The Heroes Must Be Crazy!! Or, Watch Out, Another Rant!

So, as you've no doubt heard, DC has a new concept: Heroes In Crisis. It seems the Big Three (Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman) have set up Sanctuary, a crisis/rehab center for heroes suffering from physical and emotional trauma.

Now, that's not a bad idea in and of itself, but of course, DC is immediately turning it into an excuse to kill and denigrate more heroes:

Well, it's been nice knowing you, Kyle Rayner.

See, the premise of the series is that someone is going to go berserk and kill most of the patients at sanctuary, and rumors are that's it's going to be a traumatized hero who does the killing. Yup, the facility for heroes is going to have a higher body count than Arkham. Because my gosh, DC is too busy exalting villains to have one of them be the bad guy. They're too busy worshiping Identity Crisis (still) to come up with other ideas than "look, our heroes really suck."

Now, as part of the run-up to Heroes In Crisis, DC went out and hired an actual mental health professional to tell us exactly how screwed up their heroes are.

I wish I were making that up.

So, in last week's promotional DC Nation #4 (free on Comixology), we get these profiles.

 OK, well, we all know Batman is screwed up.

But surely this professional armchair psychology can't be applied to Superman, can it?

 So wait, why did Clark adopt the Superman identity?

 Oh, I thought maybe it to better help people, and be an inspiration to us.

And that diagnosis again?

Superman, ladies and gentlemen.

Geez, what about Wonder Woman?

You'll note how hard they had to work to actually give Diana a mental disorder there, as if it were a requirement of the article that this guy find that all DC heroes have mental health problems.

Now, another real-life mental health professional, PhD Janina Scarlet, ripped into this malarkey at Psychology Today:

I'll let the psychoanalysts and psychiatrists and mental health counselor argue it out about whether this is a good practice or not.

What is infinitely more telling is this: DC hired a mental health professional to tell us that every member of the Trinity has mental health disorders. That being a hero means that there is something wrong with you. That the characters who are supposed to be our aspirational heroes, whom we're supposed to want to emulate, have dissociative traits, and adjustment disorders, and deficit attachment disorder.

Once more, because this cannot be emphasized enough: DC did this on purpose. They WANT you to believe that the greatest heroes are heroes only because they're effed up and miserable and unhappy.

Perhaps DC should have hired a psychoanalyst to judge DC's own comic writers, based solely on their writings. Maybe John Foster Elliot, MA, LMFT, could give us diagnoses for writers and publishers who constantly turn good guys into murderers. The writer who had Superboy-Prime behead Pantha--what kind of disorder does he have? What about the guy who had the wife of a super-hero raped by a villain, and then murdered by the ex-wife of another hero? What about co-publishers and chief creative officers who declare that heroes can't be married, and must be unhappy and have traumatic events in their past, or they can't be heroes? Since you're giving out pat armchair diagnoses, what, exactly, would you say is wrong with them? And what about the creators who take serious mental health issues, and use them as an excuse to murder heroes, in a mental health facility that has spectacularly failed before the first issue is even published?

DC psychiatrists, heal thyselves.