Goodbye, Lexapro summer—hello, Haldol winter?
Through playful videos hashtagged #LiveLaughLexapro and #LexaproGirly, Tiktok and Instagram creators have transformed the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor into a selective, if relatable, lifestyle for the enlightened and empowered—stigma be damned. Our society is preoccupied with chemical selfhood[1], with mental illness arguably normalized to the point of sun-kissed romanticization.
Psychopharmaceuticals receive a different treatment in the snow-blanketed mansion of The Housemaid, based on Freida McFadden’s same-named novel and directed by Paul Feig. (Spoilers ahead for the campy thriller!)
Millie Calloway (a mostly lackluster Sydney Sweeney), who is on parole, becomes the titular live-in maid for a wealthy family. She finds Haldol, an antipsychotic, in the medicine cabinet of her erratic boss, Nina Winchester (a delightfully unhinged Amanda Seyfried). This discovery leads Millie to believe that Nina is mentally ill, confirming the story that the latter’s husband Andrew (an initially charming Brandon Sklenar) and gossipy so-called friends have been building: that Nina is deceitful and dangerous.
In reality, Nina’s outbursts and mood swings are in part a reaction to Andrew’s abuse. But she also uses the perception that she is unstable to her advantage, exaggerating her behavior in an attempt to engineer her escape.
By locking both of its female leads, at one point or another, in an attic room, The Housemaid alludes to the “madwoman in the attic” trope, theorized in 1979 feminist literary criticism by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. In their seminal work, they explore how 19th-century women writers used their texts to resist the patriarchy.
The quintessential example is Bertha Mason, the first wife of the eventual husband of the eponymous narrator of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Another example: the postpartum protagonist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” whose physician husband prescribes her a rest cure and confines her to an upstairs nursery. Her resulting insanity is an embodiment of, and protest against, the subjugation of women. As literary critic Elaine Showalter[2] writes, the madwoman “refuses to speak the language of patriarchal order.”
Albeit to a lesser extent than Nina, Millie is also cast as a madwoman. Toward the beginning of the film, she seems anxious and hyper-vigilant, and her specific crime is kept secret, leaving her reliability ambiguous. And, at first, Nina’s freedom—her rebellion against the patriarchy—comes at the expense of Millie’s, hardly an example of women supporting women.
But Nina’s 7-year-old daughter Cece (Indiana Elle) encourages her mother to rescue Millie, who ultimately defeats Andrew. The police officer (Alexandra Seal) notices inconsistencies in Nina’s account but, owing to a plot contrivance, investigates no further. The Housemaid ends with Millie accepting a new job, once more as a knife-savvy housemaid for an abused woman.
Rebecca Sonnenshine’s twist-filled screenplay is highly entertaining, but it is no masterpiece. That said, we can examine The Housemaid through the lens of mad studies, a field of scholarship that places mental distress within broader social and political contexts. This approach extends the notion, often attributed to psychiatrist R.D. Laing, that insanity is a “perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.” Bradley Lewis[3], another psychiatrist, maintains that “psychic difference from the norm” can, in some cases, be something “to celebrate.”
Mille’s vengeance-driven crimes are ethically understandable; however, they are legally questionable, and most mad-studies scholars would likely not exalt them. But instead of pathologizing her and Nina’s actions, we can read them as efforts to combat Andrew’s patriarchal control.
Additionally, as Lewis underscores, healthcare professionals must seek to understand how social and political forces shape the lives of their patients and center their perspectives and narratives. Had Nina’s clinicians taken her seriously, she, Cece, Millie, and even Andrew would have been spared much pain.
Millie finds an unflushed pill in a toilet, suggesting that Nina doesn’t take her Haldol. Unlike #LexaproGang members, she has been prescribed medication against her will. Admittedly, medication can play an important role in managing mental illness, but The Housemaid emphasizes that it cannot substitute for structural change. Even if mental illness has in part been commodified by social media, the film reminds us that what is labeled madness may, in fact, be an attunement to a world that too often denies women credibility and agency—a problem that demands not merely treatment, but transformation.
The Housemaid. Directed by Paul Feig, performances by Sydney Sweeney, Amanda Seyfried, Brandon Sklenar, and Indiana Elle, Lionsgate, 2025.
[1]Metzl, Jonathan M. The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease, Beacon Press, 2010.
[2]Showalter, Elaine. “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism.” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, edited by Geoffrey H. Hartman and Patricia Parker, Routledge, 1985, pp. 77-94.
[3]Lewis, Bradley. “Rethinking Psychiatry with Mad Studies.” Mad Studies Reader: Interdisciplinary Innovations in Mental Health, edited by Bradley Lewis, Alisha Ali, and Jazmine Russell, Routledge, 2024, pp. 435-455.
Web image by Medhum.org
