![]()
The "Mad Villain" Trope in Popular Culture
From the cold, calculating serial killers of Criminal Minds, to the unpredictable loner in Joker or Nightcrawler, media narratives tend to present a fairly specific type of character: the neurodivergent criminal. The neurodivergent figure is usually depicted as being alone, socially isolated, exceptionally intelligent, and dangerous; the neurodivergent character is dangerous because its difference is a trigger warning.
Arguably, these narratives also have an effect on cultural understandings of who we deem a threat. Instead of inviting audiences to examine systemic causes of violence (e.g. poverty, trauma, lack of access/support), these stories imply that the deviance is in the brain of the individual. Therefore, its biological bases of crime become discovery, consequence, and pathologization of already misunderstood and stigmatized people.
As bad as these representations are, they are almost always exaggerated, often fictionalized, and rarely consulted with actual neurodivergent voices. In this way, we are left in a legally precarious loop of representation, bias, and then bias by representation.
Framing Mental Illness and the News Media
If films distort the representations of neurodivergence in service of entertainment and tension, it stands to reason that mainstream news utilizes the same associations. Headlines habitually speculate whether the perpetrator of mass shootings or high profile violent crime is mentally ill, even before the facts have been established. This perpetutate the fallacy that mental illness somehow equates to violence, despite evidence bears out that neurodivergent individuals are more often the victims of violence than the perpetrators of violence. News coverage rarely makes distinctions between diagnoses or takes a deeper examination of context. Mental health is a convenient and all encompassing explanation - it's a way to 'make sense' of these horrors. This simplistic framing relieves audiences' apprehension, but poses great harm to the lives of those living with neurodivergence because it provokes fear, discrimination, and alienation from public life. Similar to moral panics that reduce complicated social crises to easily-digested villains, this media logic minimizes complex persons to only being spectacles of fear. Once again, it answers the call for drama, while releasing institutions from more serious reflection.
Autism and Misconstrued Intent
Autistic individuals, by their neurobiological disaffinity to emotional reasoning and modulation, endure independent challenges while navigating/experiencing the justice system, and media representations. Attributes such as a flat affect or direct eye contact and misinterpretion of innocuous discomforts as antagonistic behaviours (ex. news articles specifying "disagreeable eyes") are put into evidence and misinterpreted by the police, lawyers, judges and juries as manifestations of guilt, or remorse, or dishonesty. Likewise, characters with traits of autism in criminal TV shows are mostly either nefarious tech savants, or bumbling social failures
These representations tacitly suggest that autism is some sort of pre-existing alien, or dangerous thing. But statistics indicate that those identified as autistic are incarcerated and brutalized at high rates, not because actuate criminal behaviours; rather, they are arrested due to the misinterpretation of the autistic nature of their communicative disposition. Surveillance and misidentification also cloud this reality. As discussed in the literature on portrayals of law enforcement, neurodivergent individuals are more readily subject to bias based on perceived unusual appearance and/or behavior. The systems that should deliver justice are too often utilized to impose marginalizing judgments.
The "Madness" of Spectacle?
Mental illness and neurodiversity are prevalent sources of spectacle for mass consumption. "Reality" shows, courtroom dramas, and viral videos have traditionally profiled breakdowns or harmful behavior as entertainment and voyeuristic content. There are innumerable TikTok and Youtube videos of “public freakouts” or “crazy criminals” where the individuals depicted were experiencing various levels of distress or states of altered consciousness. Although these sources could lead to developing awareness, they instead commodify suffering for the sake of clicks. The “madness” is turned into a revenue stream that reduces actual sufferings to viral minutes of consumption at an extreme distance. The viewing public tends to laugh, judge, or recoil, but rarely is there an invitation to understand. Digital environments also contribute to a broader commodity culture of human emotion, where anything containing or relating a person's trauma can be monetized. In an economy of attentional-labor where trauma sells, neurodivergent manifestations—particularly ones that are ahistorical, raw, or otherwise uncomfortable for a viewer—are assembled into content. The moral panic is conjoined with influencer culture, to enable new forms of punishment shrouded in entertainment.
Digital Vigilantism and Neurodivergence
Digital environments have enabled new forms of vigilantism. Digital vigilantism is the analyzing or speculating of a suspect's behavior from a person being profiled in a viral crime. Neurodivergent expressions—like posture difficulty, stimming, or unusual speech—are often misinterpreted as suspicious or disqualifying behavior. If there is no context, anything that appears "weird" becomes incriminating. For example, after the murders of the Idaho students in 2022, amateur detectives on social media judged and harassed people whose body language or tone of voice just happened to appear off during subsequent interviews. Neurodivergent people are especially susceptible to this in engagements where non-verbal and social cues are discriminately judged immediately. These occurrences are related to larger cultural anxieties about difference: if a person does not act in a "normal" way, that person must be hiding something. What used to be a television spectacle, in the form of true crime docuseries, is now a participatory spectacle bounded by followers, clicks, and trending hashtags. Also, the collective gaze is a punitive one.
Towards Better Representation
Not all representations are harmful. Shows like Atypical and characters like Shaun Murphy in The Good Doctor provide more gentle depictions of neurodivergent lives, and there are of course more. But even with such representations there is the possible implication of savior narratives or exceptionalism, or still providing compassion, only in offering compassion, for a particular, "high-functioning," neurodivergent contingent. What we need are representations that embrace ambiguity. Crime is not a product of neurodivergence; neurodivergence is not an ethical failing. We need to get away from attending to the experience of difference as pathological and instead consider the systematic circumstances underpinning crime. Key to this approach is consulting with neurodivergent creators, avoiding clichés, and forefronting support and connection and not the spectacle of performance. Representation matters beyond visibility; the importance of getting it right matters too. Justice media needs to include counter-narratives; projects and voices that are willing to consider or confront other frames. Justice media can include neurodivergent creators who reflect on their own survival strategies in everyday life, and activists who analyze the methods of police profiling as a matter of public discourse. Alternative media can document and serve as resistance.
Final Thoughts: Who Gets to be "Normal?"
At the heart of the distinction here is about who gets to be "normal," "safe," or "trustworthy." Media mediates our sense of these categories, and crime narratives can influence them even more. If neurodivergent people are foregrounded as villains, threats, or burdens in media at large, which affects the real-world institutions of schools, courts, and hospitals, we must ask ourselves who benefits from stories that link mental difference with danger, and whose presence is erased so as not to see that connection between difference and danger when that is the only narrative we make? I make this blog for awareness, since in my personal life I had to deal with someone in my family who was ostracized because she was a neurodivergent person as wel. And since she was portrayed as different, and her thinking slower and not the same as a "normal" person. She had to deal with a lot, and seeing it happen first and trying to help from a young age has inspired me to write on this. So, if media can produce myths of madness, media can also dismantle myths of madness. We must also demand to produce well-intentioned stories that more accurately construct care and humanity with nuance. Stories matter—they motivate who we choose to protect, punish, and who gets second chances in our daily lives.
This blog is a critical investigation of how neurodivergence- autism, ADHD, and mental illness is treated in crime media. Using well-known films, news stories, and other digital content as examples, this blog considers how media narratives simplify, distort, and often criminalize neurodivergent individuals. The blog will unpack how these representations are not solely fiction; they are ideological instruments which illustrate and cement more comprehensive social ideas about normalcy, danger, and justice. While this blog will be focused on real-life representations of neurodivergence in crime media, it will borrow from academic and cultural references in order to build an argument about the importance of more accurate, humane representations of neurodivergence and crime.