Welcome and Gleecap

Hello!  This is Abbey, Dianna, and Heather here, and we welcome you to our blog.  We will be posting weekly about a TV show or movie that features mental health issues/a character on the show in therapy.  We'll be critiquing and evaluating the issues featured as well as discussing how accurate/ethical the therapy session is.
First up on our show evaluation list is the show Glee.  For those of you unfamiliar with the show, it is about a Glee club in a high school in Lima, Ohio.  The show features the students in the club as well as the teachers at their high school.  Amidst the musical numbers and comedy, Glee also tackles some more serious and hard-hitting issues.  Today's post is going to look at the character of Emma Pillsbury.  Emma is the guidance counselor at the school, and she has been struggling with Obsessive-Compulsive disorder for the majority of her life.  Here's Emma engaging in her obsessive behavior, cleaning:

Emma's OCD has been an ongoing piece of her character throughout the series.  Emma's OCD is first discussed in episode 2 of Season 1, Showmance.  Will (the coach of the Glee club and Emma's potential love interest) takes on a second job as a part-time janitor and tries to help Emma overcome her cleaning obsession.  He talks with Emma about where her thoughts around cleaning began, and it is revealed that when she was 5 years old, she was visiting a farm with her family and her brother shoved her in a horse trough.  The experience of being shoved in the trough and becoming dirty set something off, and from then on she become obsessive about being clean all the time.  Emma is focused on cleanliness in all realms, from her food to being unable to have a real relationship due to her fear of becoming dirty.  Her OCD causes all of her romantic relationships to dissolve, including her marriage that occurs in the second season.  Emma's OCD truly comes to a point of extreme debalitation in episode 18 of Season 2, Born This Way.  The focus of the episode is accepting yourself for who you are, flaws and all.  Will is very encouraging of Emma to get help and overcome her disorder, but at times becoming too overbearing and trying to utilize techniques that are not healthy/affective, such as suggesting she wear a shirt emblazoned with OCD on it.  During this episode, Will also tries to have Emma eat unwashed fruit (Emma always washes her fruit before eating it) and becomes very mean to her about her behaviors.  Will's statements and attempts to help her finally work enough to make her want to change and get help, and Emma begins attending therapy toward the episode.  Emma spends her entire first therapy session cleaning the leather chair in her therapist's office.  48 minutes into the session, Emma deems the chair clean enough to sit down in, at which point her therapist tells her it is clear she has a severe case of OCD and talks with her about her symptoms and how therapy and medication can help her overcome her feelings.  After talking about stigma and how Emma's illness is severely debilitating, the therapist self-discloses that she herself suffered from post-partum depression.  She then prescribes an anti-depressant for Emma to help her begin recovering, and suggests she return a week later.  Toward the end of the episode Emma is shown taking her first pill, and then decides to fully embrace her disorder by creating a shirt that says OCD on it to show that is something she dislikes about herself but was born with.

The episode then closes with a performance of Lady Gaga's "Born this Way" and that is the end of the focus on Emma's OCD for quite some time, until a few episodes in during the third season.

I have a number of thoughts about the therapy session and it's portrayal during the episode.  First off, I think the therapist should have established some limits with Emma and stopped her in her cleaning routine before the end of the session.  Yes, it would have made Emma uncomfortable to sit in a chair she had not completely disinfected, but they wasted an entire therapy session where they could have been making some progress and the therapist could have been getting valuable intake information.  Also, I did not like the therapist self-disclosing that she suffered from post-partum depression.  I think that is a level of self-disclosure that oversteps the boundaries between client/therapist, and that it was extremely unnecessary to the therapy session.  It also featured the cliche line, "the first step is admitting you have a problem" which I believe is overused and not really effective in the therapeutic setting.  The therapist also basically just wrote Emma a prescription and sent her on her way, suggesting she come back in a week but not bothering to make another appointment or ensure Emma would really be coming back in.  The final issue I had is that the therapist simply suggested "behavioral" interventions.  While I think behavioral interventions are extremely important and have great results, particularly in a case like this, Emma has a number of deep psychological issues from her past that need to be looked at in the therapy session.  Her relationship with her parents, her experiences that led her to engage in her obsessive behaviors, her failed relationships; all of these are things that could be explored in therapy that would most likely help provide some understanding of why she engages in the behavior she does.

Overall, I think it was a better portrayal of therapy than I have seen on most shows, but I still had some problems with it, particularly the self-disclosure piece.  Please feel free to leave any questions or comments you may have on the episode, and we'll be posting again next week!