8 Damaging Ways Pro Wrestling Tackled Mental Health Problems

7. Wrestlers' Insanity Is Poorly Written And Fleeting

As an example of this point, consider the curious cases of Stardust & Little Jimmy. Cody Rhodes has gone off the deep end, and no one seems to care about that very much. He has Dissociative Identity Disorder, but don't worry, he's not crazy. He's just written that way. After losing too many matches, Cody Rhodes became Stardust and starting acting like a playschooler's drawing of a crazy man. He prances, he giggles, he's prone to stream of consciousness babbling, all the major food groups. His persona was full of general 'crazy' cliches, but then he started going darker with it. He got deeper into his character, so much so that his brother, Goldust, feared for him and the two had a mini-feud. Afterwards, he proclaimed to his brother and father that his other personality, his other 'self', Cody, was dead. And that was the end of the angle. A character reached the nadir of major psychosis, and then poof, the writing staff moved on, they're done with that story. Having Cody be joke-crazy and fading into irrelevancy is one thing, but having him wrestling with actual personal, psychopathic problems and fading into irrelevancy is something a lot more worrying, as if mental health is an issue that will just go away after a bit, don't worry about it. Case in point: Little Jimmy. R-Truth used to imagine a little boy following him everywhere. People remember that, right? He used to talk to himself and imagine that a small boy, who only he could see, called Little Jimmy, followed him around. It was really weird, and was evidently the symptom of some mental breakdown, but everyone treated it as a joke, as Truth being a 'looney' and eventually the storyline was dropped. Truth was cured by time and by the audience just ignoring it for a bit - and by lazy writing. It's a dangerous precedent to set, just like ...