A personal journey to “the haunting of hill house” and the problem of mental health
*There will be spoilers, not about the story but the scenes and events*
I’ll give you the take-home message here in case you don’t want to read the whole post. I thought the people who are dealing with mental disorders are like the family while the house is their internal conflicts and wars. I wrote some personal examples and concluded by a suggestion:
Try watching the haunting of hill house remembering that there are actually people out there (might be your close friend) who are dealing with the same terror every night, unable to express themselves because maybe you’re in the community of non-believers for them. Are you?
Well, that said, let’s start the trip. I can’t remember the last time that I dragged into a TV series like this. I don’t even watch TV series because I simply don’t have the time for it but yesterday I started watching this one because a friend of mine recommended it and I had nothing else to do for two hours. I started and then I couldn’t stop anymore, I finished the whole series in one night and found myself emotionally exhausted afterwards.
I realized that I can understand and feel many of the characters in the story, I had the same feelings, same concerns, same thoughts, same experiences, and even same coping mechanisms. To me, it was like I am the family and the house at the same time. let me give you some examples starting with the bent-neck lady, as a child, I experienced tons of sleep paralysis and I still do sometimes. The hallucinations are vivid, detailed, and horrifying. The difference is now I know why it happens and there’s nothing paranormal about it but as a child, I was just freaking out because of them. I clearly remember once seeing a transparent kinda glowing ghostly figure moving slowly towards me and bending over me. In my childish thoughts I was throwing out every prayer I knew to protect myself from that demon but it wasn’t working so that thing smiled at me like “you have no power here” and pushed itself inside me from my chest. I then jumped up feeling that it’s in me and I’m possessed. That feeling stayed with me for weeks so seeing that goddamn bent-neck lady made me put myself in Nell’s story, which to be honest was the worst.
I was Nell in that family until I noticed that Olivia (the mom) is losing her mind over a pretty stupid thought: “my children will suffer if they stay alive”. Guess who had the same intrusive thoughts a few years ago? When I was about 23 I had an emotional trauma that kicked my dark side out of control, I was trapped into different painful scenarios that I had no control over them and I had to spend a huge effort keeping up while they were playing in my head. One of them was this stupid thought of “by merely existing, living, being, your loved ones are suffering and you can’t do anything about it” this was my breaking point because the following solutions were either kill yourself and don’t see them suffering or kill them and stop the innate pain. That was one of the reasons that I sought professional help, I’ve been diagnosed with OCD and I’m taking medications ever since. So, I was Nell and Olivia now, I could understand their pain and it was already kinda a lot but that wasn’t all! Somewhere at the end Hugh (the dad) was holding his wife’s body crying out “I can fix this, I can fix this”. Oh, here we go again, that urge to “fix” your loved one’s problem while you know you literally can’t do anything kicked in again.
The horror, for me, wasn’t those pale ghosts and jump-scares (of course they worked well!) but the flashback to my own dark side. Nowadays, I’m advocating against stigmatisation of mental illnesses, especially OCD because this is the one I dealt with myself. This TV series is one of the best examples for healthy people to feel how is it for us to fight with ourselves over obviously wrong thoughts. Of course, I know I can’t fix everything or I can’t stop the suffering but ruminating on this is still capable of pushing me to a full-blown panic attack. I know that the hallucinations during a sleep paralysis is a product of a confused brain but I can’t hold the fear while it’s happening. It works when I’m out and awake.
I found some other concepts like, probably, Anhedonia (when Theo was crying out loud over that experience of “not being able to feel anything”), and interestingly, the way that psychiatrist put the idea of going back to the house in Nell’s mind. Yes, this is a huge problem for another post.
I wrote all of these, openly talked about my own experiences and tried to map them over different events in this TV series because I strongly believe that the ghosts, the house, and the whole haunting stuff are not there to make it another generic haunted house movie, they’re all real for those who are experiencing them. Let me make this clear before wrapping it up, I don’t think that this is the main point and concept behind the haunting of hill house. Actually, it doesn’t fit the ending but it worths using them as an analogy. We can relate to a headache, we easily understand the situation of people who are experiencing a Migraine. We’re also kinda ok at understanding Depression, we’ve been sad before so when we notice our friend is, by definition, depressed, we tend to support them but usually we can’t relate to Schizophrenia, Delusions, Hallucinations, random panics and phobias, and of course, intrusive thoughts. Want to experience the struggle? try watching the haunting of hill house remembering that there are actually people out there (might be your close friend) who are dealing with the same terror every night, unable to express themselves because maybe you’re in the community of non-believers for them. Are you?
