ABSTRACT
Professional wrestling has long relied on broad stereotypes of mental illness to position certain characters, both male and female, as “crazy” or “insane.” In recent years, however, many women wrestlers have come forward with competing messages about mental illness by sharing their real-life struggles with depression, bipolar disorder, and more. This chapter considers how the frank discussions occurring in tangential World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) programming such as Total Divas could potentially subvert mainstream professional wrestling’s longstanding negative portrayals of mental illness. Of course, there remains a discrepancy between how the performers are portrayed on WWE’s main programming (i.e. Raw, Smackdown) and how they are portrayed on tangential media (i.e. Total Divas, interviews, social media, etc.). Additionally, the entire professional wrestling industry still frequently falls back on regressive portrayals of women and mental illness. Yet the presence of tangential media portrayals and increasing access to the performers behind the characters may help to mitigate these stereotypical depictions. In this chapter, the authors explore wrestling’s shift toward more positive portrayals of mental illnesses such as manic-depressive illness and eating disorders.
