Part 1:
Week 13 of 14...almost there!
This week, I would like you to watch a preapproved movie that pertains to any psychological disorder. Yes - a whole movie! I know you are all at the point in the semester when things start getting busy, but do remember that you need to take time to relax and take care of yourself...view this assignment as a way to get a break from the traditional cramming and memorizing - this could be something you can do with your friends around, even. Yes, you'll need to write about it (meaning some level of attention is required), but also enjoy the movie. You also have the next week to look forward to (no assignment, yay!).
There is a list below that I would like you to try to follow, but if there is a movie you'd like to watch that is not on the list, shoot me an email with the title and I'll see if it's appropriate for this assignment.
For this assignment, please complete the following:
- Pick and watch a movie from the list below (or run one by me if not on the list).
- What psychological disorder is portrayed in the movie?
- How does the DSM 5 describe this disorder? (See last week's blog assignment for instructions to access to the DSM 5)
- Give an overview of the movie, paying specific attention to detailing how the psychological disorder is portrayed.
- Does the movie accurately portray the disorder, based on characteristics outlined in the DSM 5? Why or why not? Please provide examples from specific scenes.
No Part 2 this week, making Part 1 worth 20 points...please put effort into this assignment accordingly!
This assignment is due on Monday, November 18, 2013 at 11:59p.
Preapproved Movies (let me know if you think there should be something added to the list!)
Dissociative Disorders (Multiple Personality Disorder)
Identity
Fight Club
Sybil
Thr3e
Personality Disorders
Fatal Attraction
Adaptation
Suicide/Mood Disorders
Ordinary People
Girl Interrupted
The Hours
Silver Linings Playbook
Anxiety/Obsessive Compulsive/PTSD
The Aviator
As Good as it Gets
Fearless
Matchstick Men
Alcohol & Drug Abuse
Leaving Las Vegas
Clean and Sober
Blow
Traffic
Train Spotting
Requiem for a Dream
Rush
Sexual/Gender Identity
The Crying Game
Boys Don't Cry
Ma Vie En Rose
Paris is Burning (documentary)
Transamerica
Brokeback Mountain
Normal
Schizophrenia/Psychosis
A Beautiful Mind
Crumb
I Never Promised you a Rose
Garden
Revolution #9
Spider
Shine
Benny and Joon
Pi
American Psycho
Lars and the Real Girl
Shutter Island
Miscellaneous
Rain Man
The movie that I watched was called As Good as It Gets. The psychological disorder that is portrayed in this movie is obsessive compulsive disorder. The DSM 5 describes this disorder as a presence of obsessions, compulsions, or both. The obsessions are defined by recurrent and persistent thoughts, urges, or images that are experienced, at some time during the disturbance, as intrusive and unwanted, and that in most individuals cause marked anxiety or stress. The obsessions are also defined that the individual attempts to ignore or suppress the thoughts and images. The compulsions are defined by repetitive behaviors. These behaviors can include hand washing, ordering, checking, counting, or repeating words silently. The individual feels driven to perform these repeated behaviors. These compulsions are aimed at preventing or reducing the anxiety or stress that the individual may be having. The obsessions and compulsions are usually time consuming.
ReplyDeleteAs Good as It Gets is about a grumpy old man named Melvin Udall who has obsessive compulsive disorder. Being that he has obsessive compulsive disorder, he has to follow a daily routine and he can't stand if something throughout his day were to get messed up. Melvin constantly has to count things. Every time that he comes into his house he will lock and unlock his door five times. He will also turn the light on and off five times. Melvin also has to look down while he is walking on the sidewalk because he has to step over the cracks. Also Melvin has breakfast at the same restaurant every single morning and he must have the same waitress or else he won't eat until he gets served by her. Melvin will only eat his food with plastic utensils because he also has a fear of germs.
I think that the movie accurately portrays obsessive compulsive disorder based on the characteristics outlined in the DSM 5. I believe this because in the DSM 5 it talks about how the individual will try to ignore or suppress the thoughts or images. Melvin tried doing this in the movie. He tried to forget about counting the number of times he locked and unlocked the door when he came into his apartment. He also tried to forget about counting the number or times that he turned the light on and off. The DSM 5 talks about how the individual has repetitive behaviors. Melvin definitely had repetitive behaviors in this movie. Locking and unlocking the door, turning the lights on and off, and going to the same restaurant for breakfast were the major repetitive behaviors that Melvin showed during this movie.
The movie that I chose to watch was Silver Lining Playbook. The psychological disorder that was portrayed in this movie is mood disorders, the bipolar disorder in particular. The DMS 5 describes this disorder as having at least one episode of major depression and hypomanic episode. People with this disorder experience mood instability and a serious impairment in work and social functioning. Hypomanic Episode is “a distinct period of abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood and abnormally and persistently increased activity or energy, lasting at least 4 consecutive days and present most of the day, nearly every day.” There are often mood disturbances, increased energy and activity, and a noticeable change in their behavior. Some of the characteristics include inflated self-esteem or grandiosity, decreased need for sleep, more talkative than usual, flight of ideas or subjective experience that thoughts are racing, distractibility, increase in goal-directed activity, and excessive involvement in activities that have a high potential for painful consequences. Major Depressive episodes include depressed mood, diminished interest or pleasure in most activities, weight loss, insomnia or hypersomnia, psychomotor agitation or retardation, fatigue or loss of energy, feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt, diminished ability to think or concentrate, and recurrent thoughts of death. Bipolar disorder criteria have to meet at least one hypomanic episode and at least one major depressive episode.
ReplyDeleteThis movie is about a guy named Pat, who psychological hospital, for having a mood disorder. His mom comes to the hospital and gets him out early. Pat can get really mad and start to freak out, he has flashbacks, he can get really frustrated, he yells, and he can even become violent. He refuses to take his medication because he doesn’t think that they are helping and he doesn’t think that he has a problem. When he arrives back at home, he begins to run a lot and tries to get in shape. He is trying to get his wife, job, and house back. The movie then describes what has happened earlier on. He had come home early from work and found his wife in the shower with another guy, while their wedding song was on. Now, whenever he hears this song it is a trigger and he freaks out. Pat has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He has mood swings and experiences delusions. He meets up with one of his old friends and his wife (Veronica) and they invite him to come for supper. He shows up for supper and Veronica also invited her sister (Tiffany). Tiffany suffers from depression and also has some symptoms of bipolar disorder. This may be due to her husband’s death. Tiffany and Pat meet and right away they have some kind of a connection. They ran into each other a couple of times, and one of the times he asks her on a date. On the date, they both talk about their problems and become closer. During the date she agrees to give his wife (Nikki) a letter. She agrees, but she wants him to do something in return. She wants him to participate in a dance contest with her. He agrees, so they begin practicing their routine. During their practices, they begin to develop feelings for each other. After awhile, Pat decides that he does not want to perform. So Tiffany and Pat’s parents decide to tell him that Nikki will be at the competition to get him to go. As they are making this decision Pat looks at the note that Tiffany has given him that was from Nikki. He then realizes that Nikki had not written the note that Tiffany had written it. Coincidently Nikki had showed up at the recital. After they had performed, Pat went and talked to Nikki. Tiffany gets mad and leaves the recital. Pat runs after her and says that he has he has one more note. Tiffany thought that the note was for Nikki and gets really mad at him. He then hands her the note and she begins to read the note and finds that the note is actually for her. The note says that he knew that she wrote the notes and that he loves her.
I believe that the movie portrays bipolar disorder pretty accurate. At times I was confused by his actions and what Pat had been saying. To me it didn’t seem like he was bipolar. I thought that he just had anger problems. For example, when he is looking for his wedding video and he can’t find it. He becomes really upset, he yells, becomes violent, and blames his parents. Another example is when he is at the football game tailgating and some people start to beat his brother up. He becomes angered and begins to start fighting these people. I noticed that he also began to sleep less. I think he was more crazy than depressed.
DeleteI, too, was confused about his bipolar diagnosis at times based on how it was portrayed in the movie.
DeleteThe issue I am writing over is sexual or gender Identity. The movie I chose to watch was Brokeback Mountain. I have yet to see this movie and this is a good time to watch it. The DSM-5 diagnosis gender identity dysphoria in adolescents and adults as an incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender. There six symptoms associated with this disorder and the person must experience at least two. Some of these include a strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics of the other gender. Also there is a feeling of wanting to be the other gender and be treated like the opposite gender. Also the individual has a strong conviction that one has the typical feelings and reactions of the other gender. The DSM-5 also explains the condition associating it with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
ReplyDeleteThe movie opens with two cowboys looking for work in Wyoming around 1963. They both get jobs helping move sheep. They have beans for dinner quite often and the story is opening very slowly. After one food delivery, one of the man’s horses is scared by a bear and all the food is dropped. They sleep in shifts one sleep with the sheep and the other in a tent close by. The first sign of gender confusion arises when one of the men is bathing and the other debates whether to look. The night to follow consisted of the most conversation since the work began. The movie gets intense very quickly when a cold night causes the two men to share a tent. They are both somewhat intoxicated and this results in sex. They only had intercourse, no kissing occurred. The men get into a physical altercation and the first summer ends. One of the men doesn’t know if he will return because he is to be married. Over a year later both men are married with children. The later meet up and begin to make out and the wife sees. It has been four years since their last encounter and they get a motel room together. They talked and decided it wasn’t appropriate to live together, but it was okay to meet up every so often. The first couple gets a divorce and the wife knew what was going on. The men debate a possible relationship but it never happens. The two men are in love and they can never be together. Society and the prejudices of everyone around them influence how they are choosing to live. After they ended things, Jack was murdered. His wife was asked to spread his ashes on Brokeback Mountain, but she didn’t know where that was. He went to see Jack’s parents to get Jack’s ashes. Jack’s father would not give him the ashes but handed over one of Jack’s shirts from Brokeback Mountain.
This movie mostly associates with the men being cause social, occupational, and other impairments. This is shown when the men are not accepted back at work the following summer. Their employer caught them fooling around and refused to hire them the returning year. Social it affected both men and their marriage. One of them divorced and never dated again. The other man was so affected by a social factor that he was beaten to death. Other issues involved include mental distress and having uncontrollable anger. This was shown multiple times in the movie and the characters also faced confusion and possibly depression or anxiety.
Lars and the Real Girl is a great film to watch not only for the great actors in the film, but the lessons in it as well. Lars is a man suffering severe schizophrenia. Losing his touch with reality in which he clenches onto a doll he ordered online. This doll is, who he believes is, his girlfriend. This belief sends his brother over the edge, who doesn’t know a lot about this kind of disorder. Lars’ brother and sister-in-law take him to the doctor where they learn he has a delusional disorder. Instead of treating Lars with medications, she chooses to treat Lars with therapy. Along with the therapy, the rest of the town and his family have decided to meet Lars where he is and treat Bianca as though she were an actual being. The DSM-V portrays schizophrenia as what Lars would be diagnosed with because of his delusions about Bianca. Schizophrenia with marked stressor (father’s death, perhaps?) is what specific schizophrenic type Lars is. Frequent derailment and a psychotic state are diagnostic features of schizophrenia.
ReplyDeleteLars and the Real Girl starts out as a film featuring what we could assume is simply a man with social anxiety disorder. Lars is a simple man who works everyday then comes home to his garage apartment setting while his brother and sister-in-law live next to him in his deceased father’s house. Lars heard of his coworker ordering a sex doll online, but being naïve, he figured he could just order himself one. In whatever state he was at the time, Lars then believed he had ordered himself a girlfriend. When his new girlfriend arrived, he brightened up like he hasn’t in years. Lars had dinner with his newly found Bianca at his brother’s house that night. His brother didn’t want to go along with it, however, his wife made him. The next day, they took Lars to the doctor who said he had a delusional disorder. This delusion needed to be fixed by himself. The doctor didn’t prescribe any meds, just therapy sessions where they’d talk about Bianca. As the movie goes along, the whole community takes a part of Bianca’s life. Lars eventually wakes up and finds Bianca unresponsive then rushes her to the hospital where he’s told her prognosis isn’t good. He takes her home and the whole community comes to say goodbyes. Eventually Bianca dies and he’s over his delusional state.
The movie portrays schizophrenia in a realistic way. The way the community came together to help Lars through this hard time really shows that support is how many people make it through these kind of illnesses. The way the hairdressers did Bianca’s hair then went to her funeral shows their commitment and kind feelings towards Lars. If any one person decided to go against this way of supporting Lars and tell him that Bianca isn’t real, Lars would likely go into a more deep state of psychosis causing it to take longer to get out of it, if at all. Overall, Lars and the Real Girl is a great way to take a glimpse into what reality is like for those suffering from schizophrenia and the support needed for them.
The death of someone close can definitely be a stressor that brings on a disorder in someone already vulnerable.
DeleteFor this assignment I chose to watch the movie called As Good as It Gets. This movie portrays a man who suffers from the psychological disorder called Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and a phobia of germs. According to the DSM 5 the disorder is classified by the presence of obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions are reoccurring and persistent thoughts versus compulsions that are repetitive actions. Obsessions are related to the individual trying to ignore and repress the urges. Compulsions can be any action that includes hand washing, checking, and ordering. It also includes mental tasks such as praying, counting, or repeating words. The obsessions or compulsions are time-consuming, taking more than one hour. The individual is driven to do these actions to help them reduce stress or anxiety.
ReplyDeleteThis movie is about an old man named Melvin Udall who is a writer and works at home. Melvin suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder and a phobia of germs. The movie displays his disorder with Melvin having to follow a strict daily routine. Melvin started his day with having to constantly check his door to make sure it was locked and well as making sure that his lights were off. He would check these at least 5 times before he could leave his house. Then he lives in New York City so walks nearly everywhere but due to his obsessive disorder he counts the steps that he takes and cannot step on any of the cracks in the side walk. Since he lives in crowded New York it gets hard at times and he ends up running into people or buildings just to ensure he does not step on the cracks. On his daily walks, Melvin goes to this dinner to sit at his same table and will wait or even ask people to leave from “his” table. There is only one waitress who can handle this behavior and Melvin will not be served by anyone else but her. Once Melvin is seated at his table he will remove the silverware from the restaurant and pull out his disposable silverware that he brings and eat his same meal with that. This shows that Melvin has a phobia of germs since he will not eat off of the restaurants silverware and has to bring his own. The movie continues with showing how Melvin struggles with getting by with his obsessive compulsive disorder. Then within the building that Melvin lives one of his neighbors who happens to be a homosexual ends up in the hospital. Due to him being in the hospital he is unable to take care of his dog. This is where to movie takes a turn and Melvin decides to help out his neighbor even though he is highly uncomfortable with the situation. With Melvin being able to help out and take care of his dog who is full of germs and diseases’ Melvin is able to handle his obsessive compulsive disorder better. Melvin slowly stops worrying about all his obsessions and at the end of the movie he steps on a crack on his walk.
I do believe that the movie As Good as It Gets displays Obsessive Compulsive Disorder correctly according to the DSM 5. Since DSM 5 says that having obsessive compulsive disorder the person tries to ignore the fact that they even have an urge to do an action or a thought and Melvin did do that when he was checking his locks and turning off the lights. DSM 5 also says the obsessions compulsions are reoccurring and Melvin had a strict daily routine especially with going to the dinner and sitting at “his” table and having his same meal served by no one else but his same waitress. The DSM 5 also says how the person is driven to do these actions to help reduce stress and anxiety and that is why Melvin did his daily routine. I do like how the movie shows that even though Melvin suffered from a severe case of obsession compulsive disorder that he was able to change his daily routine and even break some of his compulsions at the end of the movie.
I watched "The Hours" for this assignment. "The Hours" is about three women in different time periods: There is a writer Virginia Woolf in 1923, housewife Laura Brown in 1951, and editor Clarissa Vaughn in 2001. Virginia writes a book about a day in the life of a troubled woman, Laura reads the book, and Clarissa is the embodiment of the book's main character. The disorder portrayed in the movie is Major Depressive Disorder. According to the DSM 5 it is characterized by display of five or more symptoms within a two week period. The symptoms must be present all day or nearly all day, every day and include: depressed mood as reported by the subject or others, lack of interest in all or most activities, significant weight loss or fluctuation in appetite, insomnia or hypersomnia, psychomotor agitation, fatigue or loss of energy, feelings of worthlessness or inappropriate guilt, inability to concentrate or indecisiveness, and recurring thoughts of death or suicide, and suicide attempts.
ReplyDeleteI think the movie does an accurate job of portraying the disorder. The first character, Virginia, is portrayed as restless and agitated. She can't seem to concentrate on some tasks and often asks her husband for permission to go on walks to "clear her head." Virginia is always in a somber mood. She rarely smiled in the film. She has a lack of an appetite and lies to her husband about eating. There is a scene in the movie in which Virginia expresses to her how she wishes to move back to London and her husband reminds her that London seemed to worsen her "fits, moods, blackouts, voices, and suicide attempts." Her husband expresses how worried he is that she will take her life. In the end she weighs herself down and drowns herself in the river.
