I was always under the impression that the erasure technique was a relatively new art form, one that had not been popularized until recently. I had seen a few poems and pages out of various older texts, like The Catcher in the Rye and The Old Man and the Sea, with words blacked out and the new words left on the page to create a new meaning. However, when doing further research, I discovered that the erasure technique was first seen in 1965 in Doris Cross’s book art “Dictionary Columns” (King.) Since then, it has gained popularity, and became even more popular in 2017; it's used a lot to make political commentaries (Stone.) It had been used many times in government and military secrecy, when documents made public had sensitive material censored in black marker, called redaction. In 2010, Author Jonathan Safran Foer’s erasure of a book by Bruno Schultz was published. Tree of Codes, an erasure of The Street of Crocodiles, attempted to represent the immense loss of lives in the Holocaust by taking Schultz’s text (he was killed by Nazi soldiers in the Ukraine,) and using erasure to show this loss in words left unsaid in his original text (King.)

           In performing erasure on my essay, I hope to shed light on some aspects of mental illness that would have otherwise been hidden behind the length and wordiness of my essay. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, millions of Americans suffer from some kind of mental illness (Numbers.) 18.5% of adults in the United States are diagnosed with a mental illness in a given year, and 4% of Americans will experience a mental illness that interferes with major life activity. With 1.1% of adults living with Schizophrenia, 2.6% of adults living with bipolar disorder, 6.9% with depression, 18.1% with anxiety disorders, and 50.5% of adults with substance use disorder also suffering from a co-occurring mental illness, mental health is a topic that can no longer be avoided in society today. Popular culture takes many of these disorders and sensationalizes them; in movies and television, characters with some type of mental illness often become the most interesting. But in their portrayal of people as “crazy,” “unhinged” and “murderous,” they do more harm than good.

            Shameless is different. The majority of the characters in the show suffer from some type of mental illness, with the most prevalent being addiction. The depictions of their problems are startlingly realistic: it’s so hard to watch father of six Frank Gallagher fail to take care of his children, and even harder to see eldest daughter Fiona forced to step up and take the place of her absent and struggling father. Along with addiction, third oldest son Ian is diagnosed with Bipolar I disorder, an illness that makes it almost impossible for a person to function and live a normal life without some sort of medication. The viewers see Ian’s pain and personal struggle with trying to find work, and we feel for him after he finally gets a job as an EMT, only to be fired after his employers learn of his illness. This kind of discrimination is very prevalent in our society, even if we are unaware of it, and Shameless makes it impossible to deny. I hope to bring these concerns and accurate portrayals to life in my sample.