Mental Illness and Narrative Complexity

Mainstream media’s relationship with mental illness is fraught. Deemed to misrepresent and sensationalise non-normative mental states, productions are said to solidify harmful attitudes in their audiences. Over the past two decades, puzzle films and complex TV shows have broken with time-honoured tropes of mental illness, offering alternative ways of visualising and narrating non-normative mental states.

Bringing together cognitive media studies, narrative theory and cultural studies, Melanie Kreitler explores the synergy between complex narrative structures and representations of mental illness. Focusing on US American films and TV shows since the mid-1990s, the book shows how complex productions strategically use their narrative structures to evoke in viewers an experience similar to that of the neuro-non-normative protagonist. Moving beyond the formal characteristics and cognitive effects of narrative complexity, this book argues for the cultural impact that puzzle films and complex television can have on our understanding of mental illness on and off screens.

Author Biography

Melanie Kreitler is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Giessen in the Department of Anglophone Literary, Cultural and Media Studies. Her research interests are in the intersections of cognitive and cultural approaches to film, television and videogames, and critical approaches to empathy afforded through narrative fiction. She is co-editor with Silvia Boide, Benjamin Brendel and Maaike Hommes of the special issue Illness, Narrated (On_Culture 2021), co-editor with Laura Borchert of the special issue Queer Politics in Media and Legal Cultures (Amerikastudien/American Studies 2024), and co-editor with Marta Lopera-Mármol of the special issue Mental TV (Series 2025).