Laura always has a sad "doe-eyed" look throughout the movie. She tells her husband that she is very tired and she is shown sleeping several times throughout the movie. She cries a lot throughout the film for no apparent reason. It is apparent that she is very unhappy in her marriage and with her life. One day she gathers pills from the medicine cabinet and drops her son off at a sitters. She checks into a motel, sits on the bed, and sets the pills next to her on the bed. She fails to commit suicide and cries. She wakes up from a nightmare in which the hotel room floods and she drowns. At the end of the film she tells Clarissa that she left her family after her daughter was born. She felt it was a better option than committing suicide.
Clarissa pretends that she is fine until about halfway through the movie. She is trying to prepare a party for her friend who is dying from AIDS. It turns out that he is Laura's son. Richard's old lover brings up a memory and she starts to cry. She says she feels like she is unraveling. She seems to be caught in an identity crisis. She is with her lover of ten years but doesn't seem to be happy in the relationship. It appears that she is in love with Richard because she says, "When I am with him I feel as if I am living." When she is over visiting Richard he climbs out the window and kills himself. Clarissa doesn't seem to show as many prominent symptoms as the other women.
Overall I enjoyed the movie more than I was expecting and I felt that it was an accurate portrayal of the disease.
I chose to watch the movie “Requiem for a Dream” because I am pursuing a minor in addiction studies. I would have chosen the movie “Blow” but that is already one of my favorite movies and I’ve seen it several times; therefore, I thought it better to watch a movie I have yet to see. “Requiem for a Dream” showed the lives of four people struggling with substance abuse. Harry Goldfarb, his girlfriend Marion, and his friend Tyrone were all addicted to heroin (opioids), while Harry’s mother Sara was addicted to diet pills that were amphetamine based (stimulant). The DSM 5 has a list of diagnostic criteria for both opioids and stimulants. Opioid use disorder includes signs and symptoms that reflect compulsive, prolonged self-administration of opioid substances that are used for no legitimate medical purpose or, if another medical condition is present that requires opioid treatment, that are used in doses greatly in excess of the amount needed for that medical condition. Individuals with opioid use disorder tend to develop such regular patterns of compulsive drug use that daily activities are planned around obtaining and administering opioids. Most individuals with opioid use disorder have significant levels of tolerance and will experience withdrawal on abrupt discontinuation of opioid substances. Now let’s consider the DSM 5 criteria for stimulant use disorder. When injected or smoked, stimulants typically produce an instant feeling of well-being, confidence, and euphoria. Dramatic behavioral changes can rapidly develop with stimulant use disorder. Chaotic behavior, social isolation, aggressive behavior, and sexual dysfunction can result from long-term stimulant use disorder. Individuals with acute intoxication may present with rambling speech, headache, transient ideas of reference, and tinnitus. There may be paranoid ideation, auditory hallucinations in a clear sensorium, and tactile hallucinations, which the individual usually recognizes as drug effects. Threats or acting out of aggressive behavior may occur. Depression, suicidal ideation, irritability, anhedonia, emotional lability, or disturbances in attention and concentration commonly occur during withdrawal. The diagnostic criteria are the same for both opioid use disorder and stimulant use disorder, they are as follows: (1) opioids/stimulants are often taken in larger amounts or over a longer period than was intended; (2) there is a persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control opioid/stimulant use; (3) a great deal of time is spent in activities necessary to obtain the opioid/stimulant, use the opioid/stimulant, or recover from its effects; (4) craving, or a strong desire or urge to use opioids/stimulants; (5) recurrent opioid/stimulant use resulting in a failure to fulfill major role obligations at work, school, or home; (6) continued opioid/stimulant use despite having persistent or recurrent social or interpersonal problems caused or exacerbated by the effects of opioids/stimulants; (7) important social, occupational, or recreational activities are given up or reduced because of opioid/stimulant use; (8) recurrent opioid/stimulant use in situations in which it is physically hazardous; (9) continued opioid/stimulant use despite knowledge of having a persistent or recurrent physical or psychological problem that is likely to have been caused or exacerbated by the substance; (10) tolerance, defined by a need for markedly increased amounts of opioids/stimulants to achieve intoxication or desired effect OR a markedly diminished effect with continued use of the same amount of an opioid/stimulant; (11) withdrawal.
ReplyDeleteNow that we have to criteria for each disorder, it is clear that all four characters in the movie accurately represent the characteristics for these disorders. The opening scene shows Harry and Tyrone taking Sara Goldfarb’s television to pawn for money to get heroin, showing that they spend a great deal of time obtaining their opioids. There were several scenes throughout the movie where this happens. Harry, Marion, and Tyrone constantly spend their days searching for heroin, selling heroin, and using heroin. When they are low on or out of opioids they would dedicate the majority of their time find alternative ways to get their fix. None of the characters had a job other than selling heroin, which shows that important activities were given up due to their addiction. Towards the end of the movie when they did not have access to heroin their moods became very hostile and they showed signs of withdrawal. They even resorted to dangerous ways to obtain money or opioids. Harry asked his girlfriend Marion to meet up with a man named Arthur (possibly an ex-boyfriend) to get money, knowing that she would have to have sex with him to get the payment. This just goes to show how strong the addiction can be on a person. The end of the movie consisted of Harry and Tyrone attempting to travel from New York to Florida just to purchase more heroin. While they were gone, Marion resorted to prostitution to get her own opioids. In the end, Marion was all alone with her opioids, while Harry and Tyrone were arrested and going through withdrawal.
DeleteSara Goldfarb’s stimulant addiction started out as a weight loss plan. She received a call telling her that she was chosen to be on a televised game show. She was ecstatic and wanted to wear the red dress that she wore to her son’s graduation. She wasn’t able to fit into the dress and tried a diet that did not work for her. One of the ladies that lived in her building told her about prescription diet pills that controlled her desire for food. Once she began taking the pills she was filled with energy and was no longer hungry. She continued to take the diet pills from summer to winter, which shows that they were taken for a longer period of time than intended. As she began to fall deeper into the addiction she become more and more secluded in her apartment, which resulted in social and interpersonal problems. As time went on she began to feel depressed because she her tolerance was building for the stimulants. She began taking more than intended to receive the desired effects. There were several scenes when Sara had hallucinations. She was hallucinating that her refrigerator was shaking and almost coming out of the wall at her because she hadn’t eaten in who knows how long. By the end of the movie she was acting to erratically that she even went to the game show company and insisted on knowing when she was going to be on the show. The employees at the company notified the police and Sara was taken to the hospital for help. Her addiction was so out of control that she was required to do serious treatment in order to beat the addiction. Overall, every character in this movie was so far into their addiction that they could no longer live a normal life. I think the movie did an excellent job at portraying both the opioid and stimulant use disorders.
Great job, very thorough!
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ReplyDeleteThe movie I chose for this week’s assignment was Lars and the Real Girl, which focuses on a character with Delusional Disorder. According to the DSM 5, delusional disorder is “the presence of one (or more) delusions with a duration of 1 month or longer.” The delusions usually do not greatly affect every day functioning. There are seven subtypes of delusional disorder which include erotomanic, grandiose, jealous, persecutory, somatic, mixed, and unspecified. Each of the seven subtypes is based around what the person’s delusions focus on.
ReplyDeleteThe main character in the movie is Lars. Lars is a single man who lives in a garage apartment near his brother and sister-in-laws house. His sister-in-law is quite worried about Lars because he is quite reserved and does not enjoy much social contact. After a coworker shows Lars a website for anatomically correct blow up dolls, Lars orders one and goes around telling everybody that the new doll named Bianca is his girlfriend. Lars’ brother is extremely upset about Bianca and extremely reluctant to go along with allowing Lars to believe that she is real, he strongly believes that Lars is crazy and needs to be in a mental hospital. Lars’ sister-in-law sets up an appointment for them all to see a psychologist who tells Lars’ brother and sister-in-law that Lars believes that Bianca is real and the best thing for Lars is include Bianca in activities as if she is real. At first Lars brother, sister-in-law, and the rest of the community are extremely hesitant to include Bianca, but after a little while, they start treating her as a real person and including her in activities such as volunteering at the hospital in hopes that it will help Lars overcome the delusions. At the end of the movie, Lars goes to wake Bianca up, but she is “unresponsive” and dying according to Lars. Bianca is taken to the hospital where Lars sits with her. When Lars’ brother and sister-in-law question how the doctor could allow Bianca to get this sick, the doctor explains that it is all part of Lars’ delusions that he was the one that found her unresponsive and said that she was dying. The movie ends with a funeral and burial service for Bianca where Lars is extremely upset.
I would say that this movie did a pretty good job of portraying unspecified delusional disorder. The movie showed multiple times where Lars was having delusions involving Bianca. One delusion was that she was a real person. He brought her to the breakfast table each morning, he changed her clothes and bathed her each day, and he tried to get her involved in the community by taking her to church and shopping. Lars also had the delusion that she no longer loved him because she was too busy with her outside community activities. The final delusion that Lars had was that Bianca died. Because Bianca was made of silicone it is impossible for her to really die, but in Lars mind, she passed away and needed a proper funeral and burial service.
For my psychology class in high school, we had to watch the movie Sybil. In high school, I found the movie to be more disturbing than anything due to Sybil’s childhood experiences. I recognized Sybil’s disorder, as we had talked about it in my high school class; however, I couldn’t remember the exact plot of the movie. All that stuck in my head from high school was poor Sybil’s childhood, so I decided to watch the movie again and pay special attention to the signs and symptoms of multiple personality disorder.
ReplyDeleteThe movie begins with a young teacher named Sybil, who experiences memory lapses, where she blackouts and cannot remember what happened. After experiencing these memory lapses enough, Sybil decides to seek help from a counselor named Dr. Wilbur. Slowly but surely, Dr. Wilbur discovers Sybil’s other personalities, which seem to be triggered by Sybil’s own fears. Terrible flashbacks of Sybil’s childhood are shown, where she becomes very afraid. Sybil then begins to fall in love with a man named Richard. After an episode when Richard spent the night, Sybil finally tells Richard that she has been seeing Dr. Wilbur. After visiting Sybil’s hometown and discovering that all of the childhood stories are true, Dr. Wilbur puts Sybil under hypnosis. Under hypnosis, Sybil meets all of her other personalities and they become one.
Some of Sybil’s personalities include the following: Vanessa, Vicky, Ellen, Clara, Margie, Ruthie, Peggy, Marcia, Mary, and Nancy. One specific example of Sybil’s split personality would be when she is contemplating jumping off of a hotel window. In this scene, she is Vicky, who seems to be very mature and recognizes the other personalities. Peggy is another example of Sybil’s personality. Peggy seems to be a child and is often found crying due to her specific fears, such as green kitchens. Some of her personalities even frighten each other. For example, Sybil makes Dr. Wilbur a purple card, but the color purple deeply frightens Peggy.
According to the DSM 5, an individual that has two or more personalities and experiences varying levels of amnesia has multiple personality disorder. Sybil has almost ten different personalities and often blackouts when she switches personalities. The DSM 5 also states that some of the causes could be due to a simple defense mechanism against abusive relationships. Sybil had a very abusive relationship with her mother including the removal of Sybil’s tonsils, screaming, and other traumatizing events. After watching the movie Sybil and reading through the DSM 5, I have realized that multiple personality disorder is a lot harder to diagnose than what I had initially thought in high school.
For this assignment, I decided to watch Fatal Attraction. One of the main characters, Alex suffers from borderline personality disorder. The DSM 5 describes the criteria for this disorder including frantic efforts to avoid real, or imagined abandonment, a great deal of impulsivity in at least two areas that can result in self-damage, fluctuating moods that result in instability, chronic feelings of emptiness and uncontrollable anger. In the film, Alex displays a great deal of these symptoms. In the beginning of the movie, Dan, a prominent lawyer, has a weekend affair with Alex, a co-worker when his wife and daughter are away. Dan believes it is a simple one-time fling, but Alex does not. When Dan tries to leave, Alex cuts her wrists. This is the first symptom of borderline personality disorder Alex displays. Alex begins to stalk Dan. She meets him at various places, invites him to the Opera, and begins to call him at all hours. This is another symptom. She is attempting to evade abandonment. Unfortunately, this is an imagined abandonment. Dan never cared about her and had no intentions of maintaining any sort of relationship with her. Eventually, she tells Dan she is carrying his child. Her obsession continually escalates and does everything in her power to become a part of Dan’s life including showing up at his apartment when Dan’s wife, Beth is home. Dan moves his family in attempts to force Alex to stop stalking him, but Alex’s obsession slowly turns violent. This is another symptom. She has an uncontrollable anger that results in her pouring acid on Dan’s vehicle, and killing his daughter’s, Ellen, pet rabbit. Dan finally tells Beth about his affair and Alex’s pregnancy. Beth is extremely upset and hurt. She asks Dan to leave. However, she is also angry. She talks to Alex and states that if she does not stop bothering Dan, she will kill Alex. In response to this, Alex picks up Ellen from school. Beth frantically searches for her daughter and is in a car accident and has to be hospitalized.
ReplyDeleteDan becomes so angry with Alex that he goes to her apartment and attacks her. He almost kills her, but he restrains himself. Alex grabs a knife and attacks Dan in return. Dan approaches the police asking for protection against Alex. When Beth leaves the hospital, she forgives Dan and they return home. All of Alex’s symptoms come to a forefront at the climax of the movie when she is at Dan’s house with a knife planning to kill Beth. Here it is evident that she is frantic to maintain the fantasy she has constructed, and Beth interferes with that fantasy. Her fluctuating moods result in a great deal of instability and anger. She has little regard for her own body, actually cutting herself before she attacks Beth. There is an intense struggle between Beth and Alex, Dan rushes in and tries to drown Alex. She actually does not drown, but Beth comes in and shoots her, killing her.
I enjoyed this movie. It actually reminded me of another movie I have seen, Obsessed. This movie is extremely similar, except that the husband does not have an affair. None the less, Lisa becomes obsessed with her boss. She steals his son, and the movie climaxes with his wife, Sharon killing Lisa in their home. Both of these movies accurately portray borderline personality disorder. They showcase the absolute fear of abandonment, the unpredictable mood swings, and uncontrollable anger. Another interesting aspect is the effect this disorder has on the man and their family. In both movies, a family is torn apart and marriages are almost ruined. Both Lisa and Alex have such a sense of emptiness that they fabricate a relationship that does not exist.
For this week's blog I chose to watch the movie Hide and Seek. In this movie, the main character has a dissociative disorder because he has multiple personalities. You do not realize this until he begins to realize that he is "Charley", his daughters thought to be imaginary friend. In the DSM 5, a dissociative disorder is defined as an interruption or disruption to the norms of that person such as their emotions, identity, or memory. In this movie, the main character has dissociative identity disorder which is described as a person who has two or more personalities that are easily distinguished and there are reoccurring episodes of amnesia.
ReplyDeleteIn this movie, it begins as a happy three person family but soon becomes dark when the mother dies by supposedly slitting her wrist in the bath tub. After this traumatic event, the young daughter named Emily is put into a children's care hospital because she becomes very depressed and distant. After a few weeks Emily is taken out of the hospital and her and her father, David, move into a new house about an hour away. When they arrive and move into their new house, the Emily goes into the woods and finds a rock cave where she finds her new imaginary friend, so her father thinks. Her friends name is Charley and they play together every day until he makes her help him with a violent deed. It is not shown who Charley is until the father makes a realization and evolves into his other personality in which he calls himself Charley. It is then shown in flashbacks that the father's alter personality is who actually killed the mother and the cat in the bath tub. After both of these killings, David experiences amnesia because he does not remember doing it and blames Emily. Towards the end of the movie Charley makes her help him to kill her father's new girlfriend. Charley then goes on to tell Emily that she likes her father better than him and that wasn't okay with him so he becomes very violent and goes after her. Emily gets away from Charley but not without Charley being killed by Emily's old doctor from the children's care hospital.
I think that this movie portrays the dissociative identity order pretty well because David has two distinguished personalities and he experiences amnesia during his personality change into Charley. David goes from being a loving and caring father to a killing machine and possessive friend to Emily. He also does not recall killing his wife or the cat which shows that he experienced amnesia during his alter personality of Charley. The only thing that was kind of confusing to me was why he all of a sudden starting to go on a killing spree if he had the dissociative disorder for a length of time and why he wasn't able to realize he had a disorder because he is a psychologist. Overall I really enjoyed this film because it was a thriller and gave me more incite into how a person with a multiple personality disorder can act.
"Thr3e" is a movie that follows Kevin Parson, a student of theology attending seminary. Unbeknownst to himself, Kevin is a victim of dissociative identity/multiple personality disorder. Dissociative identity disorder, according to the DSM-5, is characterized in an individual who expresses two or more distinct personality states, in addition to recurrent episodes of amnesia.
ReplyDeleteThe movie begins with the abduction of Roy Peters by a serial killer known as the Riddle Killer (R.K.). Jennifer Peters, a police officer and Roy's sister, attempts to save him; she unfortunately fails and Roy's life is ended by the explosion of the car in which he is trapped. Kevin Parson, who has just finished composing a thesis on the nature of good and evil, receives a call from R.K. and is threatened to confess his deepest, darkest secret...or else his car will also explode. R.K. then ends the call with a riddle, as is his custom. Though unsure of what secret sin R.K. wants him to confess, Kevin manages to escape from his car before it explodes. He then goes to the police for help, failing to mention the demand about his confession; he believes R.K is referring to something Kevin did in his childhood and has tried to forget ever since. Among the police informed is Jennifer, who is already after R.K. as a result of her brother's death.
