"So there was Hugh's inner turmoil, and he wasn't willing to embrace it. "It's an unsettling feeling if you have this person that's your anchor, and they're not the same person that they were a week ago or a day ago," Thomas says. Perhaps she meant that literally, but because of the stigma that still regrettably surrounds mental health, Hugh wasn't able to get her proper help. "I've always needed someone to keep me grounded - get me out of my head." For the majority of the show, Steven is convinced that his mother had schizophrenia, and Olivia herself hinted that her issues were pre-existing. What's more, it's implicated but never fully confirmed that Olivia lived with mental illness before entering the house. And what do you do when you really love somebody, and you see that person slipping away and something else taking over that you can't explain?"
"Because we all have our problems, and we have our hang-ups, and we have our idiosyncrasies and everything. "That's the tricky bit about negotiating life with a family, right?" Thomas says of Hugh's reluctance to take action. Eventually, she begins seeing ghosts who try to convince her to kill her family in order to protect them from suffering. Olivia also suffers from migraines, which Hugh calls her "color storms." These appear to be physical symptoms brought on by her mental state, which worsen as their stay in Hill House drags on. "And that's when his world kind of starts to seriously fall apart." "he turns this thing into him, and he's looking at it, and it makes no sense," Henry Thomas, who plays young Hugh, tells Bustle. But when she presents them to her husband, Hugh, they're an absolute mess - which is when he realizes there's something more going on with her. In Episode 7, for instance, audiences learn that there are several different versions of the house blueprints, which Olivia (Carla Gugino) calls "schizophrenic" and plans to combine into a master plan. Warning: This article contains information about suicide, which some may find triggering. And in this way, the horrors that lurk in Hill House can be viewed as a metaphor for mental illness. Whatever force is presiding over the property convinces its occupants that the outside world is terrifying and that death is the only way out. The eponymous mansion in The Haunting of Hill House is very good at distorting reality.
Spoilers for The Haunting of Hill House ahead.