'Comedy' arouses ire of mental health brigade

By MARTIN JOHNSTON

When a skipping girl screams ridicule at Charlie Baileygates, something snaps inside, his aggressive side takes over and he momentarily forces her underwater, perhaps only until she repents.

Scenes like that from the new Jim Carrey comedy Me, Myself & Irene, which opened at New Zealand cinemas this week, have sparked outrage in the mental health community.

They say the film reinforces incorrect ideas about mental illness and encourages discrimination against its sufferers - at the same time as the Government is spending $12.46 million over five years to counter the discrimination and stigma.

A main gripe is that Charlie (Carrey) has the rare condition multiple personality disorder and not schizophrenia. Yet in the movie he is described as suffering from both, as well as being "nuttier than a squirrel turd."

"It's counter-productive," said Warren Lindberg, head of the anti-discrimination project. It would shape the views of people who were unclear about schizophrenia, particularly teenagers.

He is trying to have the film's classification raised from R13 to R18.

Charlie plays a sweet-natured Rhode Island policeman who hardly has the confidence to give a parking ticket. Everyone dumps on him, even the neighbour's dog, and he takes it all. One day it gets too much and out pops a new personality, Hank, the obnoxious, leering rival of Charlie.

Some who saw the film in Auckland yesterday thought it was clearly a comedy and unlikely to affect people's views on mental illness.

Tristan Robertson, aged 29, who watched it with his 13-year-old sister, Nastassja Catmull, said: "I don't think it's meant in a disrespectful way to a serious mental illness ... I never take Carrey's roles seriously."

Another man said protests would simply encourage more people to see the movie.

"It's basically just a stupid film that people will forget as soon as they walk out."

Protesters have handed out leaflets at some showings of the film and appear to have won a concession from the promoters. Initial advertisements carried the tagline "from gentle to mental," which the protesters say implies people with mental illnesses tend to be violent.

That line does not appear in at least some newspaper ads, which Mr Lindberg, who asserted that people with mental illnesses were no more likely than anyone else to be violent, said was in response to a mental health group's approach to the distributors.

Michael Moodabe, of 20th Century Fox, said his company was merely releasing the movie in New Zealand. He did not answer questions about it.

Me, Myself & Irene is no psychology lecture. As a comedy it scrapes by, if you like bucket-loads of toilet humour, bizarre acts with chickens, and cow-strangling.