Back at home, Kevin enlists the help of childhood friend, Samantha, and they work together to track down R.K. Desperate to satisfy the serial killer, Kevin confesses his "sin" on television: as a boy, Kevin was attacked by another boy who tried to kill Kevin. He, in self-defense, locked the attacker in a warehouse to die; Kevin and Sam have concluded that the boy managed to escape and is now wreaking havoc as the Riddle Killer. The confession, however, is not good enough, and R.K.'s threats continue. The final threat is targeted at Kevin's Aunt Balinda. After Kevin's parents' death by car crash when he was very young, Kevin was sent to live with Balinda, and she proceeded to abuse him both mentally and emotionally until he moved out. He finds her tied up in her basement, accompanied by R.K. Sam discovers the location of Balinda as well and arrives to help, though she stops outside the door and never actually enters. Instead, she listens as R.K. (who has now identified himself as "Slater") tells Kevin that Kevin himself will be the one to kill Balinda, and everyone will take him to be the Riddle Killer.
Meanwhile, Jennifer arrives at the scene, and what she finds is definitely a plot twist: Kevin has been having this entire conversation with himself, and now stands with a gun pointed to his head. Due to the severe levels of trauma inflicted on him as a child, first with his parents' death and the following years of abuse by Balinda, Kevin created Samantha and the boy who attacked him. He then proceeded to subconsciously imitate the actual Riddle Killer. After Jennifer talks Kevin out of ending his own life and convinces him that Sam and Slater are merely figments of his imagination, the imaginary characters disappear from Kevin's mind. The movie ends with Kevin being admitted to a mental institution, where he can be treated.
Until the movie's end, Kevin's disorder is a secret well-kept. Once revealed, however, the symptoms of his dissociative disorder are easily recognized. The entire movie revolves around Kevin's search for what he believes to be a serial killer. However, the actual killer has nothing to do with the theology student; Kevin's subconscious (also referred to as his "evil half") takes over for different periods of time and causes Kevin to model the behavior of said serial killer.
These takeovers go unnoticed by Kevin, which falls perfectly in line with Diagnostic Criteria A from the DSM-5: "Disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states, which may be described in some cultures as an experience of possession. The disruption in identity involves marked discontinuity in sense of self and sense of agency, accompanied by related alterations in affect, behavior, consciousness, memory, perception, cognition, and/or sensory-motor functioning. These signs and symptoms may be observed by others or reported by the individual." For example, when Sam and Kevin find that Kevin's house has been broken into, they think the culprit is R. K. The real "thief," however, really turns out to be Kevin, though he has no recollection of his actions. His subconscious personification of the Riddle Killer takes over while Kevin is asleep, and essentially makes his house look as though it has been ransacked. Despite the various phone calls, threats, and bombings that take place, Kevin never realizes he is the one at fault. His mind has been so affected by the trauma of his past that he creates Sam and Slater to embody the good and evil sides of himself.
ReplyDeleteThe psychological disorder that is portrayed in “A Beautiful Mind” is paranoid schizophrenia. The DSM 5 describes the disorder as showing two of the following symptoms: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior, and negative symptoms. The DSM 5 also says that the level of functioning in a major area of the person’s life is below the level it was before the onset of the disease. Schizophrenia symptoms continue for more than six months and are not attributable to any type of substance use. People that have a family history of schizophrenia are more likely to develop the mental illness. Schizophrenia is a serious mental disorder that sometimes requires in-patient medical care and can sometimes go into remission. Paranoid schizophrenics sometimes have the delusion that someone or something is following them. This someone can sometimes be believed to be a real threat to someone’s well-being or supportive.
ReplyDelete“A Beautiful Mind” is a movie that I have watched two times now. The first time I watched the movie was when I was in high school, and I watched the movie again this weekend. Unfortunately, I got lost in the story line for a second time. The main character in the move is named John Nash. John Nash was a bright student that received a major scholarship to attend Princeton University. He would do complex mathematics problems in his room on his windows. However, Nash refused to publish until he had an idea all of his own. Nash’s complete consumption by these math problems seems to be weird and delusional like. Later in the movie, Nash is invited to the Pentagon to crack an enemy communication code. This seemed to be a first major episode of paranoia. His obsession with looking through magazines to thwart the Soviet plot was a sign of schizophrenia. A further development of the disorder was seen when Nash put letters working so crack the code in a mailbox. Nash always seemed to believe that he was being followed. Shortly after this, Nash meets a woman. He marries her, and they have a child together. A second major episode of paranoia is seen soon after the marriage. Nash is legitimately scared for his life after he witnesses a shootout between soviet agents and another man. Soon after this, he believes that Soviet agents are all over his campus. In a push to escape the agents, Nash punches a faculty member. This is when something was deemed as incorrect in Nash’s mental health. He is sedated and sent to a mental ward. In the mental hospital, Nash is diagnosed with schizophrenia. John is confronted with the made-up people in his head and given medication for his illness. After Nash is released, he stops taking his medication causing a relapse. This is when the worst schizophrenic episode occurs. Nash knocks his wife to the floor and endangers his child’s life due to the attack of the Soviets. Shortly after this, Nash revisits his doctor. Even though he didn’t agree to take medication, he believed that the Soviets and the made up people were part of his hallucinations and decides to control symptoms himself. He is successful at this and becomes a math professor at Princeton. The movie ends with Nash winning the Nobel Prize in Economics.
DeleteI believe that the movie’s portrayal of the disorder is mostly accurate based on the characteristics outlined in the DSM 5. First of all, I believe that Nash’s disorder started out less severe and continuously got worse until the time he decided to get help and understood he had a problem. Initially, Nash was a successful young man. After schizophrenia set in, he was almost paralyzed academically. It was an all-consuming paranoia. Once the illness was back in control, Nash continued to be successful. The actual portrayal of paranoid schizophrenic was accurate by DMS 5 standards. Nash demonstrated delusions (Soviet agents after him), hallucinations (people following him to mailbox), and disorganized speech (rapid speech no one could understand around roommate and wife). Him taking actions against his hallucinations (knocking wife over and putting letters in mailbox) are also very typical of somebody suffering from schizophrenia. Nash was hospitalized for his illness, which is necessary for many schizophrenics. However, I believe the solution to his problem occurred to quickly. Medicine can’t stop the symptoms immediately or completely. Also, schizophrenics would suffer to disregard their delusions like Nash did at the end of the movie.
I chose to watch the movie entitled "The Hours" for this weeks assignment. This movie was very interesting in trying to detect the direct disorder that is displayed. The movie talks about three women, three suicide attempts, and two successful attempts. This movie takes place from a 1941 when Virginia Woolf who is the first character who attempts suicide by putting rocks into her pockets and walking off into the river. The second suicide took place while actor Clarissa Vaughan watches the man she was madly in love with takes his life by falling out a window. The third suicide was only an attempt but Laura Brown fills her purse with pills and decides to go to a hotel but luckily regrets the decision and goes back home to her son. These three stories are completely separate from one another but they do revolve around the three fictional character ideas of Mrs. Dalloway who lives a sad and decrepit life. This movie also demonstrates that personal freedom is expanded greatly during these decades. The women get to enjoy more rather than waiting on their every need of the family. These women were granted more independent time.
ReplyDeleteThis movie displayed quite a variety of psychological issues especially when it got to the point that two out of three of the suicide attempts were completed. According to the DSM-5, many of these actors faced the major depressive disorder. They were depressed a majority of the day, surrounded by loved ones they didn't care for and dealing with a dear friend dying of AIDS. Actor Laura has an amazing son and husband but decides to lay in bed all day which correlates with the loss of energy and diminished pleasure in all things enjoyable. The main contributor to the depressive disorder is the recurrent thoughts of death and carried out by suicidal acts. All the suicides that took place had a specific plan of action and those were carried out as the movie progressed. The suicides all came from different meanings. Woolf's suicide was a time of clarity with her struggles of mental illness. She feels the madness growing inside of her and doesn't want her loved ones to feel the pain. Laura attempts her suicide out of despair and the gentleman tells Clarrissa Vaughan how he cared for her so much but just didn't want to continue on with life.
I think that this movie did a really good job of explaining this disorder. You had to pay very close attention since there was three very distinct stories being told but they all had very similar correlations so you were able to recognize that all the actors were suffering from this disorder. I thought the way that Laura took on her suicide attempt was very recognizable especially in the way she treated her family. She could have cared less with what her husband had to say and she didn't show any emotions to her son until he told her that he loved her. Laura was also pregnant at the time that she was contemplating taking her life or not. I think the movie showed how this disorder can be displayed in three very distinct ways. It shows how suicide can slip into the minds of each individual in so many different ways and under varying circumstances. I really enjoyed this movie and got a better understanding for just how detrimental this disorder can be.
Once you learn more about mental illness and criteria used to diagnose them, watching movies is different...always trying to pick out examples that would characterize somebody as having a particular disorder!
DeleteFor this week’s blog, I chose to write about the movie Lars and the Real Girl. I have watched this movie a couple times before, a while ago with my mother and I have been wanting to watch it again, so I thought this would be the perfect time to watch it again and have more of an understanding about what Lars is going through and why he acts the way he does. In the movie, Lars has severe schizophrenia or also known as delusional disorder previously. He lives in his brother and his wife’s garage. He is very withdrawn and becoming out of touch with reality. One day, he tells Gus and Karin, that he will be bringing home the love of his life, “Bianca.” Bianca is actually a doll that Lars bought off of the internet, when he heard his co-workers talking about ordering sex dolls off the internet. Lars is very naïve and did not necessarily realize what they were referring to. Lars’ love for his inanimate object aka Bianca, really annoys and frustrates Gus, it is difficult for him to understand the way that Lars thinks and to accept it at first. It causes so much tension for Gus, that he and his wife take Lars to a doctor to learn what they can do to help Lars. Instead of using medications, they decide on therapy. Then, there is even a point when the whole community tries to convince Lars that his “soul mate” is not who he thinks she is. I feel like this situation is very accurate with people who have schizophrenia in the present. Many people do not understand why they are how they are and are super quick to judge. This shows how ignorant our society can be when it comes to different psychological disorders and such. Once people realize that he needs there support, they band together and really do their best to support Lars and Bianca. They begin to invite Lars and Bianca to events and really do their best to make Bianca “feel welcome” and make Lars happy!
ReplyDeleteAccording to the DSM V there are seven subtypes of schizophrenia, which are based on the person’s delusions. The seven subtypes are erotomanic, grandiose, jealous, persecutory, somatic, mixed, and unspecified. Lars is diagnosed with schizophrenia because of the 3 main delusions he has about how Bianca is real, how she fell out of love with him because she was too busy and how she dies and needs a proper burial. There is also frequent derailment and a psychotic state is diagnostic features of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia also has a marked stressor that may bring on the disorder is a person is prone to it. In this movie, the death of Lars’ father is the stressor that brings about schizophrenia. When he goes to therapy is it “actually” for Bianca, which I am not completely sure how well that would work, trying to treat a person through an inanimate object, but in this movie it seems to work pretty well. Then in the end of the movie, Lars wakes up and realizes that Bianca is unresponsive and he rushes her to the hospital where he receives news that she is not in a good condition. Lars takes her home and the whole community comes to say their good-byes to her. She then passes away and this causes his delusional state to end for a point in time. All in all, this movie portrays his delusional disorder quite well. It shows a small glimpse of what it may be like to have a person with schizophrenia in a person’s life. Also, the importance of someone with this disorder having a strong support team and people they can ask for help or just talk to.
The DSM 5 no longer has subtypes of schizophrenia like they did in the DSM-IV-TR (paranoid, catatonic, disorganized, undifferenentiated). We don't really base a diagnosis on what type of delusions they have, but note them.
DeleteThe movie I wrote about was Fight Club. This movie about a man that is suffering from sleep deprivation. He finds relief by going to a support group for testicular cancer. He becomes addicted to these support groups and begins going on a regular basis as they help him sleep at night. He then becomes acquainted with another person named marla singer, whom is also addicted to going to these support groups. He then attempts to negotiate which groups they will go to in order to not get in each others way. The main character is then on his way home from a business trip when he meets Tyler Durden. Durden and the main character go to a bar and they get drunk. Durden then provokes the man to hit him and he does. The provocation then leads to a fist fight in which they both were surprisingly very fond of. They then start a club known as "fight club" in the bottom of a bar. Things quickly get out of hand as it almost becomes a cult and the people involved begin to make/plant bombs on credit card companies. At the end of the story the main character realizes that Durden is a person that he made up in his mind and that he was behind all of the acts of violence including the bombings.
ReplyDeleteAccording to the DSM V this is an example of dissociative identity disorder. This is when a person is unaware they have another personality. It was said the subject will have, "Sustained periods of identity disruption may occur when psychosocial pressures are severe and/or prolonged." Regarding the issue in the movie that made him not realize that he was Tyler Durden until the end was described in DSM V. It described 3 ways that dissociative identity can manifest itself. Those three things are: gaps in the memory, laps in dependable memory, and discovery of evidence in everyday tasks. All three of these things were depicted in the movie which leads me to conclude that this movie actually portrayed a somewhat accurate depiction of a person with dissociative identity disorder.
Provide a little more description, especially when talking about the three ways that DID can manifest itself - give specific examples for each of these based on scenes in the movie.
DeleteI decided to watch Silver Linings Playbook. The main character, Pat, has a mood disorder, but more specifically bipolar disorder. According to the DSM 5, bipolar disorder is a “distinct period of abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood.” It also consists of abnormally goal-directed activity or energy, which lasts at least one week. This manic episode can be either preceded by or followed by hypomanic or major depressive episode. A hypomanic episode is very similar to a manic episode, however, involves increased activity or energy that lasts at least four consecutive days. Both manic and hypomanic episodes include the same symptoms and three or more symptoms have to be present to a significant degree during the mood disturbance period. Some of these symptoms are inflated self-esteem or grandiosity, decreased need for sleep, more talking than usual, racing thoughts, distractibility, increase in goal-directed activity, and excessive involvement in activities. A major depressive episode is when five or more symptoms are present during the same two-week period and has to be either depressed mood or loss of interest or pleasure. Most of these symptoms are daily or all day and they include; depressed mood, diminished interest or pleasure, weight loss, insomnia or hypersomnia, psychomotor agitation or retardation, fatigue, feelings of worthlessness, diminished ability to think or concentrate, and recurrent thoughts of death. Bipolar I Disorder must have met at least on manic episode.
ReplyDeleteSilver Linings Playbook starts with the main character, Pat, being discharged form a mental health institute. The condition of the release includes Pat moving back in with his parents. He was put in the institution because he beat up his wife’s lover and was then diagnosis with bipolar disorder. His wife, Nikki, left him and now has a restraining order against him. Pat has mandatory therapy sessions but he doesn’t take the medicine he is prescribed. He goes through series of frustration and violence. He also has terrible insomnia throughout most of the movie. He is goal-oriented by trying to get Nikki and his old job back. His dad has OCD with the football team Philadelphia Eagles because he has to have certain items in the exact same place every time they play. His dad is not helping him manage his bipolar disorder because of his own OCD and gambling addiction that only drives Pat more aggravated. His friend, Ronnie, invites Pat over for dinner and his sister-in-law is over there as well. The sister, Tiffany and Pat embrace their oddities and differences to form a friendship. Pat asks Tiffany to get a letter to Nikki in exchange for dancing with Tiffany during a dance competition. They spend many days and nights practicing, but the stakes are raised when Pat’s dad gambles money on the Eagles winning and Pat and Tiffany getting 5 points during the dance competition. Pat realizes at the dance competition that Tiffany wrote the letter back to Pat, not Nikki. Nikki came to the competition, and while Tiffany and Pat dance, the Eagles win and they score exactly 5 points. Pat then goes to Nikki, whispers something into her ear and Tiffany runs off. Pat then leaves Nikki to find Tiffany and tells her that he has always loved her, just never knew it.
I believe this movie did a pretty good job portraying bipolar disorder. However, when I first watched this movie I didn’t know that he had bipolar disorder, so it was very confusing. Some of the symptoms he has are insomnia, goal-directed activity, racing thoughts, and excessive involvement in activities. One night when he can’t sleep, his thoughts are racing and he goes into his parent’s room and wakes them up with excessive talking. He also gets angry and frustrated easily, and an example is when they are tailgating at the football game and his brother is getting beaten up. He then starts fighting and beating the people who attacked his brother and then gets dragged out by the police. His dad’s condition of OCD was also perceived very well because of all his little “good luck charms” and how obsessed he was at getting all his charms just how they were when they won once before.
DeleteI also struggle to see Bipolar Disorder in this movie at times!
