Can I please take a moment to rant about Alice Madness Return’s portrayal of mental illness!???!
Alice Madness Returns by American Mcgee is a horror story about mental illness. And it never ONCE demonizes the mentally ill. Alice is a deeply traumatized individual. She has intense PTSD after the death of her family that left her in a comatose state for years. She then wakes up and leaves the asylum she was kept at and goes to see a therapist. Alice is struggling with PTSD, depression, and possibly more things that she’d likely never be diagnosed with in her current setting: 1870s England.
That is what the game is about, a psychological gory horror game about a mentally ill young woman. Yet the fear and horror doesn’t come from her. It comes from the abuse she has suffered. The images she faces in her wonderland are monsters trying to keep her in her suffering, representations of her trauma and survivor’s guilt. It’s people she faced in real life, doctors who performed terrible experiments and “treatments” on her, like leeches and electro shock.
The main villain in Madness Returns is her current therapist who has been hurting and abusing her. He’s the one that made her wonderland worse, he’s the one that forced her back to her coping mechanism. The ENTIRE concept of wonderland in the games is a mentally ill person’s fight against their illness and their struggles to recovery when faced with no support system, and being treated by a society who sees her as a freak or monster, that fails to understand her, and only damages her mental health.
She’s forced back to her wonderland after the first game because of her therapist, because of his abuse. But she’s able to move past it when she rejects the way she’s been treated. When she confronts him on the evil things he’s been doing to his patients. (and quiet satisfyingly, pushing him in front of a train)
It could have been so easy to make it into another story that uses mentally ill people as a way to scare neurotypicals. But instead it’s a power fantasy for people isolated and struggling with their mental health. At least, that’s how I view it as a neurodivergent person. I always thought that Alice was so inspiring. She even has a great moment with her previous nanny, basically saying that society is going to chew you up and spit you out, and it’s up to you to protect yourself. It’s up to you to fight for the way you need to be treated.
Even in the scariest, goriest, grossest part of the game, during the Asylum level, the fear is watching poor hurt Alice being tortured by the monstrous doctors and caretakers. A tragic truth about what real people when through back then in those kinds of facilities.
The real horror isn’t the mental illness. It’s the abuse mentally ill people go through from society.
And I am just SO THANKFUL we have these games. These crazy, gory, action, horror games that gives us an AWESOME mentally ill protagonist!
TL:DR The games could have just used mental illness to exploit harmful stereotypes but instead used it as an inspiring story about overcoming trauma and an abusive system that rejects mentally ill people.
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