Inside Out and Mental Illness

I watched Inside Out after a friend of mine had told me that it was a movie about a “screwed up” mind. But what I took away from the movie was Disney’s addressing on mental illness.

The movie focuses on 5 emotions in 11-year-old Riley’s head: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust, whereby Joy the titular character, is Riley’s dominant emotion. When Riley’s family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco, Joy goes at lengths to ensure her move is smooth and joyous while keeping Sadness away from the control center. However, Sadness starts touching Riley’s previously happy “core memories”; Joy somewhat gets into a brawl with Sadness and they are accidentally banished from the headquarters. With only Anger, Fear and Disgust left in her state of mind, everything starts to go downhill, and Riley spirals in a series of bad decisions that go against everything about her personality.

But what struck me was that Sadness didn’t seem to be intentionally making Riley sad. She actually didn’t seem to want Riley to be sad. She is remorseful and profusely apologizes, explaining that explaining that she doesn’t know why she’s doing it and that she doesn’t mean to mess things up.

I soon realized that Disney was trying to address an important issue in today’s dog-eat-dog world; the issue of mental illness, especially amongst teens. It was trying to emphasize the importance of feeling and embracing sadness: when we keep denying ourselves the right to be vulnerable and sad, our feelings instead bottle up, causing us to further escalate into a spiral of depression. Our pursuit of happiness should not necessitate fighting and pushing away our negative emotions.

To me, the portrayal of Joy and Sadness working together to get back to headquarters reminded me that our highs and lows, our strengths and weakness are packaged deals. As Joy finally gave the control to Sadness, when we finally acknowledge that sadness is an inherent and natural component of our feelings, we are more able to rationalize our thoughts and actions. When we embrace sadness, we come to realize that after the rain, comes a beautiful rainbow.

Inside Out was a reassuring move on Disney’s part to address issues not just pertinent to teenagers but also to adults alike. Many of us live with unhealthy “screwed up” minds, but do not allow ourselves to embrace vulnerability.

However, I do wish that Disney could have better depicted Riley being in control of her own mind, rather than the emotions literally controlling her mind. To some extent, it does seem to give off the message that the power of our emotions on our actions and behaviour are insurmountable.