DeleteI chose to watch the movie Benny and Joon. It was a really cute movie and opened your eyes to how people with mental illness live day to day. One of the main characters is named Joon, she has Schizophrenia. For a person to be diagnosed with the disorder they must meet two or more of the following that are present for a significant portion of a one month period. The criteria are: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior, or negative symptoms. They must also experience a decreasing level of function since the onset of symptoms, continuous signs of disturbances persistent for at least six months. Schizoaffective disorder and depressive or bipolar disorder must also be ruled out first before the diagnosis. Some of the associated features supporting the diagnosis are: laughing in the absence of an appropriate stimulus, dysphonic mood such as depression, anxiety or anger, disturbance in sleep patterns, lack of interest in eating food or refusal, depersonalization, anxiety, along with cognitive deficits. There can also be abnormalities in sensor processing and inhibitory capacity as well as reductions in attention. Individuals with psychosis may lack awareness of their disorder. Aggression is also linked to schizophrenia in some cases. The prevalence of the disorder appears in .3-.7%. The psychotic features of the disorder usually appear between late teens and mid 30’s. The predictors of course and outcome are largely unexplained.
ReplyDeleteThe movie shows the day to day life of Benny and Joon. Benny is Joon’s brother and he takes care of her. She cannot be left alone at home because she sets things on fire. The movie takes you through and shows you how she does things differently than a normal person. For instance when she makes breakfast she puts cereal, milk, and peanut butter into a blender and blends it all together then eats it. The movie also shows how caring for his sister full time affects his life. He is afraid to date anyone for the fear that Joon will not like them. Plus he is taking care of her all the time so he doesn’t get to do much stuff. One night Joon is playing poker with some of Benny’s friends and she loses. The guy bet his mentally challenged cousin. So Benny has the cousin come home with them to stay for a little while. While he is there he hangs out with Joon and keeps an eye on her. They end up falling in love and move into together in the end. The cousin teaches Joon to cook by taking an iron for ironing clothes and makes grilled cheese sandwiches. Throughout the movie when Joon talks she bounces around from many topics in one sentence and she also has unrealistic views of situations.
I think that the movie did a good job of portraying an individual with Schizophrenia. They showed how she could not stay on one topic while talking also that she did not think twice about setting things on fire. In one scene she was angry at her brother so she let a piece of paper fly into a candle flame and just left it burning on the floor, and her brother had to go put it out. She didn’t understand how detrimental fire was. There was another scene where she was directing street traffic but she was causing a lot of trouble. She did not understand that what she was doing was dangerous and that she was not supposed to do that.
I decided to re-watch the movie Blow because it is one of my all-time favorite movies! This psychological disorder that is portrayed in this movie is substance abuse especially focusing on cannabis, alcohol, and mostly cocaine abuse. The DSM-5 describes stimulant use disorder as a pattern of amphetamine-type substance, such as cocaine, that can lead to clinically significant impairment or distress. Some of the criteria that must bet to have stimulant use disorder include: the stimulant is taking in larger amounts or over a long period of time, the person feels that they must take the stimulant, craving the stimulant, cannot fulfill major role obligation at school, work, or home, and go through withdrawal without the stimulant.
ReplyDeleteIn this movie the main character George, Johnny Depp, grown up in a lower class family that ends up going bankrupt. His mother complains a lot and ends up leaning him and his father multiple times but always comes back. After growing up poor, George is determined to make a good living for himself. He goes to California and begins selling marijuana and when he is caught smuggling drugs across the border he is sent to jail where he meets Diego. In jail, George learns how to get into the cocaine business with Diego and when he gets out of prison he begins selling and using cocaine in which he is very successful. After getting in with dealers from Mexico he falls in love with Mirtha, played by Penelope Cruz, and due to all their money and success she end up becoming addicted to cocaine and even continues to use it while she is pregnant. Mirthas abuse of cocaine puts a huge strain on her and Georges relationship and results in them splitting up even though they have a child together. George is successful in the cocaine business for years until he is framed by his own friends and captured by the police and sentenced to life in prison. George was wanted due to being the first person to bring cocaine to America. This movie was based off of the true story of George Jung.
Although this movie is surrounded by cocaine use, I am not sure that it ultimately showed a person going through and dealing with addiction. This movie was mostly about the cocaine business and what a person goes through when selling cocaine. Although Mirtha was addicted to cocaine and it tore apart their marriage, the movie did not focus on her and her addiction. In the movie, she is shown snorting cocaine while pregnant and states that at least she stopped drinking. This shows how a person can be dependent on a substance no matter if it is putting another life or a relationship in jeopardy.
For this week's assignment, I chose to watch one of my favorite movies, Fight Club. This movie portrays a character with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). As discussed in class last week, this disorder is described as the coexistence in one person of two or more largely complete, and usually very different personalities, otherwise known as Multiple Personality Disorder. Each personality has its own name, memories, traits, and physical mannerisms. Transitions between the two can be sudden and extreme.
ReplyDeleteThe DSM describes this disorder in more depth. DID is often characterized as "unbidden intrusions into awareness and behavior" and "inability to control mental function or access information". It's also characterized by recurrent detachment (detachment from one's body/mind) as well as amnesia. Many people will have "lost time", alterations of sense of self, and other symptoms.
In the movie Fight Club, the life of the narrator is discussed. By chance, he meets a man named "Tyler Durden". Immediately, he is intrigued by this new friend, as Tyler seems to be everything the narrator isn't and have everything he doesn't. He comes to live with Tyler after his apartment explodes. Tyler and the narrator eventually come to start a club called "Fight Club". Through this, they organize a series of organizations throughout the United States. Slowly, the narrator becomes very jealous of his friend Tyler, as Tyler is always getting the credit for starting "Fight Club" and is convinced that Tyler is plotting against him, leaving him out of the plans. No one will tell him what is going on either, because "Tyler" told them not to. Eventually, at the end of the movie, we realize that Tyler and the narrator are the same person.
The more I've watched the movie, the more little things I've noticed as clues. For example, sometimes in the narrator and Tyler's conversations, they have several similarities. The first time they meet, they have the same briefcase. There are also unexplained reasons why Tyler's girlfriend (Marla) is weird to the narrator and wonders why he isn't talking to her or treating her well. He is trying to be respectful to Tyler, but in fact, he IS Tyler. Tyler is a character created by the narrator to "look like he wants to look, act like he wants to act", etc. He also talks about Tyler's jobs (part-time, working nights), but also discusses how he (the narrator himself) has insomnia and can never really sleep. There's also clues about the "creator of Fight Club", and all of this information is about the narrator. It's kind of a confusing movie the first time you watch it, but it has become one of my favorite over the years and one movie I can never get sick of.
I think this movie does a good job at describing DID, as the narrator is completely unaware that he and Tyler are the same person. He is aware of who Tyler is, yet does not realize the similarities between the two of them. However, often with DID, individuals are not aware of the other person and does not know that there is another person that exists. I think the producer of this movie did a great job at conveying subtle clues throughout the film. One of my favorite quotes of the movie is: "If you wake up at a different time, at a different place, could you wake up as a different person?"
Shutter Island and Schizophrenia.
ReplyDeleteThe film I chose to watch and critique is Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island. This is an amazing movie and I think both Scorsese and DiCaprio are genius and they make a great team. The disorder portrayed in the film is Schizophrenia.
The DSM 5 says one has Schizophrenia if they have two or more of the following symptoms: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior, and negative emotional symptoms. Some individuals with Schizophrenia may lack awareness of their disorder, which typically a symptom of schizophrenia itself rather than a coping strategy. Lack of awareness is the most common predictor of non-adherence to treatment, and it predicts higher relapse rates, increased number of involuntary treatments, poorer psychosocial functioning, aggression, and a poorer course of illness. Roughly 20% of the individuals with Schizophrenia will recover completely, some have remissions in the active symptoms with only their cognitive abilities impaired, while many require lifelong living supports.
Shutter Island is great because you are unaware of the main characters disorder in the beginning, it slowly reveals itself as his symptoms grow further out of control after he if off his medication. The movie starts with Leo (Teddy Daniels) coming to Shutter island with new partner Chuck. You are led to believe that he is a US marshal who has been sent to the island on a case of an escaped patient named Rachel Solando. The movies is also latent with flashback/ dream scenes. Primarily of when Teddy was in was involved with the liberation of Dachau during WWII and nightmarish visions of his wife asking him to locate her murderer, Andrew Laeddis. After a gruesome storm he meets a mental patient and they have a discussion that leads Teddy to believe that they are lobotomizing people in the Lighthouse. Teddy tries to reach the lighthouse and he climbs down a cliff because he sees a light in a cave. In the cave he meets Solando, who claims that she used work for the institution, but after she tried to alert the police she was committed. After this meeting Teddy becomes increasingly more paranoid that he is being drugged by the Institution. When Teddy finally gets to the light house, you discover that his partner was actually his psychiatrist, and that he was in fact Andrew Laeddis. This whole experience he had delusions being an officer. His paranoia of the institution and hallucinations of Solando were all symptoms of his Schizophrenia. His Schizophrenia was sparked by him not being able to live with the fact that his wife killed his children he felt guilty.
I think this movie does a great job portraying the disease. You see if form the point of view of the Schizophrenic. The whole movie you were on his side, slowly seeing reality come back into play. This movie makes you question what is real. The delusions, hallucinations, and paranoia seemed very real, which I must for those inflicted. Especially seen in the cave seen when he is talking to Solando and when he finally reaches the light house. Not even his gun was real. And not being aware of the disease is a very common side effect in extreme cases of Schizophrenia. Since Leo is the main character you want to be on his side, but at the end of the movie you see the truth.
The first time I saw that movie (before I really started learning about psychological disorders) I was mind blown...it is a great movie!
DeleteThe movie I watched was The Silver Lining Playbook. This movie portrayed Bipolar disorder and OCD. I will be describing bipolar disorder from the DSM 5 since that is what the main character was diagnosed. Bipolar disorder is when a person experiences manic episode and depressive episodes. A manic episode is known as an expressive mood or abnormal energy within a person personality. This episode will last an entire day, at least once a week. A person may experience an increase in self-esteem, more talkative, or excessive activity involvement. There may also be a decrease in sleep and increase in goal driven activities. A hypomanic episode has the same symptoms, but lasts at least four consecutive days. During major depressive episodes, a person experiences a depressed mood, low levels of energy, and decrease in ability to be involved. Manic episodes and depressive episodes are opposites pertaining of a person’s functions, abilities, and thoughts. Bipolar disorder is genetically passed down by family members. Males are less likely to experience episodes, when compared to females. Females are more likely to experience depressive thoughts or symptoms than men. Prevalence estimate within the United States was 0.6% for this disorder.
ReplyDeleteDuring the movie, there is a main character named Pat who is diagnosed with bipolar disorder. His mother comes to visit him at the institution he and discharges him to come home. Pat uncontrollable lashes or depressive episodes get him involved with violent words and actions. Although, these types of depressive moods only last a few hours. Pat also has manic episodes where he stays up late at night reading. Pat is very goal driven about getting fit and changing his ways for his ex-wife. Pat eventually meets a woman named Tiffany, who also has psychological problems. Both of these two have been through traumatic events that have skewed their thinking. Pat is trying to contact his ex-wife who has a restraining order against him, whereas Tiffany is dealing with the death of her husband. At first they did not accept or like each other, but later they learned from each other’s personalities. They worked to together to face challenges and problems within their lives. Tiffany helped Pat contact his ex-wife and Pat helped Tiffany dance in a competition. Practicing for the competition brought their relationship closer.
I believe that this movie portrayed the disorder correctly, but not what I thought bipolar disorder was. Maybe it is because it thought the symptoms would be more prominent than they were within the movie. Pat shows depressive moods when he gets in an argument with his parents and lashes out. His mood changed suddenly when he apologized once he realized what he was doing. Pat also showed manic episodes by running every day because it was his goal to get in shape. Even though his dad wanted him to stay home and spend time together, Pat would leave to do his daily run. Another manic episode Pat presented was when he stayed up until 4a.m. to read a story. His sleeping hours had decreased, which lead him to wake his parents up to explain the excitement about his book.
I sometimes struggled to see Bipolar Disorder in this movie too, so it's probably not the "best" example of what is typically seen in someone with Bipolar Disorder.
DeleteI watched the movie Lars and the Real Girl. In this movie the main character Lars seems to be somewhat socially withdrawn. He keeps to himself and avoids touching other people. One day Lars receives a package in the mail, it is a life size doll he names Bianca. Lars acts as though Bianca is his girlfriend and every bit as real as any other human being. The disorder portrayed in this movie is delusional disorder. According to the DSM 5 delusional disorder is a disorder in which someone has a delusion, an unshakeable and untrue thought that they believe to be true, for at least a month. Other than having a delusion their behavior isn’t out of the ordinary. Lars’ delusion is definitely bizarre and when his brother Gus tries to tell him that Bianca isn’t a real person Lars just pretends not to hear him. The movie continues on and everyone in Lars’ community shows how much they care about him by pretending that Bianca is a real person. They find her jobs, vote her onto the school board and do everything possible to not make Lars feel like he’s crazy. Lars’ psychiatrist asks him to bring Bianca into the doctor each week so she can have special treatment, but really the doctor is trying to figure out what is going on with Lars. He tells her that when someone touches him it hurts, but not with Bianca. All this time there is a girl at Lars’ work that has a crush on him and you can tell that he’s interested in her but he doesn’t know how to show it. One night they went out bowling together while Bianca was at a meeting and before they leave Lars holds her hand and you can tell that it doesn’t hurt him. A couple days later Gus finds Lars in Bianca’s room saying that she won’t wake up and her treatments aren’t helping. They rush Bianca to the hospital where they find out that Bianca won’t get any better and while they’re at the lake one afternoon Bianca ‘passes away’. They have a funeral for Bianca and at the very end of the movie Lars asks the girl from work if she’d like to go on a walk with him. Lars’ delusion ended because he no longer needed it which according to the DSM 5 is kind of how delusions run their course. However, Lars’ delusion isn’t really in any of the classifications of delusions. It’s a very bizarre delusion, almost at the point of schizophrenia, except his delusion subsides and he’s normal other than thinking a doll is a real person. Even though Lars’ delusion is so unusual he still shows many signs of delusional disorder. He uses his delusion to help him grow in relationships with other people in his life, by having Bianca in his life and his community’s support Lars starts to come out of his shell and starts to make real connections with real people which helps him lose sight of his delusion.
ReplyDeleteI watched The Silver Linings Playbook which portrays multiple psychological disorders. The main characters Pat and Tiffany each have their obvious mood disorders. Pat is said to have undiagnosed bipolar disorder in the movie and has been living with it his entire life but when he found his wife cheating on him and it created a huge trigger for Pat’s disorder. Tiffany on the other hand lost her husband and fell into a deep depression resulting in a severe mood disorder. An underlying psychological disorder in this movie is portrayed through Pat’s father. Pat’s father has many showings of OCD such as his obsession with how the remotes lay and knowing when one envelope is missing from his study. Of all these disorders I would like to focus on Pat’s bipolar disorder.
ReplyDeleteAccording to the DSM 5, there are three types of bipolar disorders. Bipolar I described as when someone experienced a manic, hypomanic, or a depressive episode lasting around a week with episodes almost every day for the most part of the day. Bipolar II is for people who have had a major depression and a hypomanic episode lasting four or more consecutive days during which the depressive episode has five or more symptoms present during a two week period, mostly resulting from a change in work or social function. The final category of bipolar disorders is cyclothymic disorders. This disorder is when people have mania, hypomania, or depressive episodes that are not severe enough to be considered bipolar I or II, lasting around two years in which half of the time is spent in the hypomanic or depressive periods.
Overall, this move was quite accurate at depicting some of the tell-tale signs of a bipolar disorder, but the time frame is a little confusing to understand. In the beginning we find that Pat caught his wife cheating on him, leading him to an outburst where he almost beat the man his wife was cheating with to death. Only later do we find out in Pat’s therapy sessions that Pat’s wedding song was playing when he caught his wife in the act, creating a trigger for Pat of uncontrolled violence. Also, during his therapy session it is mentioned that a week before the cheating occurred Pat accused his wife and the man she cheated with of embezzling money from the school they worked at. When the embezzlement was disproved Pat was told he had an undiagnosed bipolar disorder leading to delusions. Also, the movie shows Pat’s obsession with getting his wife, Nikki, back by reading her entire class syllabus and finding any way to communicate with her, despite the restraining order she placed against him. This is outlined in the DSM 5’s criteria as an increase in goal-directed activity. During this obsession to get Nikki back, Pat rarely sleeps when he first gets home, which fits with the DSM 5’s criteria of insomnia. Also, during one of his sleepless nights Pat decides he wants to see his wedding video, leading to a huge outburst when he cannot find it. Another criteria depicting in the movie is Pat’s uncontrolled talking. Pat has almost an awkward uncontrollable need to talk leading to him constantly interrupting people and raising his voice in order to be heard as if he felt a pressure to keep talking.
Pat’s actions accurately fit the DSM 5’s criteria for bipolar disorder. However, the timelines involved in the movie and the criteria listed are almost impossible to compare, leaving that portion of the DSM 5’s criteria not accurately portrayed within the movie.
