What Does Disney do to Mental Health?

With backgrounds in medical humanities and school therapy and social work, Jenifer Fisher and Nikki York describe a recent project analysing Disney films in terms of how they depict poverty and mental illness and what solutions they present to these problems (almost always: get yourself rescued by one perfect relationship). Their analysis found a strong, and realistic, correlation between characters' adverse childhood experiences (ACE) score (a measure of neglect and abuse) and the incidence of poverty and mental illness in their portrayals. Our conversation explores concepts of the 'self-made man' and the 'virtuous poor', the reduction in emphasis on poverty in films since 1937, and the dangerous consequences of presenting singular relationships as solutions to mental health problems.