A study published earlier this year found that almost half of respondents to two surveys taken last January believed that people with a serious mental illness are more dangerous than members of the general population. In reality, however, less than 5 percent of individuals with a serious mental illness become violent. They are much more likely, in fact, to be the victim of a violent crime.
Such movies, and TV shows of the same ilk, also function fairly well as pro-police, pro-surveillance propaganda. Criminal Minds is probably the one I hate the most. By portraying a new evil genius on a weekly basis that can only be stopped by a hardboiled no-nonsense detective who doesn't follow the rules and various highly unconstitutional investigation techniques, they prime the viewership for acceptance of the real thing. As media role models they even encourage real police and those who aspire to become police to act in the same way. Nobody blinked when the PRISM scandal broke because we'd been seeing the same thing on CSI for more than a decade.
The issue is that mental illness is generally tragic, not entertaining. When one is in the business of crafting entertainment, poetic license is to be expected. Media perception of murderers amplifies the problem: you've heard of Lyle and Erik Menendez. You've heard of Scott Peterson. You've not heard of Ricky Abeyta, despite the fact that he killed twice as many people as the other three combined. Why? He didn't do it with any drama. He just went blood-rage and slaughtered a couple families. Only reason I know about him is it happened down the street from my grandparents' house. We're not particularly concerned with violence perpetrated for a reason we understand - we're interested in violence perpetrated for a reason we have to puzzle out. Thus the fascination with serial killers over mass murderers. Shoot up a Hollwood Video? nobody remembers. Make lampshades out of people's skins? Now we're talking a string of cheap slasher films. There's also an aspect of "ookyness" to mental illness; while schizophrenia is represented in 1% of the population of the United States, fully a third of all homeless people suffer from it. And while it's true that schizophrenics are more likely to suffer from violence than they are to commit it, they're also a lot more likely to commit it than sane individuals. There's disagreement about whether this is fundamental to the illness or an associated symptom due to an increase in substance abuse (self-medication) and an attendant participation in crime. We shun the mentally ill; florid portrayals of the mentally ill as "other" is probably more an effect than a cause.
Interesting article. But talking about inaccurate portrayal, which subject is ever portrayed even remotely accurately by Hollywood? You don't make money by being accurate. Because that would require far more intelligence which beyond most of the people busy munching popcorn and gulping a giant coke.