I chose to watch the movie Fight Club and the disorder is displayed was a Dissociative Disorder of multiple disorders. The movie is about a young man who works at an office job and has sever insomnia. He doesn't sleep for days and figures out that if he can cry, he can sleep. So in order for him to cry, he goes to all different kinds of support groups. It doesn't matter if he has something wrong with him or not, he goes to every group. His job then has him go on business trips everywhere and on his business trip he meets this guy who really interests him. His name is Tyler. It seems to be a guy who reflects the kind of lifestyle he wants. After he returns from his business trip he finds out that his apartment has burned down and then he needs a place to stay so he goes and stays with Tyler. After him and Tyler spend some time together, they begin to develop a fight club. It doesn't take long for the fight clubs to get out and people in other cities are doing them. After they fight clubs get bigger, guys start moving in and training to be come Tyler's army. They guys in training start going out in the city and committing crimes and they never seem to get caught. Finally, there is a huge plan to blow up six buildings that hold credit card companies. By this time, the unnamed main character figures out that Tyler is actually him. He figures out that Tyler is a part of his mind and by this time, he cannot remove Tyler. At the end of the movie, he has to shoot himself in the head to get rid of Tyler and he somehow lives with a hole in his face.
ReplyDeleteThe DSM5 criteria says a person whose identity is characterized by two or more distinct personalities. It also says recurrent gaps in the recall of everyday life and it can cause significant distress in social, occupational, or other areas of functioning. A big one is that these symptoms are not attributable to the physiological effects of a substance. The main character in this movie does actually portray all of this criteria in the movie. He has a personality that takes over his life and he never seems to remember when he plans his crimes for his army. He also never remembers anything that Tyler plans, even though that is his mind.
I think you mean Dissociative Identity Disorder.
DeleteI watched the movie Silver Linings Playbook. It portrays a few mental disorders but the main character has bi polar disorder. The DSM 5 explains Bipolar I disorder as this; a manic episode that may have been preceded by and may be followed by hypomanic or major depressive episodes. The main feature of a manic episode is a period of persistent, elevated, and irritable mood that is persistent for most of the day, every day. There is also a large increase in goal directed activity with excessive planning and multi tasking.
ReplyDeleteThis movie is about Pat, it starts off showing him in a mental institute. He found his wife cheating on him and almost beat the guy to death because he had diagnosed bipolar disorder. He moves back in with his parents and meets this girl Tiffany whose husband past away. She suffers from depression and is a very interesting character. Pat struggles throughout the movie with trying to get back with his wife even though there is a restraining order on him and his attraction with Tiffany. They end up making a deal that Tiffany will give Pats wife (Nikki) his letters to her if she will enter a dance competition with him. It was a really interesting movie because it showed two people whose lives were a mess and they are both dealing with a mental illness come together.
I think the movie did a great job of displaying bipolar disorder. Pat really cant accept that he has mood swings. He doesn't take his medication because he thinks he has it under control. There are many things that set off his moods and they usually involve his wife. He hears their wedding song in the waiting room and starts throwing stuff around the room. One night he tries to find his wedding tape and his parents try calming him down and he ends up hitting his mom and fighting with his father. That is when he realizes that he needs to start taking his medication and getting his episodes under control. Throughout the movie all Pat wants is to get back with his wife, goal planning. He obsesses over it and does everything he can to impress her. While trying to do that he is learning a dance with Tiffany and trying to help his father, multi tasking.
For this week’s blog assignment I chose to watch “Girl Interrupted.” Depression is the disorder that the movie focuses on. We see signs of other disorders as well, but depression is the main focus. It is extreme depression and an attempt at suicide that lands a girl not much older than me into a mental hospital. At first Suzannal won’t admit she’s crazy and she only took those pills to help her sleep. She keeps up this denial for the first half of the movie. When she is given the chance to run away to Canada with Toby, she realizes that she needs Claymoore (the mental hospital) and that she can’t leave until she is better. Eventually she makes an escape with one of her friends there. She and Lisa want to go be Cinderella and Snow White at the Disney theme park that’s opening in Florida. They stay one night at a former Claymoore patient’s house. Lisa says some hurtful (yet possibly true) things to Daisy and she hangs herself in her bathroom. Suzanna is the one who finds her the next morning. This confrontation of death led Suzanna to the realization that she needed to use the facilities at Claymoore to her advantage and that she needs to be the one to make herself better. She pours her heart out to her therapist three times a week. She writes in her journal and paints in order to get all the negativity out. She proactively works to make herself better and is awarded release for her efforts at the movie’s end.
ReplyDeleteThe DSM-5 features various symptoms of Major Depressive Disorder. Three of these are very accurately portrayed in Suzanna’s character – overall depressed mood, insomnia, and recurrent thoughts of death. Suzanna seems to be preoccupied with death, which is clear to her doctors as well as evident in her writing and when she finds Daisy dead. She also is never manic and is always very calm – almost too calm sometimes. She does get frustrated sometimes, but not in dangerous ways. She also has insomnia for most of the movie, and this alternates with not being able to sleep at night to being able to sleep all day. “Girl Interrupted” very accurately shows viewers what living with Major Depressive Disorder is like, as well as the fact that recovery is possible. I learned a lot about what it’s like to live with depression and also the effort that goes into treatment. Living with depression and finding the will to recover is not easy, but it is possible.
There definitely is an element of depression in here, but Girl, Interrupted mostly portrays Borderline Personality Disorder. I encourage you to look up the criteria for that and see what you think about the movie. Maybe you'll have to rewatch it after learning about BPD!
DeleteI decided to watch Shutter Island for this assignment. I own this movie and loved watching it again, paying special attention to the details of DiCaprio’s character.
ReplyDeleteThe movie portrays a man described as a schizophrenic, but I never realized this and had always believed he had a form of DID as well, so I also wanted to see if he fit the criteria for DID.
Diagnostics for Schizophrenia in the DSM-5 include the following:
First, 2 or more of the following: Delusions, Hallucinations, Disorganized Speech, Disorganized or Catatonic behavior, and Negative Symptoms. The level of functioning (in daily life) must be significantly impaired due to these disturbances.
Diagnostics for Dissociative Identity Disorder in the DSM-5 include the following:
The disruption of the person’s identity, which results in the individual having two or more distinct personality states. According to the DSM, “The disruption in identity involves marked discontinuity in sense of self and sense of agency, accompanied by related alterations in affect, behavior, consciousness, memory, perception, cognition, and/or sensory-motor functioning.” In addition, gaps will be present in the recollection of everyday activities, to an extent that is not the result of normal average memory forgetting. Functioning in day to day life will be impaired by these symptoms.
In Shutter Island, DiCaprio plays U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels, who has been called to Shutter Island to investigate the disappearance of a patient named Rachel. Shutter Island houses the criminally insane. In the opening scene, Teddy and his partner are on a ferry and teddy discusses how his wife and children were killed by a fire (he eventually discloses that this fire was set by a man named Laeddis, who is housed on Shutter Island). When they reach the island, it becomes increasingly evident that something regarding the disappearance of Rachel is fishy, an Teddy becomes suspicious. Throughout the first portion of the movie, Teddy experiences several flashbacks/hallucinations from when he was a Marshal in WWII. A hurricane reaches the island and the power goes out. It is discovered that Rachel (who was imprisoned for killing her children) has been found by the lighthouse. When talking to Rachel, Teddy becomes absorbed in her tale of missing her husband and later hallucinates that he is a part of her family, helping to drift her children off in the lake after she has killed them. Teddy later hallucinates that these children are on a pile of bodies, those which he shot during the war. Teddy makes his way to the C ward of the psychiatric prison, where the most dangerous prisoners are held. Rachel originally wrote a note saying to look for the 67th prisoner, who was supposed to not exist. However, Teddy goes looking for Laeddis anyway, but never finds him. Finally, in the culmination of the movie, Teddy goes to the lighthouse, where the warden and head doctors are waiting to inform him that he is in fact Laeddis, and the entire movie has been an elaborate role-playing scheme to allow Laeddis to play out his fantasy as Teddy, the U.S. marshal, for in fact Laeddis’ wife killed his own three children when he left her alone in their lake house after she burnt down their apartment. Laeddis’ wife had manic depression, which Laeddis chose not to deal with. Alone in the lake house, she drowned their children, a scene Laeddis came home to before killing her. As Teddy, Laeddis could escape from the reality of his life, pretending his wife and kids had been killed in a fire by Laeddis, another man.
Although in this final scene Laeddis remembers who he is and breaks free of his alter-persona as Teddy, implying the elaborate role-playing schema has been a success, the doctor tells him he has been “cured” before, but regressed back into his alter-personality, Teddy. After an unknown amount of time living as the “cured” Laeddis, it appears in the end that Laeddis slips back into his fantasy world as Teddy. There is debate about whether Laeddis then knew the truth but perhaps decided the lobotomy was better than living with the truth. He says in the last line, “What is better? To live as a monster or to die as a good man?”
DeleteThe main symptoms seen in DiCaprio’s character are hallucinations and severe flashbacks, excessive blinking, body tremors, alcoholism (prior to being committed), and the alter-identity of Teddy. The blinking, migraines, and tremors can be attributed to withdrawals from the medications Laeddis took but “Teddy” did not.
For Dissociative Identity Disorder, Laeddis has a distinct alter-identity that he succumbs to as a result of trauma. This alter identity has distinct personality traits separate from Laeddis, but rather than an actual altered-state, this separate identity is more distinctly a “past” identity, allowing Laeddis to slip into the past when he was a distinguished U.S. Marshal. For this reason, there may not be enough evidence to diagnose DID.
Laeddis exhibits two or more of the first criteria for schizophrenia. He has hallucinations, delusions (distinguished U.S. Marshal uncovering a conspiracy theory) as well as, in a way, negative symptoms (he has no recollection of his traumatic past and no emotional attachment to it). Laeddis has had his condition for 24 months and it is obvious he cannot live a normal life like this.
I think the movie fairly accurately portrays a schizophrenia disorder. Laeddis has multiple hallucinations that keep him up at night in addition to his delusions. He is a patient in a prison for the criminally insane yet he still conjures up the grandeur delusion that he is a distinguished U.S. Marshal who has been called to perform an investigation. In the scene where his partner first mentions that maybe the psych ward is trying to drug him and play him, he completely succumbs to this mad idea immediately, rather than face the truth that it is he who is insane. Schizophrenia also can be characterized by “episodes” followed by partial or full remission, which Laeddis is said to have had. Overall, this movie gives a great look into the delusional world of a schizophrenic.
Awesome job, I like your curiosity!
DeleteI chose to watch As Good as it Gets. The psychological disorder that is portrayed in this movie is obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). According to the DSM-5, individuals with OCD tend to have dysfunctional beliefs. This may include an inflated sense of responsibility and the tendency to overestimate threat; perfectionism and intolerance. The diagnostic criteria of OCD is as follows:
ReplyDeleteA. Presence of obsessions, compulsions, or both
B. The obsessions or compulsions are time-consuming (take more than 1 hour per day) or cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
C. The obsessive-compulsive symptoms are not attributable to the physiological effects of a substance or another medical condition.
D. The disturbance is not better explained by the symptoms of another mental disorder
In the beginning of this movie, the main character Melvin is shown washing his hands in scalding hot water. He then continues to throw away the first bar of soap, grab a new one out of his cupboard, and does the same thing with scalding hot water. This is the first hint that he may have OCD, as he is displaying a repetitive behavior. He displays several acts of these behaviors throughout the movie; avoiding cracks in sidewalks, locking his door constantly, counting, phobia of germs, etc. Melvin appears very distressed with life at the beginning of the movie. These acts seem to take up quite a bit of his time, and also seem to frustrate others.
Another more specific example of his repetitive behaviors is when he goes to eat breakfast at the same diner, at the same table, with the exact same waitress every morning. He tends to order the same thing each time, brings his own plastic silverware as he is afraid of using the diners, and gets frustrated if something interferes with his routine such as someone else sitting at his table. Melvin does not have much of a social life, as he just appears to get upset easily when things don’t go the way he thinks they should. Throughout the movie however, he starts to wind down.
His neighbor ends up becoming aggressively beaten up, and he is forced to watch his dog for him. Melvin hates this at first, but the dog and him quickly build a companionship. Not too long after his neighbor recovers and Melvin is left lonely again. This sets off his bad day, so he decided to try and keep the rest of his routine going by walking to the diner where he finds his typical waitress is missing and he has a new one. All of this upsets Melvin greatly enough to go out of his way to find the waitress and show up where she lives.
As to not give away too much of the stories plot, I am going to stop my summarizing here. The movie does indeed portray OCD accurately. Melvin displayed several ritualistic obsessions and compulsions throughout the entirety of the film. He did admit eventually that he had started taking medication, and it seemed to be helping him as his behaviors had eased. Overall, this movie was very compelling and I enjoyed watching it. It gave me great insight as to how an individual with OCD lives day to day and how they cope.
Fight Club
ReplyDeleteThe psychological disorder that is present in this movie is Dissociative Identity Disorder. The DSM-5 states that this disorder is a disruption of identity characterized by two or more personality states. This disruption in identity is involved with marked discontinuity in sense of self and self of agency. The disorder is also accompanied by related alterations in affect, behavior, consciousness, memory, perception, cognition, and sensory-motor functioning. This can be observed by others or even by the individual. The recall of everyday events, important personal information, and traumatic events are inconsistent with ordinary forgetting. The symptoms of this disorder cause clinically significant stress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. The disturbance from Dissociative Identity Disorder is not a normal part of accepted cultural or religious practice. The symptoms are not attributable to the physiological effects of a substance or other medical conditions.
The movie starts out on top of a building with Tyler holding a gun in the narrator’s mouth. At this point is when the narrator takes us back in time. The movie shows the narrator at his boring job which makes it pretty clear that he is unhappy with his life at this point. The unhappiness leads to insomnia. After many days of no sleep the narrator decides to go to the doctor. The doctor kind of laughs at his and tells him that if he wants to see real problems he should see people in support groups. This is when the narrator begins to go to support groups. He becomes addicted and goes to different ones all the time acting as a different person at each one. Finally, he breaks down at one and can sleep that night. He then starts to notice a woman that has also been attending all of the same groups that he has. Her name is Marla and he can no longer concentrate on bettering himself while she is there. They decide not to attend the same meetings. The narrator’s job is to travel the country and evaluate cars. He becomes tired of this and takes a vacation by visiting a nude beach where he meets Tyler. When he returns home he finds that his house has blown up. This is where the narrator calls Tyler and eventually moves in with him. In order to move in with him, the narrator must hit Tyler as hard as he can. This is where the fight club begins. This club begins to gain attention of other men. The narrator has a dream that he sleeps with Marla. The next day, Tyler tells the narrator that he met Marla last night and slept with her. This angers the narrator because not only did she invade his support groups but now his home. At this point, he begins to forget about work and focus all of his time to fight club. Tyler is the leader of the group and later disappears. The narrator begins asking everyone he meets if they know where he is. A bartender ends up calling him Tyler. He is freaked out so he runs to call Marla to see if this is true. Tyler then returns and is upset with the narrator for discussing him with Marla behind his back. The narrator is eventually kicked out of fight club. He then wakes up in his house and decides that he needs to warn Marla of who Tyler really is. She tells him of the terrible things that he has been doing and he doesn’t really remember anything. He visits the fight club and wants to fight everyone there so that he can die. The narrator finally understands that he created Tyler so that he could be with Marla. He then shoots himself in the cheek. The narrator wakes up and thinks he is in heaven but he is really in a mental institution.
This movie pretty accurately portrays the disorder because the narrator and Tyler end up being the same person which is an example of two or more personality states. This is present throughout the whole movie. When Marla tries to tell him all of the bad things that he has done, he has no recollection which is an alteration in memory like stated in the DSM-5. The narrator also cannot remember everyday events that he encountered which is stated also. He also just forgot about his job which is a symptom that is mentioned.
ReplyDeleteI decided to re-watch Silver Lining Playbook. I really enjoy this story. The second time watching it I noticed different things than when I had first watched it. The psychological disorder in this movie is the mood disorder of bipolar disorder. According to the DSM5, bipolar disorder there are two episodes that a person with this disorder goes through. These two episodes are a manic episode and a major depressive episode. The manic episodes have hyperactivity with elevated moods and energy. During the manic episode, people with this disorder are more easily distracted and tend to be very irritable. They have a decreased need for sleep and tend to participate in more activities that are dangerous to them. They seem to talk more than usual and have an increased desire to reach goals. During the manic episode, they also tend to avoid subjects that get their mind racing. During the major depressive episode, they are depressed most of the day and have a diminished interest in activity level. They are unable to concentrate for very long and have a loss of energy or seem fatigued. During this episode they get very agitate and seem to have no interest in pleasure seeking activities. During this episode often times this person will feel very useless or guilty as well.
ReplyDeleteSilver Lining Playbook is about a character named Pat. He was institutionalized because of his bipolar disorder after he assaulted his ex wife’s lover. He was released and then sent to live with his parents. He would refuse medication and have moments of up and down episodes. Pat had a goal to reconnect and find his wife again but she had a restraining order on him and did not want to see him. Pat had caught his wife having an affair to their wedding song. This song, and anything that triggers the memory sets Pat off and he becomes somewhat violent or outbreaks. Pat returns home and begins running every day in a garbage bag to sweat more and get in shape. He goes over to his friends house one night for dinner and his friend’s wife invites her sister over. The sister’s name is Tiffany. We do not know this right away but later on find out that Tiffany has the disorder as well and is even a little depressed. She takes an interest in Pat but Pat is still hooked on finding and reconnecting with his ex wife. Tiffany was married but her husband had died. Eventually Pat and Tiffany go on a date where they get to know each other a little bit better and discuss how their life is with the disorder. Pat had written a letter for his ex wife and Tiffany said that she would give her the letter as long as Pat was her dance partner for a competition. The two begin to practice for the dance while Pat waits and waits to hear back from his wife. During this time the two start to fall for each other. They even hang out around Pat’s house and watch football games with his parents like they always used to do before Pat went into the institution. The moods of Pat and Tiffany vary because of their disorder. Towards the end of the movie Pat decides that he does not want to perform because he found out that Tiffany lied about the letter and she wrote the response back and not his wife. His parents and Tiffany decided to lie to him and tell him that the wife would be at the dance show just to get him to go. Of course there is a happy ending and Pat does the dance which is actually quite horrible compared to the other dancers and realizes that he loves Tiffany.
