Mental health is an important part of every living person's life and throughout our lives we’re bound to have some heavy encounters with it. Regardless if you are dealing with mental health struggles or have been around someone with specific struggles of their own, it’s almost a guarantee.

I had recently finished a complete binge watch of the TV Show “Bates Motel” which ran from 2013-2017 on A&E. Bates Motel is not only a fantastic watch from start to finish for any horror or thriller fan, but it had a profound impact on me as an artist and human being. Mental health is essentially a major factor in this show’s storyline but even deeper, Bates Motel dives into how your mental health can affect the people you love.

Underneath all of the violence and fictional aspects of the storyline, there is a very real factor of relatability. Quoting directly from Wikipedia: “A Contemporary Prequel to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho, Depicting the lives of Norman and Norma Bates” The show is a slow build up to a massive decline of one’s mental health that can unfortunately be seen in humans today, albeit sometimes in a much less extreme manner. 

Starting with the character of Norman Bates, the obvious center piece of the show and the ultimate case of a mentally unstable person. If you take away his exaggerated actions, underneath everything is a person who paid the ultimate price for ignoring his own mental health. Surrounded by people that love him unconditionally, unfortunately this is also a factor in his death. Norman struggles with many different mental illnesses and issues ranging from multiple personality disorder to bipolar disorder. Norman was realistically ignoring his own reality but even worse the people around him were also ignoring that very same reality. The main catalyst here for Norman is his mother Norma, the one person that tried to protect him became his downfall. When you love someone unconditionally you’ll find yourself going to great lengths to protect them even to a fault. This is exactly what happened here in this mother and son relationship, as we all know there is no bond like parents with their children. Norma Bates continued to feed her son's actions throughout the story by justifying that she was protecting him, yet simultaneously making his situation worse without knowing it. Most mothers would agree that they would do anything to keep their children out of jail or harms way, that’s exactly what Norma did to the very end and to a degree it’s always respectable. This situation shows that sometimes too much love can end up hurting the ones you’re trying to help while also putting yourself at risk by being so blinded by love. 

Norma did everything to fully help Norman but let him go and heal on his own. Unfortunately cases like these are far too common in the real world and I couldn’t help notice the reality of it all. Parents and Grandparents can truly love you to the bitter end but sometimes can’t recognize when you need to be helped in different ways. The mother and son relationship can be an unbreakable one and when you add in mental illness to the equation it can become very dangerous for everyone involved. A struggle like watching a loved one deteriorate while also wanting to protect them is a special type of emotional hell. The dynamic of a mother and mentally ill son's relationship is perfectly summed up when I realized that Norman and Norma are simultaneously thinking they’re protecting each other from the horrors they experienced in their early lives. Two mentally damaged people trying to protect each other is a situation all too common in the real world that leads to bad outcomes if it isn’t addressed properly.