The Dark Knight. Have you seen it?

All right, you know the part where Harvey Dent has been roughing up one of the Joker's maniacally laughing henchmen (you know, the one that had Rachel's name on his nametag), and Batman shows up and explains to Harvey that the guy has been busted out of a hospital, that he's exactly the sort of freak that the Joker wants working for him because he's HIV positive and therefore sick, twisted and deviant?

Wait...what? It didn't happen like that!

Okay, maybe it happened like this: Batman shows up and explains to Harvey that the laughing maniac has been busted out of a hospital because he's blind and deaf and is therefore a sinful abomination before God and so, just the sort of freak that the Joker...

No, no, no! It didn't happen that way either! That's horrible, Lauren, how can you write that?

You've got me. What actually happened in the movie was that Batman identified the henchmen as being Joker-worthy because he was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic.

Ah! Well, that's perfectly all right, then. Because everybody knows that schizophrenics really are violent maniacs who love to kill people randomly. That's scientifically sound, unlike all that claptrap about people with HIV being twisted deviants or the physically handicapped being sinful abominations...right?

Umm...no.

Last night, I went to see The Dark Knight, the latest incarnation of Batman on the silver screen, and the aforementioned scene angered me so much that I nearly walked out of the theater. Wanna know why it was only “nearly”?

Because the movie was just that good. I've been a Batman fan since I was about five years old, and I adored this film. It was better than the first in this series, gritty and dramatic, grounded in reality, with superb writing. And the acting? Oh! I could rhapsodize for hours about how the late Heath Ledger's performance really does live up to all the hype, or how the always-brilliant Gary Oldman has made this incarnation of Commissioner Gordon into a character worth standing up and applauding, or why Christian Bale is the once and future Batman...

But I won't. At least, not yet. I'm too busy thinking about some of the people I've known in my life - people living with schizophrenia – and what a tiny little toss-off line in a big, big movie will do to their lives.

Before I proceed, let me make one thing crystal clear: there is no truth, none whatsoever, in the commonly-held belief that schizophrenia turns people into perpetrators of random, maniacal violence. Nearly all schizophrenics have no history of violence (other than very common struggles with self-injury), and those who aren't violent don't suddenly “snap” and start killing people. This is because schizophrenia does not cause violent tendencies. Sure, it can exacerbate existing tendencies, can make someone who's already violent (for the same reasons any of us “sane” people are violent) more dangerous and unpredictable, but it won't turn a decent person into a danger. Even if every schizophrenic in the world experienced auditory hallucinations in the form of voices telling him or her to “kill,” they would have a choice of whether or not to obey.

Had Christian Bale been given the line, “He's a paranoid schizophrenic with a violent history,” I wouldn't be complaining, but he wasn't. It was just “paranoid schizophrenic,” and lines like that in popular media add layers and layers to the already paralyzingly thick stigma our society has against people with mental illness, stigma which makes it nearly impossible for them to try to live the normal lives that everyone deserves.

I used to work with schizophrenics, along with others who had mental illness, as a disability employment specialist. Not a single one of the dozen of schizophrenics I had as clients had a history of violent behavior. Yet nothing would get a job interview ended more quickly for one of them than making the choice of disclosing their diagnosis. Interviewers would ask a few questions about whether my clients were going to snap and kill all of their coworkers, then quickly show us the door. I would try to explain to them about myths and stigma, would give them my card and tell them to please call me to talk about the non-existent risk they were worried about.

No one ever called me. After all, what did I know? I, a mental health practitioner, might say that schizophrenics aren't dangerous, but hey, the movies said otherwise.

Not all movies, maybe. Russell Crowe won an Oscar just a few years back for his portrayal of mathematician John Nesh in A Beautiful Mind, but now, do people remember what disorder Nesh suffered from?

Couldn't have been schizophrenia. Who ever heard of a mathematician working for the Joker?