I think that this movie displays the characteristics of these disorders quite well. Tiffany tends to ramble and talk a lot and Pat sometimes seems to have no interest. It is also very clear when Pat has his outbursts like when he got in a fight with his parents one night and when he fought somebody tailgating at the football game. Pat also was not sleeping very well. You could tell when he had his manic episodes because he seemed to be all over the place like when he had to run he had a lot of energy. With Tiffany, you could tell that she was a bit depressed and that she found comfort in Pat. I think that when Pat decided not to dance, he was going through a depressive stage that was triggered by the letter not actually being from his wife. I think the movie is adorable that the two find comfort in each other despite their disorders they are still able to overcome them together. Another thing that I found was that Tiffany kind of avoided the subject of what was wrong with her for a while and ignored the topic of her dead husband.
DeleteIn my opinion, this is a tricky movie to see Bipolar Disorder in, but you did a great job!
DeleteI chose to watch the movie “Thr3e;” the disorder portrayed in the movie was dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder. The DSM-5 describes this disorder with 5 different criteria. The first criteria is that there is a disruption of identity with two or more distinct personalities; this is accompanied by related alterations of affect, behavior, consciousness, memory, perception, cognition, and/or sensory-motor functioning, and these can be reported by the person or a witness. The second criteria are recurrent gaps in recall of everyday events. The third is the symptoms may cause may cause significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, and other areas of functioning. The fourth criteria are the symptoms are not part of a religious or cultural practice, like little kids having imaginary friends. The last is that the symptoms are not considered a physiological effect of a substance or another medical condition.
ReplyDeleteAt first I was really confused about how the movie was categorized as multiple personality disorder when it was about a serial killer. The movie started out with showing this girl, who we come to learn is a detective that tries to help Kevin, trying to save her younger brother from being killed by RK (the riddle killer). 3 months later, the main character Kevin started getting weird phone calls and threats from who everyone thought was RK. As the movie progresses, the threats and riddles get worse. In the last half hour, after Kevin almost gets killed with his friend, Sam, he heads to his aunt Balinda’s house and finds out that the killer has her. While he went there, Sam went to his house and made a shocking discovery; Kevin was writing his thesis on good and evil, and that the person was made out to be the killer was actually Kevin, just the evil personality. Then Sam shows up and says there is more than one person, because she sees two sets of feet, and at that point, Jennifer, the detective, was on her way. When Jennifer gets there, she hears more than one voice, but when she gets downstairs, she realizes that everything is just a figment of Kevin’s imagination, except his aunt, of course. So she has to talk him down from killing himself as the evil Slater. While Jennifer is trying to explain this all to him, he doesn’t understand and says “But you saw Sam?” She replies with “I never actually saw her.” Kevin ends up in a mental hospital at the end of the movie with Jennifer going to visit him.
When I found out that he had multiple personalities, it all made sense. What was shown in the book, I feel like did portray the criteria in the DSM-5 very well, especially the first criteria. They did a great job portraying that he had more than one personality and had absolutely no idea about. In the end of the movie, they were all down in the basement of the garden shack, when Jennifer was talking Kevin down; the movie kept switching between her point of view and his. So when we saw Jennifer’s point of view, She just saw Kevin holding a gun to his head and pointing another gun at his aunt, but when we saw Kevin’s point of view, we saw Sam, who was trying to talk Kevin out of killing his aunt and to kill Slater, and Slater, who was holding a gun to Kevin’s head to get him to kill his aunt. Sam and Slater were supposed to show the good and evil within Kevin, and the reason everything occurred when it did was because of the topic of his thesis. Through the entire last half hour of the movie, they did a great job showing the effects of the disorder and what the disorder was just like in general.
I decided to watch the movie Blow. I am an Addiction Studies Major so I thought I would chose a movie from the Substance Use Disorders category. George the main character in the movie would be diagnosed we be diagnosed with a stimulant disorder, mainly a Severe Cocaine Addictive Disorder (304.20). George meet 9 out of the 11 criteria just based on his character. The biggest one that would be an attention getter is the toxicity level for cocaine in an average adult is 1-1.5g of cocaine and he stated in the movie that he used more than 5g on a daily basis and that he used 10g in 10 minutes one time. When a patient has that high of a tolerance that is a severe addiction.
ReplyDeleteThe movie started off with him setting in a room with some buddy talking about the pure Columbian Coke that he had in front of him, the he introduced himself as George Jung Federal Inmate. Then the story started showing him as a child wanting to go to work with his dad and he his mom was kind of upset about it. As the childhood years progressed it talked that his mom had left his dad several times but he always took her back. When she found out that they lost everything they started to get in a fight and his dad made a comment to her about not doing it in front of the kid. When George graduated high school him and his best friend Tuna decided to move to California and live the life. They had $300 and they want a change. After being out there they were introduced to Cannabis. After a while they started buying and selling it on the beach. They started to get money hungry and decided with the help of another friend they would start selling it back on the east coast. With the help of George's girlfriend who was a flight attendant she would keep flying back to the east coast and deliver the product. Every time she arrived back there the dealer on the east coast would tell her he needed more. George figured out a way to get more back there but in the process he got busted trafficking over 600lbs of cannabis across state lines. He jumped bail and ran from the cops for a short time till he showed up at his parents house and his mom turned him in. He received 26 months in Federal Prison where he meet Diego his cellmate and future Columbian Drug partner. After Diego and him talked inside and Diego found out why he was in prison he asked George what he knew about Cocaine and told him he knew how he could make lots of money. Once George was released from prison he called Diego and flew to Columbia to meet with Diego's contacts. He figured out a way to make $40,000 out of a $10,000 kilo of Cocaine. Before you knew it he had his hands on every gram of Cocaine that entered the US. During this time he meet his wife and she also got addicted to Cocaine. While she was giving birth to their child George collapsed in the delivery room due to a high toxic level of Cocaine in his system. After that situation he decided to stop running Cocaine. He had over $30 million in a bank and had a child to keep him happy. George's wife kept snorting coke and it ended up getting George in trouble. He started having problems at home and when his account got seized after a DEA bust he decided to do one more run. His wife made them almost have a wreck on the freeway and he got pulled over with over a kilo of Cocaine in the car. He went back to prison for 3 years and lost contact with his daughter. After getting out this time he was going straight again and decided he wanted to do one more run so he could take his daughter to California and start paying child support so he could see her more. His friends set him up to get busted and it landed him a 60 year sentence in Federal Prison and worst off he realized that he was never the father he should of been.
He never admitted to having a problem. Although her always let the drug run his life. Although he was letting the drug run his life because of the money he had such a high tolerance for the drug that he was in a severe Cocaine addiction. He was always taking risk to get that next dollar he got caught up in what should of been important to him. If he would have sat down with a Addiction's counselor he would be diagnosed with a severe disorder. The movie was more about how at one time every gram of Cocaine that entered into this country was touched by George Jung. The movie gave a stat that 85% of the Cocaine that enter the US from the late 1970's to the mid 1980's was brought here because of George. It is a great movie and I am so glad I had to watch it for this assignment.
DeleteAwesome job when talking about the criteria (listing the code and stating that he met a specific amount of criteria)...sounds like you have a bright future in ADS!
DeleteIn the movie a Beautiful Mind, John Nash suffers from schizophrenia. The DSM 5 describes schizophrenia as a mental disorder. Two or more of the following: Delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior, and negative symptoms must be present for a significant portion of a one month time period. At least one must be delusions, hallucinations, or disorganized speech. Once the onset of the disturbance levels of functioning in one or more major areas, such as work or self-care, are below the level achieved prior to the onset. There must be continuous signs or disturbance for at least 6 months. The disturbance is not caused by use of substances such as a drug abuse, or another medical condition. There are many different courses. Each has their own criteria. Schizophrenia will always be in his life but the symptoms are not as bad and he has learned to live with them.
ReplyDeleteThe movie portrays John’s life while he was in college and on. Right away you can tell that he is a very brilliant man, but a little different. He does tend to have disorganized speech where you can’t always tell what he is saying. He is not a very social person except with his roommate who is a hallucination. One sign that shows he has schizophrenia is that he hallucinates. He hallucinates his roommate Charles, Charles’s niece, and William Parcher the spy. These hallucinations do not seem to affect John’s life. He gets married, has a job teaching and doing research and decoding at MIT. As the movie goes on and his delusions about being a sky and decoding newspapers increases his personal and work life take a hit. He gets admitted to a psych hospital to try to fix his mental illness. Since his real work has to deal with decoding it was easier for him and others to believe that his delusions about decoding the Russian’s codes were real. John starts to see what is real and what isn’t. There is a scene where he undergoes shockwave therapy. Back then, shock wave therapy was a common treatment for a disorder like schizophrenia. Once he starts treatment his delusions go away, and his life goes back to being somewhat normal. Then he stop taking his medications and the delusion of him being a spy and decoding come back. Then comes the part where he realizes that his delusions and hallucinations aren’t real. He realizes that Marcie, Charles’s niece, never gets old. John decides to try to fight this mental illness on his own. He is somewhat successful. He does still have hallucinations, but he knows they aren’t real and can go on living a normal life doing research and teaching. At the end of the movie we find out that he does take medication to help the schizophrenia. John Nash is nominated for the Nobel Prize and wins. He also receives the honor of getting pens from Princeton’s professors.
I think that his movie does do a good job of showing what schizophrenia is like. The hallucinations and delusions are both outlined in the DSM 5 for being criteria for schizophrenia. John has both of these with seeing people and having delusions about being a spy. The movie also shows how this mental disorder influences major area of one’s life. Just like is said in the DSM 5, John’s work, personal, and self-care was at low level functioning for a significant portion of time. The fact that John was able to be “cured” from schizophrenia was miraculous. If any part of the movie is farfetched from actual schizophrenia this would be the part. It is possible to do what John did. You need a strong support system which he did have. In the movie it looked a lot easier then what is outlined in the DSM 5. If one has the right medication, will power, and support system I guess it is possible though. This movie did shed light on the schizophrenia and remind me that not all people who have this mental illness are crazy and non-coherent.
The movie that I decided to watch was the movie Rain Man. I had never watched the movie before, but was recommended but was recommended by a friend. The psychological disorder portrayed in the movie was Autism Spectrum Disorder. The DSM 5 describes this disorder as having persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction such as having abnormal social approach, reduced sharing of interests, emotions, or affect; failure to initiate or respond to social interactions. Deficits in nonverbal communitive behaviors and deficits in developing, maintaining, and undertanding relationships and restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests or activities.
ReplyDeleteThe movie Rain Man is about how Charlie Babbitt, played by Tom Cruise, discovers that he has an autistic brother named Raymond. Initally Charlie kidnaps his brother in order to attain $1.5 million of the money that Raymond had inherits and finds out that his brother has Austism Spectrum Disorder, even though Charlie does'nt know what it means or how he would be able to take care of him, he goes ahead and runs off with him. As they both journey to California Charlie realizes just how tough it would be for him to take care of his brother Raymond. Raymond can't hold a solid conversation with Charlie and likes repetitive behavior and movements, such as repeating the "Who's on first" joke to himself constantly and asking for the maple syrup before the pancakes and likes repetitive sounds. He also portrays other symptoms such as hyperactivity to sensory input, as stated in the DSM 5, especially to loud noises, hot baths, things that relate to death, such as highways that have high death rates and airlines that have ever had a death related to the airline. One of the difficult things that Charlie finds hard with Raymond is his insistence on watching certain shows at certain hours and having his bed close by the window and going to bed by 11pm. Charlie has no choice but to get him a portable TV so that he doesn't get in a constant argument with Raymond.
I would say that in many ways the movie does accurately portray the disorder. In one of the scenes towards the end of the movie. Charlie takes Raymond to Las Vegas to gamble after he realizes his ability to remember things. While they were busy gambling away, a wheel catches the attention of Raymond which is consistent with what the DSM 5 states as having Highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intesity or focus, Charlie is unable to pull Raymond from this object in the Casino and his repeating of words that others say, what the DSM 5 calls Echolalia. He also lines up objects perfectly such as his baseball cards and his books. The movie is really awesome I definitely enjoyed it and it was really awesome getting to learn about the disorder, it lead me to do more research and find out about the real rain man Kim Peeks and other people with extraordinary disorders and abilities.
The movie I chose to watch for this assignment is American Psycho. The psychological disorders that Patrick Bateman, the main character, suffers from as specified from your list on the blog are Schizophrenia and Psychosis. I, however, think that the psychosis displayed in the movie is due more to a personality disorder than to schizophrenia, or maybe vice versa. In the movie, Patrick Bateman lives two lives. One is of a man living the “American Dream,” with a lot of money, high social standard and well respected in his job position, and a girlfriend. The other is a man who is having an affair and murdering people left and right. He shows symptoms of psychotic catatonia, which qualifies him as suffering from psychosis. Some other symptoms of psychosis are delusions and hallucinations that he is killing (or isn’t killing) these people (the movie leaves you with a cliff-hanger kind of, making you question whether or not he’s actually a killer or if he’s imagining it all) and disorganized speech in a way such that he changes subjects and talks about topics not related to the situation. The symptoms that he shows that lead me to believe he has a personality disorder, though, are his failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest, deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure, impulsivity, irritability and aggressiveness, reckless disregard for safety of self or others, lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.
ReplyDeleteSome scenes and examples in the movie that correlate with these symptoms are:
His huge lack of guilt or remorse after each murder.
The hallucination that the back ATM tells him to feed him a cat, and he attempts to shoot the stray cat. A woman walks out and tries to stop him, and he just shoots her without hesitation.
His lack of guilt and also impulsivity with his affair and prostitute encounters.
His impulsivity of making reservations and spending money on fine dining and women.
His hallucinations that he hid the bodies, then can’t find them later.
How aggressive and angry he gets when someone says one thing wrong (like when a man comes up to them and shows them his business card while they are drinking, or when he kills Paul after they meet up.
When he’s hooking up with his prostitutes, he talks about music and will give them directions in between in the flow of dialogue, without a pause.
He lies and uses two aliases.
He can switch back into a personality when he is around his work colleagues for the most part, until he starts to lose it at the end.
Some of his other habits in the movie lead me to see he has characteristics of OCD, such as his morning routine and the specifics of it.
The man in this movie is so complex that I had a hard time differentiating between disorders and symptoms.
It's definitely true that it is sometimes complicated to sift through someone's symptoms and choose which disorder best fits...sometimes if they both fit well, we diagnose an individual with multiple disorders.
DeleteThis week I chose to watch Silver Linings Playbook. Silver Linings Playbook is about this guy whose name is Pat, who just got let out of a mental hospital, but since he is going home he had to agree to go to therapy and take his medications. Pat’s incident started when he came home from work early and caught is wife cheating on him with another teacher, and they were listening to their wedding song and then beat the other guy up very badly. After Pat is out of the hospital he is convinced that him and his wife are going to get back together, but his wife got a restraining order against him. During the movie Pat meets a girl, Tiffany. Tiffany has just lost her husband and is having a tough time getting over it all. Their friendship starts out with them running in the mornings, and then turns into Tiffany saying that she would help Pat talk to his wife by passing her letters. But in order for her to help Pat he had to agree to do a dance competition. During the movie Pat goes to a eagle's football game and Pat’s dad, gets mad because Pat go into a fight during the game and the eagles ended up losing. But Pat’s dad was really mad because he is an obsessive gambler, and lost a lot of money on the game. While Pat is getting yelled at by his dad about the game, Tiffany came into Pat’s house and started yelling at him because Pat missed their dance practice by going to the game. While Tiffany was at the house, Pat’s dad started to say that Tiffany is part of the reason while the eagles lost, but she goes to prove Pat’s dad that every time Pat is with her the eagles win games. Tiffany and Pat’s dad make another bet with a guy and double the offer, to when the eagles play the cowboys and Pat and Tiffany have to at least get a five out of ten in the dance competition. Pat was furious that Tiffany got his dad to make another gamble on the game that he told Tiffany he was no longer going to dance. Tiffany, Pat’s mom and Pat’s dad all agree to tell Pat that his wife Nikki would be there just to get Pat to do the dance and not ruin the bet. When they are waiting for their turn to dance, Tiffany sees that Nikki really did show up and was not happy because she was starting to fall for Pat. After their dance, the judges gave them an average of 5.0 and won the bet!!!! Then Pat went over and talked to Nikki, the movie showed him whisper into Nikki’s ear. While Pat is talking to Nikki, Tiffany leaves the competition. Pat sees her leave and runs after her and gives her one more letter. The letter said that Pat knew it was Tiffany writing the letters to him and not Nikki, the letter also said that he loves her.
