Mental Illness in Star Trek and Science Fiction

     In today's science fiction representation matters. One way that authors represent marginalized people is to write stories about mental illness. It is not only important to have characters who suffer from some sort of mental illness but to treat it with compassion and to try to bring awareness. It isn't surprising that Star Trek Picard Season 2 has decided to tackle this topic. Will it only be about representation?

    Science fiction explores technological innovations and the possible consequences to society. In stories about mental illness, a writer will take us to a world where a civilization or our future civilization has proclaimed that they have cured mental illness and then analyze how this would affect society while also making commentary on social problems we face today. 

    A small example of this is the short story by Robert Bloch, "Comfort Me, My Robot". This story takes place in the 22nd Century, in a time after a blast destroyed America and the world's population lives in Asia. In this world, they claim to have cured violence and mental illness through using psychodrama. The story even debates psychological and psychiatric methods of the 20th Century and calls them barbaric. In these psychodramas, you take out your anger on robot replicas instead of the real person. This is supposed to cure a number of mental illnesses. However, sometimes people act out not because of mental illness but because of evil, which, according to Bloch, technology cannot cure.

    I have heard of this possibility of curing men of evil impulses by allowing them to act them out on robots, clones, or in virtual reality. I saw it in another show, Humans, where men were allowed to act out their sexual fantasies, no matter how sick, on robots. That reminded me of another movie Westworld (I haven't seen the TV adaptation) where people could murder, abuse, and have sex with robots. In both of those examples, the robots begin to gain sentience and fight back against their abusers. Humans taking their worst impulses on a non-living being, is still immoral, something brought up in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Measure of a Man". It was sort of mentioned in Star Trek Picard Season 1. 

    Another technology in science fiction is the memory block or giving someone a completely new personality. These are usually given to those who suffer from PTSD or suicidal depression. Memory blocks tend to fade and the sufferer is suddenly being attacked by mysterious nightmares in their minds. Personality changes rarely work as the old personality will haunt the new. It did work in Deep Space Nine. Worf's brother wanted to commit suicide so instead they gave him a memory block, plastic surgery to change his face, and a new personality. Would changing your personality, mind, and face help cure you of trauma?

    Star Trek used many technologies to deal with mental illness using not only medicine and machines but also could use aliens who had empathic or psychic powers. One was the neural neutralizer, a beam that would hypnotize the patient and help them get through their illness through suggestion. Of course, this technology was abused. Vulcans used mind melds to go inside people's minds to help find out what was troubling a person. In the episode, "Whom God's Destroy", they used a medicine that was supposed to cure all mental illness. I guess it didn't. Troi in TNG used her empath powers to help her give her patients therapy for their anxiety, grief, and depression and the show tried to deal with those issue in a compassionate way. 

    In one episode, Troi entered her mother's mind, using a telepathic connection to help her open up a repressed memory. In Star Trek Picard, Tallinn used a mind meld machine to help her enter the mind of a comatose Picard.  Using some sort of telepathic technology to explore someone's mind to get information or to see what is troubling them is common in science fiction. In Star Trek: Picard, the main character of Picard's mind has been uploaded into a new body. His new life doesn't cure him of dealing with past trauma. Unfortunately, this was explored any deeper. 

    Mental illness is an interesting topic in science fiction, and I hope it will be more than about representation on Picard Season 2 and will be more about exploring compassionate ways to deal with this part of our humanity.