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Thu 03 Mar 2007Getting tangled up in bluesDespite their fascination with mental illness, few films and television shows get close to the dull truth of what it's like to have a mental disorder, writes former depressive Tim LottMy earliest recollections of madness are inevitably gothic - gothic being the cultural form that the theme of mental instability most naturally evokes. Hence my childhood and adolescent memories are branded with the raving Prince of Denmark, the baroque melancholy of Miss Havisham, the off-the-register psychosis of Rochester's wife, and the maudlin drifting into twilight of Blanche DuBois. This, as I grew up, was how I imagined mental illness to be, something far removed from ordinary life - melodramatic, overblown, almost otherworldly.