ReplyDeleteThis movie shows Pat’s dad who is an obsessive compulsive gambler. The DSM 5 defines obsessions as the recurrent and persistent thoughts, urges, or images that are experienced, at some time during the disturbances as intrusive and unwanted and that in most individuals cause marked anxiety or distress. Compulsions are repetitive behaviors or mental acts that the individual feels driven to perform in response to an obsession or according to the rules must be applied regularly. During the movie, they show Pat’s dad making sure all remotes are in the right order and shows he always rubbing this green handkerchief while the eagles are playing. Another disorder they show in this movie is that Pat is bipolar. The DSM 5 says that bipolar disorder having manic episodes, a distinct period of abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive or irritable moos and increase goal related activities or energy. You would see Pat always running in the movie and him having times were he would go from one mood to the next then even apologizing for his behaviors. I thought Silver Linings Playbook did a pretty good job of showing these two disorders, it showed you how some people live every day.
Great job throwing in the gambling side of this movie!
DeleteFor this assignment I watched "K-Pax" which portrayed delusions throughout the movie until the end where the main character develops catatonia. DSM-5 describes delusions as fixed beliefs that once they occur they are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence. DSM-5 goes on to state that there are themes when talking about delusions. The themes can move from common delusions to bizarre delusions. The common delusions include persecutory, referential, grandiose, erotomanic, and nihilistic; however, the bizarre delusions do not have a declared name for the few uncommon delusions. The type of delusion that the main character in the movie I believe he would have a bizarre delusion due to the fact that he believes he is from a different planet.
ReplyDeleteThe movie "K-Pax" involves a man who goes by the name of Prot who is supposed to be from the planet K-Pax. The movie is set at a mental institution in Massachusetts where Dr. Mark Powell tries to figure out who Prot really is. Prot goes through the whole movie saying that his kind, from K-Pax, can travel faster than light and that is how he got to Earth in the first place nearly five years ago. He also tells the other patients that he will take one of them back to K-Pax with him. When it gets closer to Prot's time to go back to K-Pax, Dr. Powell tries hypnosis on Prot who even under hypnosis still believes he is Prot and not Robert Porter, which is his real name. Dr. Powell finds out that Robert's wife and daughter were killed and some time after he found them he tried to kill himself; which is the point that Robert became Prot. When it is time for Prot to go back to K-Pax, Dr Powell finds him under his bed unresponsive while one of the other patients goes missing. The closing scene of K-Pax shows Prot or Robert being pushed around in a wheelchair by Dr. Powell because he is now in a catatonic state.
I think this movie does a good job at portraying the delusion part but not the catatonia disorder because there wasn't a lot of time for that disorder to develop. The only clue that I got from the movie that Prot/Robert became a catatonic is because Dr. Powell was pushing him back inside and stated that he was in a catatonic state. The move does a better job at showing what a person with a delusion disorder. However, it is hard to place what kind of delusion Prot has because the DSM-5 doesn't describe this kind of delusion; one where he wholeheartedly believes he is a completely different person after a tragic accident. A great example is when he is under hypnosis and he believes he is Prot when he is about five years old and he thinks that he is Robert Porter's friend.
The movie that I watched was Silver Lining Playlist. The main character’s father has OCD, but the main disorder in this movie was the main character, Pat, being Bipolar. In the DSM5 there are many different types of Bipolar disorder than I thought there was. “Bipolar I” stood out to me the most in relation to the movie. An episode is a distinct period of abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood and it can consist of an abnormal or a persistent increase in activity or energy. This can last for at least 4 consecutive days and be present for most of the day every day. During a mood disturbance there are several symptoms that a diagnosed bipolar person can have. They are: inflated self-esteem or grandiosity, decreased need for sleep, are more talkative than usual, racing thoughts or flight of ideas, easily distracted by unimportant things, excessive involvement in activities with a high risk for painful consequences.
ReplyDeleteIn this movie, Pat is the main character, who is in his high 30s, and it starts out with him in a psychiatric hospital. It shows him excessively exercising and not taking his medication. His mother comes and discharges him from the hospital to come back and live with them. He was in there due to almost beating a man to death when he caught his own wife having an affair with this man. He doesn’t sleep very often and occupies his time with reading and running a lot. Pat keeps saying if he gets fit and loses a lot of weight then his wife will take him back and they will be happy. He meets a girl named Tiffany who also has some type of mood disorder. Their friendship was rocky because they disagreed a lot of the time, but they both share a traumatic experience involving their wife/husband. Tiffany’s husband was killed. They started bonding when Pat wanted Tiffany to give his ex wife a letter due to him having a restraining order and not being able to have any contact with her. In exchange, Pat would train with Tiffany to be in a dance competition together. Tiffany couldn’t get the letter to her but instead of telling Pat that, she decided to forge the letter for his ex. Pat eventually found out about her writing the letter but he didn’t let her know that he figured it out. They had their ups and downs and towards the end of the movie, Tiffany thought that Pat was getting back together with his ex and Tiffany ran out of the dance competition right after they performed together. Pat had brought along a letter to the competition making Tiffany think it was for his ex. Pat ran out after her and handed her the letter, because it was actually for her. He confessed his love for her and how she’s helped him with his disorder. In the end, Tiffany and Pat were together and they were good for each other.
The movie portrayed the disorder very well. It showed Pat having manic episodes and his symptoms. Before he met Tiffany, he would stay up all hours of the night reading books that he thought his ex wife would like. Then in the morning, he would get up and exercise a lot because he thought his ex wife would take him back if he got in better shape. Pat wouldn’t take his medication and it affected him with even worse episodes. Also, whenever he was with people he talked a lot and would be very blunt. He even said that he has no filter. A specific song would trigger episodes as well. It was the song from his wedding and it was playing when he found his wife in the shower with another man. Even when there is no music playing, sometimes he can hear it playing in his head and he has a meltdown. I’ve never seen how a person diagnosed with bipolar disorder has an episode and from the DSM 5 it matches pretty accurately with how the movie presented it.
I choose to watch the movie The Hours. I had never heard of the movie before and I thought that it could be interesting. The psychological disorder that was portrayed in the movie was major depressive disorder. According to the DSM 5 a person has to have at least five of the symptoms along with depressed mood or loss of interest. Some symptoms that are included is depressed mood, loss of interest, weight loss, fatigue, trouble sleeping, hard time focusing, and thoughts of dying. It also states that people do not function well in their environment.
ReplyDeleteThe Hours is split into three stories. Each story focusing on a women that had depression and is thinking about suicide or someone close to them is. All of the stories are based in different periods and even different locations showing that this disorder can affect anyone anywhere. All of the stories are based around the novel Mrs. Dalloway. One story is based on a women named Victoria who is a writer. She does not eat, hears voices, had blackouts and has tried to kill herself before. In the movie she successful at committing suicide. The second story is about a expecting mother named Laura. She has thoughts of suicide, does not interact, tired, and has a hard time connecting with her family. During the movie she finds herself in a hotel room trying to commit suicide by swallowing pills but can not bring herself to do it. Later in the movie she leaves her family once the child is born which is connected to the third story. The third story is about a women named Clarissa who is taking care of a friend who has AIDS and depression. He is deteriorating due to the illness. He does not eat unless forced, hears voices, does not interact with anyone, and has thoughts of death. She is planning this party for him and is trying to convince him that there are still things to live for even though he does not think so. His conversation gets her upset because is suppose to live for her. When she goes to get Richard for the party he decides that he has had enough. He commits suicide by jumping out the window. Richard, Laura, and Victoria all showed signs of major depressive disorder.
Yes the movie does accurately portray major depressive disorder. When Victoria's husband is talking about what happened in London she had blackouts, does not know where she is, tired, and tried to kill herself. When Clarissa goes to Richard's home she asks him about if he is eating and taking his medication because she does not believe he is. They talk about the voices he heres, does not interact with others, and talks about death. The movie I believe was accurate.
I chose to watch the movie 'Hide and Seek'. The disorder incorporated into this movie is multiple personality disorder. DSM-5 describes this disorder into 5 different divisions. The first part is that there is a change of identity with two or more different types of personalities. They may lose consciousness, memory and cognition. This is normally noticed by someone being around them. The second part includes recurrent gaps in everyday memories that are easily remembered. Third, symptoms may cause also of stress in their personal life, social life and professional life. The fourth part is that the symptoms are not a physiological effect of a substance.
ReplyDeleteIn the movie, the father suffers from multiple personality disorder. He wakes up every day at exactly 2:06 in the morning to realize something horrible has happened. These events include the killing of his wife, cat and girlfriend. He does not remember doing any of these activities and blames his young daughter. In the beginning of the movie the daughter explains how she has an imaginary friend named Charlie. Eventually, the daughter blames Charlie for all the deaths and strange things that have been happening. At the end of the movie you realize it is the father who is Charlie when he switches personalities. The father does not realize he has this disorder, but it soon kills him and his whole family. This movie is a good representation of multiple personality disorder.
This movie was a good example of multiple personality disorder. In the scene where the daughter talks about Charlie, her imaginary friend, her father does not approve of her having an imaginary friend. This is one of the characteristics of the disorder. Also, the movie shows a scene where he fades in and out of his personalities, showing how he loses memory of every day events. Hide and Seek is a good movie representation of multiple personality disorder.
I watched the movie Blow with Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz. This movie portrays the disorder of drug abuse, especially the use of cocaine. This type of drug use is classified as a Stimulant Use Disorder , which is classified as having two criteria, such as the stimulant being taken in larger amounts or over a larger period of time than intended and recurrent stimulant abuse resulting in failure to complete home, work, or family tasks to name a few. This disorder can range from mild, where only 2-3 of the symptoms are present, to severe where there are 6 or more symptoms present. I think that this movie accurately portrays a person who has severe Stimulant Use Disorder. For example, in the scene where his wife is getting ready to go to the hospital to give birth, George is shown snorting lines of cocaine before they go to the hospital. While his wife is giving birth, he ends up having a heart attack due to the cocaine. This shows how he is constantly using this stimulant drug even though it causes him to fail to complete tasks, as well as using it to an extent that it is physically hazardous to him. Another example would be how he is sent to jail again in the end, leading to him failing both his daughter and his wife.
ReplyDeleteIn the movie George, who is eventually played by Johnny Depp, grows up poor as his family struggles to make a living. George decides that he doesn’t want to live that way anymore, so he and his friend decide to sell marijuana in California, where he is caught and sent to prison. While he is in prison, he learns about cocaine and becomes a partner in selling in America. George and his partner eventually becomes the main seller of cocaine from Columbia. When his wife (Penelope Cruz) throws him a birthday party which is raided by police, sending George back to prison, his wife files for divorce and takes custody of their daughter. He never sees his daughter again, and the movie ends with an old version of George sitting in prison.
For the blog this week I decided to watch Silver Linings Playbook. In this movie, the main character, Pat has a mood disorder, more specifically bipolar disorder. The DSM 5 classifies bipolar disorder as having at least one episode of major depression and at least one hypomanic episode. People diagnosed with bipolar disorder can also become highly impulsive to the point of attempting suicide, and bring on substance abuse disorders.
ReplyDeleteIn the movie, Pat is sent to a psychiatric hospital after he lost it and beat up another guy for sleeping with his wife. He came home one day and heard his wedding song playing and then found the two together. Ever since then, whenever he would hear that song, it would trigger his anger and aggression. He was also a person who had no filter when talking and did not think about what he said before he said it which made for some really uncomfortable conversations; that is until he met Tiffany who also had a mood disorder. She also spoke her mind without thinking about it first. They became friends throughout the movie, but the most interesting thing was the conversations that they would have. One minute they would be screaming at each other and then the next they were smiling and laughing. There was a scene in the movie where Tiffany started crying when Pat said that her husband was dead and then before he knew it, she was hugging him. Then, once she pulled away she slapped him and walked away. In the next scene, Pat went home to find his wedding video. When he could not find it he blamed his parents for hiding it from him when in fact it was just lost. Things got so bad that he ended up fighting his father and the police were called. However, once the police showed up, he calmed down and asked the police officer not to report anything from the incident. These are just a few examples of the swift mood changes that both have. Also, Pat’s belief that his parents were hiding things from him shows his paranoia. There are many other scenes identical to these that portray the quick shifts in mood and in paranoia.
I chose to watch the movie Blow starring Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz. This non-fictional movie portrays drug abuse, including marijuana and cocaine. According to the DSM-5, stimulant use disorder states that the stimulant is taken in larger amounts or for a longer period of time than intended as well as continued use even after personal issues with the stimulant.
ReplyDeleteThe movie begins when George is still a child and his father makes it clear that money is not important. Later on in the movie, George, as an adult, moves to Southern California where he is first introduced to marijuana. He meets two girls on the beach, one who becomes his girlfriend, and they introduce him to Derek Foreal, who is the main drug dealer. When the demand for marijuana grows, they make a choice to buy directly from Mexico, where they get involved with drug lords. After two years of doing this, George is caught in an airport with pounds of marijuana and sentenced to two years. George skipped bail to be with his girlfriend who is dying of cancer. After his mother turns him in he spends twenty-six months in prison with his cellmate, Diego. Diego convinces George to go into the cocaine cartel business with him and they approach Pablo Escobar of Columbia and he agrees to it as well. Diego betrays George and cuts him out from Derek. After this happened, George has a baby girl with Mirtha (Penelope Cruz) and swears he will never be involved with drugs again. This promise was soon broken when Mirtha throws George a birthday party, where cocaine is of abundance. It was soon busted by the waiters and George was arrested. Years later, George promises his daughter a trip to California and does one last deal for the money to take her. This situation ties in with the DSM-5 definition. George did not intend to deal again but he was pulled back in, despite the personal issues it caused in the past with his family. Little did he know, the deal was set up by FBI and George was sent to prison for 60 years, as well as breaking the promise to his daughter. His daughter never has and still has not visited him to this day.
As the movie chosen off the list, I chose to watch “Ordinary People”. At first, this movie was a little difficult to follow. After reading the summary about the movie I assumed the son talked about was the main character. I assumed we, as in the movie watchers, would watch the son struggle through his psychological disorder and die as described in the summary. But I was very wrong; the death of the son had already happened. The brother, Connor, has nightmares showing the flashbacks of the boat accident that killed his brother. Because he was involved in the accident as well, he is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He was hospitalized for four months before returning back to school. I also catch the vibe that he may be suicidal during moments in his life. For instance, a train was speeding by and he looked at it mesmerized. It seemed to me as if he was daydreaming of jumping out in front of it.
ReplyDeleteOn DSM-5 Post traumatic Stress Disorder states, “Exposure to actual or threatened deaths, serious injury, or sexual violence in one (or more) ways..”. It also states the criteria applies to any age person who has been involved with such experiences.
The movie does portray Post Traumatic Disorder in an accurate display. Although it was difficult to distinguish what was going on within the movie, once I watched it for a while longer I caught on to the nightmares as being flashbacks. It is understandable as to why Connor would be having such nightmares about his brother’s death; he was there. It looks as if he was trying to help but did not succeed. Connor’s characteristics do fit nicely in the DSM-5’s characteristic list. He has flashbacks often and struggles with memories of his brother’s death. He is a swimmer at his high school and it seems as though it is hard for him to catch his breath in between his strokes, as if thinking about his brother struggling in the horrific waves of the sea.
I chose to watch “Brokeback Mountain” for this blog. I believe that this movie was trying to portray is “other specified sexual Dysfunction” according to the DSM – 5. The DSM – 5 describes this disorder as having similar characteristics with any other sexual Dysfunction disorders but it does not meet the full criteria for any of the other disorders. The main thing is that it must cause clinically significant distress to the individual. In short the movie is about two men who love each other, but society says that it is wrong for them to love each other, so they have to have this hidden relationship for decades. It is basically the journey that these two men have together, the difficulties they face, and what eventually becomes of them. They both know that society will ostracize them for loving each other, and they both have families that they have to take care of. They both struggle with what they want verses what they think society thinks, and what would happen if people found out about their relationship. It was extremely hard for them both to love the other but not be able to be with them.
ReplyDeleteI think that the movie probably made a pretty accurate portrayal of how people viewed homosexuals in that time, but I do not know how to really connect it to the DSM – 5 other then that this love these two men had for each other, and the fact that they couldn’t be together, really was distressing to both of them. For example in one of the later scenes they are on Brokeback Mountain and they are having an argument because Jake wants to get a ranch and live together, and Aunis does not think that is a good idea, and says it would never work. This conversation takes a huge tole on their relationship and it starts to fall apart at that point I think. But as far as the disorder thing goes, I really do not view homosexuality as a disorder because to me a disorder is something that can be fixed or treated, and homosexuality really cannot be “fixed”. They are who they are, they’re just people.
