The tragic case of Nicola Bulley shows the public want real news to be Happy Valley style entertainment drama

Exposing a dark obsession with violence and persistent mental health stigma

In May it will be 16 years since 3 year old Madeline McCann disappeared from her family’s holiday apartment in Portugal yet her photo on a newspaper front page is still a major selling point today. Despite 170,000 people going missing every year in the UK I fear the public has again become fixated on another single missing person with hysterical obsessiveness. Nicola Bulley does indeed seem to have vanished into thin whilst walking her dog on 27^thJanuary. The fact that there seemed no obvious explanation for a ‘happy’ mother of two to just take off understandably captured wide interest. However when it became clear that the police did not primarily suspect anyone else was involved and were focused on searching the river, the public and media were outraged. Indeed that outrage only intensified when the police provided clear reasons for their approach, namely that Nicola was vulnerable and likely a risk to herself. Every decent soul hopes and prays that Nicola will be returned safely to her family. However, whatever has happened to this poor woman, the widespread visceral rejection of the idea that she may not have been a victim of evil criminals is very revealing of our current collective psyche.

Only weeks ago it seemed like everyone was raving about the magnificent BBC drama Happy Valley. This centres around villain Tommy Lee Royce, who infamously abducted, imprisoned and raped a young woman with psychopathic pleasure in the first series. In the darkest way he capture popular imagination, especially pitted against the feisty Sargent Catherine Cawood, his inspiring nemesis. We all need some escapism from our daily life worries and TV drama certainly offers that. However, whatever one thinks of the popularity of brutal, ‘true to life’, crime dramas we need to realise that the line between fiction and real world news has become too easily blurred. It is not unreasonable to suggest that many people, whether consciously or not, almost want Nicola Bulley to be a victim in the style of a violent Happy Valley drama. They want a real news story that they can follow, speculate on and that entertains them like the fictitious storylines available on Netflix, BBC, Amazon Prime or any of the other every increasing outlets. 

  Perhaps part of the problem is that we access both all our news information and entertainment on the same electronic devices. Our phones are now an extension of our brains, never leaving our sides and a data base of everything we need to know. Importantly they’re also a source of news updates, be it about the latest episode of whatever series we’re into or information on what’s happening in the real world around us. Notifications banners pop up with both the latest TV drama cliff hangers and the latest news headlines. I wonder whether being so immersed in the screen world, often looking more into the blue light rather than the sunlight, is shaping our expectations of life and even our sense of reality.

   There is also a dreadful hypocrisy in the outcry over the police revealing personal information about Nicola Bulley’s vulnerabilities. The people who never stop banging on about the need to talk about mental health and ‘smashing mental health stigma’ have been referring to alcoholism and menopause related mental struggles as ‘smears’. ‘They’re trying to make out she was a menopausal drunk’, was a popular remark, not just on social media but by commentators on popular news channels. Whatever you think about the police’s decision, in consultation with the family, to go into some detail around Nicola’s health problems, to say it’s ‘trashing her reputation’ is increasing the stigma around certain illnesses. Even in a Telegraph article, which rightly points out the ghoulish obsession with Nicola’s case, the headline is that ‘the police threw her reputation under the bus.’ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/02/17/victim-shaming-nicola-bulley-has-thrown-unflattering-light-modern/  According to that way of thinking being an alcoholic or suffering mental ill health trashes a persons reputation. Many of us had hoped we had moved beyond that way of thinking. Ironically perhaps Nicola’s family thought putting the emphasis on the peri menopause rather than mental health generally would incur less judgement! That would have been a reasonable assumption as only in the last months there have been significant public campaigns to have more awareness of the often severe problems faced by women going through the menopause. There was even a debate about encouraging employers to make special provision for menopausal women, as they would for those with disabilities.  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-64553260 But these days holding contradictory beliefs doesn’t appear to be a problem for far too many people. 

    ‘Stop victim blaming’, is also a widespread cry amongst the reactions to the revelations about Nicola Bulley’s health status. The public had clearly decided that Nicola Bulley was a victim of some horrific crime from the moment they saw her beautiful smiling face and learnt she was a mother of two with a doting partner. Willow, her gorgeous spaniel completed the picture. Here was the perfect victim. After all, what reason would such a woman have to leave her ‘perfect’ life behind her? Why on earth would a good mother leave her children? For all the claims that we now understand and accept mental ill health better than ever, the old stereotypes and ignorance still abounds. Plenty of fantastic parents, loving partners and generally wonderful people have mental crises that can lead to them end their lives. You just won’t hear about them in a news bulletin. We might hear that suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50 in the UK. But do those men have a public face? Arguably women make more attractive victims for a ‘good’, harrowing drama. Rather than confront the multitude of complex, ‘unglamorous’ suffering in society, many of the public prefer to be fixated on and savour a Netflix worthy crime drama, preferably with abductions and basement imprisonments thrown in.  Scared locals in St Michael on Wye where Nicola Bulley and her family live have even had to seek the help of a private security firm to protect them from wannabe sleuths, rattling locks on sheds and peering in windows. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11762663/Village-locals-Nicola-Bulley-went-missing-hiring-private-security-company-council-chief-says.html As with so many politicians these days, many want to be the hero in their own hit drama.

Collectively as a society we’ve been through a lot in the last three years. Individually many have suffered greatly and suffer still. There has been a lot of fear, anxiety, hurt, anger, resentment and confusion. All these emotions need an outlet and too much is being channelled into real life psycho dramas like that being woven around poor Nicola Bulley. In psychoanalysis ‘catharsis’ means to let out, discharge or purge previously repressed emotions caused by trauma via bringing them back up to the surface. This causes the patient to re-experience the emotions in a safe therapeutic environment, to be helped to better understand them and to let them go. However by becoming so involved in specific real life crime dramas is deflecting us from dealing with the actual issues we all need to process. It’s also dangerously blurring the lines between fantasy and fact. Furthermore it’s a massive distraction from the huge problems that threaten us all – corruption and bad actors on a global scale, a largely criminal pharmaceutical industry, a cost of living crisis impoverishing and ruining lives and, dare I say, the hypocrisy of people who claim to care about stigma around mental health and then perpetuate it themselves.