Associate Professor of Ophthalmology, Dr Michael Puente,* and his colleagues have conducted compelling and illuminating research into this topic related to strabismus in animations for children which you can read about in the link below. It is a free article on the American Academy of Pediatrics’ website. The article features extracts from the research, and you should contact the authors if you wish to read the full work.
Depictions of Strabismus in Children’s Animated Films | Pediatrics | American Academy of Pediatrics
Authors: Jintong Liu, BS; Aditya Mantha, BA; Tyler D. Benjamin, MM; Maksym Goryachok, BS; Mohamoud Ahmed, BS; Nathan Grove, MS; Michael A. Puente, MD
This article has garnered a lot of attention and deservedly so.
The research highlights some facts about strabismus that are, in general, still broadly ignored by the wider world beyond strabismus sufferers and their clinical caregivers.
If an adult or a child has visibly misaligned eyes (strabismus), other children and adults immediately notice it. How they respond may vary, but it’s unlikely to be a positive response. This may seem like an obvious thing to say, after all, who would want to have eyes that are misaligned? Who can ignore having strabismus when other children and other adults immediately notice the condition and react negatively?
Worse still, how do you cope with having a disfigurement that is incorrectly associated with low intelligence and other negative characteristics? How do you cope with being a figure of fun? The psycho-social impact of all this is obvious, yet still today, this impact is either downplayed or ignored resulting in further suffering for strabismus patients of all ages.
It is incredibly sad that, even today, misaligned eyes are still used for comic purposes in children’s animated films. Strabismus is a medical condition, beyond the control of the sufferer. For a symptom of this debilitating visual impairment to be used for humour or depicting villains is not only lazy storytelling, in my opinion, but also cruel and harmful to children who suffer with strabismus. Children with strabismus need to see themselves represented positively, as heroes and leaders, and as capable and as intelligent as anyone else. Certainly, children with strabismus do not deserve to see negative depictions of strabismus characters in children’s animated films.
The prejudice that children with strabismus suffer does not restrict itself to childhood. Many adult strabismus sufferers are impacted negatively by similarly hurtful depictions of adults with strabismus in films and TV shows. The psycho-social harm that adults suffer can include low self-esteem, social isolation, poorer job prospects and reduced social mobility.
The research that Dr Puente and his colleagues conducted is vitally important and I hope it will be a catalyst for change for the better. I think their call-to-action for all Ophthalmologists to put pressure on animation studios to stop portraying characters with strabismus in negative and misleading ways is a laudable quest and I hope it gains active support internationally.
*Dr Michael Puente is an Associate Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the Children’s Hospital Colorado.