TV Show House Goes Further in Its Support of Mental Illness -- Spoiler Alert

If you are a fan of the tv show HOUSE and haven't watched the April 6th episode, I'm warning you that there's a spoiler ahead. You've been warned.

In my February 3rd blog post "Popular TV Show HOUSE Uses Its Star Power to Support Mental Health" I applauded that the tv show has been raising a great deal of money to support the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Tonight the show dealt with suicide and a search for the cause of that suicide. At the end of the show there was a public service announcement about what to do if you are in crisis. And then there was another announcement:

If viewers wanted to leave a message for the person who had killed himself -- they could go to www.fox.com/kutner and leave a message.

I had just written a blog post at www.FictionMarketing.com about when people act as if fictional characters are real. And my immediate reaction to the web page to leave messages for "Dr. Kutner" is that this blurring of what is fiction and what is reality has gone too far.

Yes, I cried during the show, but I was crying for the fictional character. No, I don't want to demean the death of real suicides by leaving messages for a fictional tv character.

What are your thoughts about this?
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Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL and the co-author of the Jewish holiday book SEASONS FOR CELEBRATION. She also blogs at Mrs. Lieutenant and Operation Support Jews in the Military, and she is the co-host of the BlogTalkRadio show Your Military Life. Her company Miller Mosaic LLC builds call-to-action websites for book authors and small businesses.

Popular TV Show HOUSE Uses Its Star Power to Support Mental Health

The January 30th Daily Variety issue celebrated the 100th episode of the Fox drama series HOUSE. (Full disclosure – I’m a fan of the show.)

As I flipped through the several pages of the special section, I stopped at the full-page ad of the actors who play Dr. House and Dr. Foreman. Both actors were wearing a black t-shirt with the words “Normal’s Overrated” on the shirts. At the bottom of the full-page ad were these words:

Buy a T-shirt. Change a life. Purchase a T-shirt from housecharitytees.com and you will help the National Alliance on Mental Illness end mental illness and improve the lives of all who are affected.

What was this ad about? I looked for an article in the special section that would explain the ad. The article by Jon Weisman, entitled “Charity reaps benefit of skein’s support,” noted:

In October, the U.S. government passed the Mental Health Parity Act, requiring health insurance companies to evaluate mental illness on the same basis as physical illness. The law was a long-term mission of the National Alliance of Mental Illness, which “House” has dedicated itself to supporting.

I don’t know where I’ve been in these past 100 episodes, but it appears that in the second season executive producer Katie Jacobs decided “to get out in front of a charitable organization so that we could all sort of own it, feel attached to it.”

And apparently the show has been raising “hundreds of thousands of dollars for the charity, creating cast-heavy ads that have run in Seventeen and Rolling Stone as well as T-shirts that have sold online.”

If you want to be part of this very worthwhile cause, buy your Normal’s Overrated T-shirt now as proceeds go to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. I just did.