Legion, a comic book series about mental health

Sounds exciting right?

It totally is. And it is a really important show to watch for those who aren't aware of how mental illness looks sometimes.

Legion is based on the X-Men comics character of the same name, like most longish running comic book characters, he has gone through many iterations over the years and honestly I can't be arsed to spend a lot of time talking about that, in short he is a mutant with whatever superpower the writer needs and a host of split personalities with varying levels of control over his abilities, in the comics that is.

Much more interesting is the TV show on FX.  David Haller is a schizophrenic, spending his life in and out of treatment and institutions, on meds and off, self medicating and otherwise. We encounter him in his twenties I think at the tail end of his latest stay in an institution. It doesn't go well and he finds out he is a mutant, an incredibly powerful one in a world that isn't really aware of mutants in general, and those who are(the government) are hunting them for their own reasons. He is rescued by a group of mutant rebels and taken to a safe place to learn to control his powers and fix his brain.

The conceit here is that as a telepath, the things he has been seeing and hearing are all actually real, but he had no way of knowing that, so the best guess from the medical community was to diagnose schizophrenia, the community he joins eschews all that and attempts to help him without meds and without treating him as having an illness.

My personal theory is both of them are correct, and if I am right that is a hell of a thing.

The show is wonderfully shot and scripted, it plays with your mind in ways I haven't seen in a lot of TV, our POV character is Haller, and for whatever reason, he isn't in touch with reality in the same way as anyone else, he doesn't know what is real or not, and the show goes to great lengths to keep us from knowing either, it is entirely possible some, or none, of the events in the latest episode happened at all, but we have no way of knowing that truly. And indeed from episode to episode things are found out that cast doubt on "facts" we have discovered in previous episodes. It is brilliant, and utterly terrifying. In fact the series easily qualifies as a horror series for a couple of reasons. The first being there is some fucking creepy shit in it, imagery, characters, and scenes designed to feel like nightmares and dream logic. If you don't know what is real, then anything could be fake, but more importantly, anything could be real, including the drawing from a children's book come to life with a knife, or the yellow eyed demon.

And that touches on the second part of why it is scary, it's realistic.

I can't speak to the experiences of those with disorders like that directly, but I have spent a lot of time in the company of someone who suffers from it, Dan Stevens is the actor who plays David Haller, you might know him from Downton Abbey, clearly did a ton of research for the role.
When you are talking with someone who sees and hears things that aren't there, it isn't funny, they don't hold conversations with invisible people, or treat them as friends, or try to convince you they are real. How do I put this.

From my understanding the "hallucinations" are mostly auditory, and mostly just, noise. My brother described it once as a ringing in his ears, but it never, ever, stops, and untreated it gets more intrusive, eventually it seems, the brain tries to do something with it, and then there are words and phrases, but it isn't full conversations, just flashes of connection. The visual stuff is also not usually just seeing a dude that isn't there, though that happens too, usually it is just flashes, a face that appears just after you open your eyes from a blink, a movement out of the corner of your eye, something COMING RIGHT AT Y-oh wait, it's gone, or the prison guards eyes glowing red.

The thing is, most schizophrenics know this stuff is not real, or at least, they hope it isn't, so what we see when we watch them are twitches, a jerk of the head, constant movement of the eyes, a refusal to look directly at us, short outbursts, just a couple words long, directed at nothing and coming seemingly unprompted. And a reluctance to talk about it, even to those they love.

Imagine living in a world where you can't trust what you see and hear, you literally don't know what to expect, from anyone. We on the outside are scared of them because they are unpredictable, and it is true, they are, but imagine, from their point of view, everything is like that, they can predict nothing and must therefore treat everything with caution, or paranoia.

Dan Stevens plays a character that, if I encountered him out in the world, I would be utterly convinced he was suffering from the same thing. One minute he could be having a perfectly normal conversation, just a persistent refusal to meet the eyes of who he is talking to, the next a complete shutdown or freakout.

So that is the scary stuff, but he's human too, and Haller, when in a rightish mind, is clearly a nice fellow, intelligent, witty, and personable. He's a guy you would be happy to hang out with. You like the character, and want him to succeed, even though his obstacles are pretty huge.

What I am saying is, watch Legion, you won't find a creepier show, or a more interesting one, out there right now, and you don't find a more honest and open portrayal of mental illness in pop culture pretty much anywhere.