I just saw the pilot for Perception. I like the idea that they’re trying to portray a schizophrenic crime-solver sympathetically, in the mold of Monk for OCD but without the comedic elements. It’s intriguing enough to want to see the other episodes that have aired. I like the main character and several supporting cast members. There was a nice moment during his neuroscience class when he presented an argument for skepticism pretty much the way a philosopher would, a reminder schizophrenic author Philip K. Dick had skeptical philosophical themes in his writing, partly from his neurological condition and the impossibility to detect from within a hallucinatory experience that it is not reality, since it appears just as real as anything else. This is what schizophrenia really is like for many who experience it. I liked that he has to have a handler who lives with him and follows him around on campus to tell him when someone he’s interacting with is real or not. (But they don’t raise the question, at least yet, of what happens if he hallucinates the handler’s response to his questions.)

But two things bothered me. One is that they’re trying to portray a schizophrenic’s hallucinations as his subconscious mind trying to make sense of things his conscious mind can’t make sense of. I know it’s popular to emphasize the increased abilities that sometimes come with a disability, and these increased abilities are genuinely present in some cases with some disabilities (sometimes often present, sometimes very rarely). This is true with diminished senses and increased other senses, and it’s true of some increased cognitive abilities for some with autism, But this looks like a wholly-concocted special ability for schizophrenia, which as far as I’ve been able to discern is not a “different” neurological condition with some pros and many cons but is in fact simply a mental illness, with no pros. I may be wrong about that, and experts can feel free to correct me if I am, but I’ve never even heard of something like this, and it does an injustice to what is good in the neurodiversity movement to pretend there are good elements to a condition where there aren’t any, while bolstering what’s insidious about that movement by acting like every neurological condition has to have positive features, when that’s hardly the truth. ….

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