ve been wanting to talk about this for weeks. So there’s a show on HBO Max called Titans. It’s the gritty version of the Teen Titans from DC Comics. The the trailer for the show, famously showed Robin kicking some people’s ass in the in the in the alleyway. And someone says like, where’s Batman? He goes, fuck Batman. Right? Is this is?

Link Keller 1:31
are they teens?

Josué Cardona 1:31
I think they are. They are Yeah, yeah, they’re,

Lara Taylor 1:35
I mean, but they’re gritty teens.

Josué Cardona 1:36
They’re just, yeah, they’re not all teens. Some of them are adults. They’re grown ass adults, some of them. But

Lara Taylor 1:45
hanging out with teens.

Josué Cardona 1:45
But that’s what’s called Titans is not it’s not a Teen Titans. So the show is on season three. And there’s an episode called Lazarus, the fifth episode of this season. And the character of Leslie Thompkins who is a doctor that appears in Gotham City Stories. She’s a psychiatrist. And this one, I don’t know, I don’t know that she’s always been a psychiatrist. But she’s a psychiatrist in this version, and she’s talking to Jason Todd. And he, he’s talking about how he wants to be Robin. He has to be Robin. Then the psychiatrist says something. I don’t know. She psychiatrist. I don’t remember now. It doesn’t matter. The point is that she she she knows that Bruce Wayne is Batman. And so she tells Jason Todd, who is Robin currently in the show that Robin is just a projection of a man with borderline personality disorder, like Bruce Wayne, right, then she and she diagnosis and it doesn’t just like says that. And I was so upset when that when that happened. It had been it had been. I mean, Batman stories are the ones that have sparked the most conversations, I think definitely among us, but like in our circles of like, you know, geek and nerd psychology stuff, right?

Lara Taylor 3:12
What that was Travis langly first

Josué Cardona 3:14
book, obviously, we wrote a whole book, Batman and psychology. We’ve talked about this a lot. But there’s also like, one of the first things I ever posted on the on the first version of The Geek Therapy website was an article of a group of psychiatrists who were speaking up against DC Comics for always giving villains these, you know, just throw away diagnoses, you know, like the real diagnoses, but like, just completely

Lara Taylor 3:43
how you write a villain throw a dart at the DSM? Yeah,

Josué Cardona 3:46
yeah, pretty much. And so. So this bothered me on a number of levels. Okay. That Bruce Wayne would have a BPD first of all, it’s like, that’s never been a thing. First of all, right. And then you could, you could kinda, you could make an argument, maybe that this version of Batman is different. I think every version of Batman is slightly different. And you can do it in a responsible way. But of course, they didn’t do it in a responsible way. Right. They didn’t explain anything. There was there was nothing there. But it was also the way she said it. She didn’t say, you know, you know that your you know, your your caretaker, Bruce, you know, he’s he’s working through, you know, borderline personality disorder. He’s, you know, he’s been working really hard on it. And you know, sometimes he just happens and it there was no like compassion to it. There was no there was nothing about like, it was like, That guy’s got BPD like, why are you listening to him like it was just so so. It was just very negative the way that it was used, but also it doesn’t explain what BPD is, right? It just it just kind of by that connotation alone, like, if you don’t know what it is, it’s like, oh, that must be really bad. Um, I want to tell ya, that’s

Lara Taylor 5:11
very different from saying something like, he’s treating you unhealthily. Like, don’t listen to him. It’s like, throwing you out there a diagnosis

Josué Cardona 5:20
this guy, he’s got BPD you don’t you don’t wanna you don’t want it?

Lara Taylor 5:23
You can’t listen to those people.

Josué Cardona 5:24
can’t listen to those poeple. Yeah, pretty much. And I mean, like, I like this version of Batman has done things that most versions of Batman

Lara Taylor 5:33
wouldn’t do or haven’t done

Josué Cardona 5:34
haven’t done yet. Right. And I’ll leave it at that. I don’t I don’t love this version of Batman. But it’s, it’s, it’s okay. It’s a different version of Batman.

Lara Taylor 5:49
It’s also not the Batman show.

Josué Cardona 5:52
Yeah, I mean, yeah. But it’s definitely it’s definitely not crazy ex girlfriend. Let me tell you about how crazy ex girlfriend brought up a BPD diagnosis. Okay. When they did it in their season three. Okay. Rachel goes to her to her therapist, in a not great way. Right. But she doesn’t she she asked her therapist, like about this diagnosis. She doesn’t she doesn’t understand if she doesn’t like it. And the show proceeds to let the therapist go one by one through the checklist of all of the symptoms, right?

Lara Taylor 6:35
And then it flashes back to her stuff, right?

Josué Cardona 6:38
She’s going through them she’s identifying with each point, showing moments throughout the show that demonstrate that behavior. And then at the end, right, there’s this there’s, there’s that moment of where she’s like, oh, like I meet all nine criteria for that, right?

Link Keller 6:58
Yeah, Dr. Akopian, correctly specifies that for diagnosis, you have to meet five of nine. And Rebecca goes, Oh, shit, I got I got nine of nine. I am winning this one. Yeah, the champion of this one. Oh, no… yaay?

Josué Cardona 7:17
But like the fact that a show took the time to walk through actual, you know, diagnostic criteria, and not just say a word, say a thing. I have I mean, we could, we could and we probably should start a whole show on on crazy ex-girlfriend stuff that goes on there. But that that is right, these are polar opposite examples of something right. And I mean, the Batman example, the Titans example bothers me so much, because it’s Batman too. It’s not just like some obscure character that like people know, it’s like, Bruce Wayne is an archetype or they like people, even if you’ve never seen a Batman movie or, or don’t like characters

Lara Taylor 8:02
you know, Bruce Wayne is

Josué Cardona 8:03
you have a general idea. And and that idea is also because there’s so many stories, right? Like to some people Batman is a certain lik...