The glamorisation of mental illness in BBC’s Sherlock

Abstract

This chapter employs an allegorical approach for mapping the intersections of genius and madness and psychopathy and sociopathy as depicted in BBC’s Sherlock (2010-2017). By analysing and evaluating episodic and historical notions of psychiatric disorders, it probes various symptoms of mental illnesses as represented by the characters of Sherlock Holmes, Jim Moriarty and Eurus Holmes. The series advances its narrative arc and explores the relationships between the three characters; however, it does so through oppressive therapeutic labelling, which promotes inaccurate assumptions about mental illness and all its varying complexities. Through remote interventions viewers are able to experience, diagnose, popularize and inevitably glamorise mental illnesses from within the receptive space of their televisual enclosure. In so doing they help to perpetuate a therapeutic culture that blurs the porous boundaries between fictional characters and the psychiatric disorders they are allowed to misrepresent.