Malektojar 2
identity, gender representation, and the culture of mental health in North American societies. In addition to the many layers of Inside Out’s plot that people can choose to analyze at their leisure, this film is not presented way that would trigger people with existing mental health diagnoses like depression. This means that Inside Out can potentially act as a way for people with depression to illustrate to how they feel to their loved ones. Similarly, to the average viewer, Riley seems like a typical young girl. Upon further reflection, it can be seen that their experience and identity might not simply be that of a young girl, but rather someone who might not fully identify as female. That is truly the brilliance of Inside Out; it has so many layers and how one chooses to view it can provide them with a completely different experience while watching the same film. Throughout the film, Riley is never shunned by their community or by their parents. This is not always the case for people living in Western countries. Riley’s parents’ depict a constructive way people struggling with mental health can be treated without being shunned by their communities. Often, people who struggle with mental health in non-Western societies are better supported by their communities than people in
Western societies (Borges 2017). For example, in the documentary Crazywise, people in the African communities are nurtured by their peers rather than stigmatized (Borges 2017). Mental health care often starts with the people closest to the individual struggling with mental health. Riley’s parents thus can be catalysts for Riley to seek help from a mental health care professional; most health care professionals agree that this would be the ideal scenario (Corrigan, Druss, and Perlick 2014). Parents typically find it difficult to talk their children about their struggles with mental health because they worry that their child may actually be struggling with their mental health and could see this as a fault of their parenting (Liegghio 2017). Riley’s parents care for her in a way that they feel comfortable, but do not actually try and have an open conversation with Riley about her mental health. This is a conversation that would have been beneficial to see in the film, as it would de-stigmatized the practice of having open conversations about mental health with loved ones. Furthermore, the culture of mental health is well represented since the audience sees that people suffering with mental health are not necessarily outsiders. They can be average children like Riley or 75