The movie I chose to watch was Lars and the Real Girl. This movie was based around a man and his battle with severe schizophrenia, or previously delusional disorder. In the beginning of the movie, Lars appears to be a normal man, however, the story soon unfolds. Lars lives in the garage by himself, his older brother, Gus, and wife, Karin, live next door. One of Lars’s co-workers showed him a website for “life sex dolls.” Lars doesn’t really understand what that really means. He orders one online and soon falls in love with, Bianca. He takes Bianca everywhere. He talks to her, and treats her like a real human. Lars’ brother doesn’t support his actions at first. He tries to tell Lars that the doll isn’t a real person. Lars won’t have it. He doesn’t even consider that she isn’t real. Karin tells Lars that Bianca should go to the doctor. Karin does this so that Gus can receive therapy. He attends sessions each week while everyone pretends to give treatment to Bianca. Gus finds it difficult to accept Lars for what he is. I think this movie did a great job of depicting how family members feel during situations like this. There is also a part in the movie where Lars brings Bianca to a party. The entire party turns and stares. I think that this is a real part of having a disorder like schizophrenia. People aren’t educated and don’t understand the struggles that a person faces. Lars gains his families acceptance and they begin to treat Bianca like a real person. They include her in family events and the community begins to include Bianca as well. Gus begins to accept it and Lars is happy again. The movie goes on and eventually Lars doesn’t need to rely on Bianca anymore and he wakes up and realizes she is unresponsive. I believe this was his way of moving on.
ReplyDeleteThe DSM V says that schizophrenia has seven subtypes. The seven subtypes are erotomatic, grandiose, jealous, persecutory, somatic, mixed and unspecified. Lars is diagnosed with schizophrenia because he has delusions that Bianca is real. Lars believes that Bianca is in love with him, then falls out of love, and then dies. Schizophrenia can be brought on by a traumatic event or a stressor. Gus mentions the death of their father being very traumatic. This could be a direct effect of Lars’s schizophrenia. I think the type of therapy they used was very interesting and very creative. However, I don’t think the family would get enough participation. I also don’t think a doctor would put up with pretending that a sex doll is a sick human. Furthermore, in today’s society I’m not sure the response from the community would be that supportive. I think that this movie provided a great glimpse at what it’s like to have someone close to you diagnosed with schizophrenia. This movie shows us how much support needs to be given to someone with a psychological disorder.
There are no longer subtypes for schizophrenia like there were in the DSM V (catatonic, disorganized, undifferentiated, paranoid). The type of delusion one experiences doesn't give them a "subtype" - it's just a way to describe what they are experiencing.
DeleteI watched the movie Fight Club with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. The protagonist in the movie, named “narrator” in the credits, has Dissociative Identity Disorder. The twist in this movie is it doesn’t let the audience know the protagonists true condition until the end, but does provide hints throughout. The DSM-5 diagnoses individuals with Dissociative Identity Disorder following these criteria:
ReplyDeletea) Loss of identity of the individual characterized by two or more distinct personality states, some cultures describe it as an experience of possession. The disruption in identity involves marked discontinuity in sense of self and sense of agency, accompanied by related alterations in affect, behavior, consciousness, memory, perception, cognition, and/or sensory-motor functioning. These signs and symptoms may be observed by others or reported by the individual.
b) Loss or gaps in memory and the recall of everyday events, important personal information, and/or traumatic events that are not normally forgotten easily.
c) The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
d) The disturbance is not a normal part of a broadly accepted cultural or religious practice.
e) Note: In children, the symptoms are not better explained by imaginary playmates or other fantasy play.
f) The symptoms are not due to substance abuse (e.g., blackouts or chaotic behavior during alcohol intoxication) or other medical conditions (e.g., complex partial seizures).
When I first watched fight club I expected a very testosterone filled movie with plenty of blood, guts, and action. The movie was based off the book, but the book was not well known until after the movie. The trailer was even designed to give away as little information as possible. The narrator (Edward Norton) of the movie has a routine life; he works at a 9-5 cubicle job that he hates, lives in a small apartment by himself full of junk he never uses, and is generally completely depressed with how his life turned out. All of these factors lead to the creation of Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), who is everything the narrator wanted to be: An Entrepreneur, ladies’ man, anarchist, and gorgeous human being. This is congruent with the first criteria of DID. The narrator explains at the beginning of the movie that he has had trouble sleeping and has gaps in his memory due to all the events of his life starting to slur together. Not only that, but when the character Marla, a girl who becomes involved in a love triangle with the main characters, is introduced she is never in the room with the narrator and Tyler at the same time. This is a great example of how the second criterion is shown in the movie. Finally our narrator loses his job and blows up the worlds credit card companies records, showing a definite impairment in social and occupational functioning. Fight club is a great movie that is not what it seems at first. It is a great story whose main protagonist is a shining example of an individual with Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Shutter Island is a movie that explores Schizophrenia/Psychosis. With Schizophrenia, delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking, and diminished emotional expression are all symptoms that accompany it. A person must possess two or more of them. The level of functioning in areas such as work, relationships, or self-care has plummeted greatly. Symptoms must persist for at least 6 months consecutively.
ReplyDeleteIndividuals with this may display inappropriate emotions such as laughing at an unlaughable situation. Dyshphoric moods like depression, anger, or anxiety as well as a disturbed sleep pattern are all symptoms. A person may have a lack of interest of eating or food refusal. Anxieties and phobias are very common. Hostility and aggression can be associated with schizophrenia, although spontaneous or random assault is uncommon.
In the movie, Edward Daniels and Chuck Aule travel to the Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane on Shutter Island located in Boston Harbor, as part of an investigation into the disappearance of patient Rachel Solando, incarcerated for drowning her three children. Daniels begins to have awful headaches, and disturbing dreams of his wife, Dolores Chanal, who was killed in a fire set by arsonist Andrew Laeddis. In one dream, Chanal tells Daniels that Solando is still on the island, as is Laeddis.
It turns out that Solando had randomly and miraculously been found. Daniles is convinced that he needs to go to the top of the lighthouse to be reunited with Aule whom he got separated from at the beginning. At the top of the lighthouse, Daniels finds Dr. Cawley waiting for him.
Cawley explains that Andrew Laeddis is actually Daniels himself, ‘their most dangerous patient’, incarcerated in Ward C for murdering his manic depressive wife after she drowned their children. According to Dr. Cawley, the events of the past several days have been designed to break Laeddis' conspiracy-laden insanity by allowing him to play out the role of Daniels, an anagram of his name. The hospital staff, including Dr. Sheehan posing as Aule and a nurse posing as Rachel Solando, were part of the test, and the migraines that Laeddis suffered were withdrawal symptoms from his medication. As memories of reality overwhelm Laeddis, he faints.
The rearranging of the letters is a side effect of Daniel’s schizophrenia and psychosis. He simply does not realize what his subconscious mind is doing and the effect it has had on him. Teddy meets this diagnosis, according to the manual, because he experiences the delusions for more than one month. My favorite scene was when Daniels was in the cave because so much happened and so much was revealed if you paid close enough attention.
I chose to re-watch the movie Fight Club, which portrays an individual with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder, DID occurs when there is a coexistence of two or more mostly complete personalities within an individual. These personalities generally are very different as well. Each different personality is, essentially, its own person, owning their own name, memories, characteristics, even physical mannerisms.
ReplyDeleteThe DSM 5 goes much more in-depth definition, as is expected of an official psychiatric guideline book. It describes DID as a disruption in identity, in some cultures DID is confused with possession. Again, there are several factors of DID that must be met in order to be diagnosed with it. These include, recurring gaps of time on a day to day basis, significant distress or impairments in social, occupational and other settings, and a distinction that the symptoms are not induced by an artificial substance (drugs or alcohol).
Fight Club revolves around the life of the narrator, who remains unnamed throughout the movie. In the beginning, the narrator seeks help for his insomnia and is directed to support groups in order for an emotional release. Upon finally self-curing, he resumes a heavy workload of traveling, where he meets soap salesman Tyler Durden. The narrator returns home to an exploded apartment, sparking a call to Durden. The two men go out for drinks and end up creating living arrangements, after engaging in a fist fight in the bar’s parking lot. These fights and outrageous behaviors continue as the two become closer, eventually garnering an interest with other men who see them happening. This interest is the beginning of the “Fight Club” and a very interesting relationship between the narrator and Tyler Durden. The initial fight club creates more across the country, with Durden at the helm, creating his own army of cult followers. In the end it is revealed that Tyler Durden is the same as the narrator, another personality living within his mind that the cultists have been following the entire time.
I believe that Fight Club accurately portrays DID, the narrator remains completely unaware of his other personality until the very end, which is a common occurrence with individuals that are diagnosed with this. Many of the symptoms are revealed as the movie progresses, for instance his impairment in everyday life, being unable to connect socially at work or in private relationships is shown much more heavily than is the relapse of memory, which really only occurs in the movie once he begins to discover his other self.
The movie I chose to watch for this assignment was Silver Linings Playbook. The movie shows multiple disorders. The first is seen within the main characters father who has OCD. The second is bipolar disorder. While OCD is seen throughout the movie, for the purpose of this blog assignment I will be talking about bipolar disorder as it is the diagnosis of the main character and therefore more prevalent throughout the movie. I believe that 'Bipolar 1 Disorder' is the closest, most appropriate diagnosis in regards to what is seen throughout Silver Linings Playbook. According to the DSM-5 an individual with 'Bipolar 1 Disorder' has manic episodes that may either be preceded or followed by hypomanic or major depressive episodes. A manic episode is a distinct period of abnormally and persistently elevated or irritable mood and persistently increased goal-directed activity or energy (this lasts at least one week and occurs daily). When individuals with bipolar disorder experience mood disturbances they can have a wide variety of symptoms such as: grandiosity (grandiose delusions), decreased need for sleep, become more talkative than usual, become easily distracted, and have racing thoughts/ flight of ideas.
ReplyDeleteThe movie starts out with the main character, Pat, getting discharged from a mental hospital. He was institutionalized for beating up the man his wife was having an affair with and was there diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Pat is supposed to be on medication, but he doesn't take it because he doesn't like the way it makes him feel. He also attends mandatory therapy, but feels as though he can manage his life through healthy living. Pat excessively works out in hopes of getting fit and reuniting with his wife. Pat also doesn't sleep very often and spends a lot of his time doing repetitive, daily activities (running and reading). Pat goes to dinner at his best friends house, where he meets a girl named Tiffany. Tiffany's husband died and she used sex to cope with his death. Tiffany, the recovering sex addict, and Pat, diagnosed with bipolar disorder start a love/hate friendship in which they bond through their similar problems/issues. Tiffany asks Pat to join her in a dance competition and Pat agrees through ultimate hopes of reuniting with Nikki. Throughout the time they spend together, they start to bond and make a connection much deeper than they had anticipated. They encounter a lot of ups and downs throughout the movie such as: Tiffany forging Nikki's letter, Pat's fight at the Eagles game, Tiffany and Pats fight due to him ditching their practice, etc. They make it through all the ups and downs and go to the dance competion, where they receive a score of 5 (which was the score they needed for Pat's father, who has OCD and a gambling addiction, to win a bet he placed on the two). Nikki is there and Pat has a short conversation with her before chasing after Tiffany who storms off when she sees the two talking. After their brief conversation, Pat leaves Nikki and runs after Tiffany. Pat finds tiffany and tells her that he's loved her from the moment they met. Her love helps him with his functioning and coping in the outside world despite his disorder.
I feel like overall Silver Linings Playbook portrayed bipolar disorder very well/appropriately. The movie did a really good job at showing manic episodes, as well as symptoms such as decreased need for sleep, flight of ideas, and increased energy/activity. Pat would stay up all night (decreased need for sleep) and read books that he thought Nikki would applaud him for/ she would like. These flights of ideas he constantly had about ways in which he could get Nikki back occurred regularly throughout the movie (i.e. him reading books she'd like, his excessive exercising in order to get in shape for her, the dance competition, etc). Not taking his medication, as well as specific songs, would trigger Pat to have manic episodes in which he would get angry and breakdown. The movie also did a good job at showing how individuals with bipolar disorder may have issues with speech (no filter, increased rate- at dinner with his best friend, his wife, and Tiffany) and impairments in social functioning (at dinner/ football game/etc). In regards to the DSM-5, I feel as though the movie did a really good job representing bipolar disorder.
DeleteThe movie I chose to review is "Fight Club". It centers around a man who suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) which is classified by the DSM-5 as a "disruption of and/or discontinuity in the normal integration of consciousness, memory, identity, emotion, perception, body representation, motor control, and behavior". This certainly summarizes the main character, who I like to call Jack, as he often summarizes emotions he feels to characteristics of organs of "Jack", a character in a book he read (i.e.- "I am Jack's broken heart"). At the start of the movie, Jack is shown to be a passive, depressed, and materialistic man suffering from insomnia and a job he hates, although he does nothing to leave it. One day, on a plane ride, he meets Tyler Durdin, who displays characteristics that Jack clearly lacks, in the sense that he is confident, carefree, and lives the lifestyle of a minimalist. Jack comes to live with Tyler after the explosion of his apartment; he slowly begins to take on many aspects of Tyler's personality after they form Fight Club, losing care for his possessions and appearance, becoming more uninhibited, and leaving his job in dramatic fashion- even he attributes his actions to be similar to those Tyler may show. Upon confusion that Jack goes through after hearing people refer to him as "Tyler", he ultimately finds out the truth that Tyler was him all along, through confronting him. Jack begins to realize that his early insomnia was him fighting off the subconscious urges to act on Tyler's behalf. His giving in led him to believe that he was sleeping, while in reality, he was off being Tyler. He learns that he also often hallucinated seeing Tyler doing things while he stood back and watched, as well as sometimes allowing aspects of Tyler's personality to seep into his own life- saying or doing things that seemed more akin to how Tyler would act. Upon learning of his disorder, he begins to resist Tyler and his plans, which does not make his alter-ego happy- so much so that his split personalities begin to physically fight in a most hallucinatory fashion. At the end of the movie, Jack "kills" Tyler by pointing a gun in his mouth, saying directly to Tyler, "My eyes are open", and pulling the trigger, leading Tyler to believe that he too had been fatally shot, when in reality, Jack shot the bullet through his cheek.
ReplyDeleteJack is certainly an accurate example of a person with DID, as he suffers from dissociative amnesia, forgetting the times where he was Tyler, assuming that he was asleep. Furthermore, Jack suffers from the depersonalization and derealization associated with DID. At one point in the film, Jack stands by as Tyler stands up to the mobster who owns the bar they have Fight Club at. Tyler gets badly beaten, but the wounds never appear on Jack, nor does he seem to ever be in pain. In their earliest meeting, after the plane ride, Jack is talking to a baggage handler about his missing luggage, when he notices Tyler hop into another man's convertible, and drive off with it.
Dissociative Identity Disorder, also known as Multiple Personality Disorder, is portrayed in the movie Fight Club. The DSM describes this disorder as a disruption of identity, having two or more distinct personality states. There are recurrent gaps in the recall of everyday events, personal information, or traumatic events. A person with this disorder must exhibit symptoms that cause distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other areas of functioning. This disorder is highly controversial due to different cultural practices around the world. According to the diagnostic criteria, the disturbance is not part of a broadly accepted cultural or religious practice. Lastly, the symptoms of this disorder cannot be due to other physiological effects of a substance or another medical condition.
ReplyDeleteThe main characteristic is the presence of two or more distinct personality states or an experience of possession. It is a very complex and detailed disorder due to the different levels of possible awareness of the individual’s amnesias. Some people do not remember events, family members, or even their own name. An individual may have a possession-form or non-possession-form case, depending on how long of a period their discontinuity of identity is displayed. This disorder is commonly comorbid with anxiety, depression, substance abuse, self-injury, and non-epileptic seizures.
Throughout the movie, DID is used as a “saving grace” instead of a disorder. The narrator’s constant struggle with his insomnia and stressful life has caused him to dissociate. The movie follows an office employee (narrator) who struggles with insomnia. The only way he can sleep is if he attends support groups for various diseases and cries with them. He meets a woman named Marla who also attends support groups as a fraud. He becomes friends with a soap salesman on one of his business flights and the two instantly become friends, living together due to the mysterious fire of the narrator’s apartment. Throughout the movie, the two organize a fight club to help men release their anger and frustration. Fight Club becomes a huge success and wildly popular, eventually leading to an organization called “Project Mayhem”. The group is dedicated to anti-materialism and anti-corporation. The group begins to deteriorate when Tyler suddenly disappears and a member dies from a police shooting. The narrator believes it is up to him to undo all of Tyler’s damage. As the narrator tries to shut down the project and disband fight club, a member and Marla both believe him to be Tyler. Due to the immense guilt that the narrator is experiencing, he signs up to fight every member. He ends up passing out in the duration and wakes up in the house he shares with Tyler. Then we return to the beginning scene of the movie, on top of the Parker-Morris building where Tyler is holding a gun to the narrator’s mouth. Marla and the support group members arrive and beg him to stop. The narrator ends up firing a bullet through his cheek and wakes up in a mental institution, which he thinks his heaven. He is surrounded by beaten up guys that are ready to continue their work.
In this movie, the filmmakers display dissociative identity disorder inaccurately. There are some accurate points, but the major flaws override those. To the knowledge of the viewer, the narrator did not experience any childhood trauma. His anxiety and feelings of entrapment are due to the structure of modern society, not a traumatic event. This was the portrayed as the main cause of his dissociation. The main flaw is that multiple personalities never meet or come face to face. For example, there is a scene towards the end of the movie where the audience can see the other people’s point of view during the first fight between the narrator and Tyler. The people outside the bar and the security camera could only see the narrator beating and hitting himself. This wouldn’t occur with DID since the two personalities would never interact or be aware of one another. Interaction between Tyler and the narrator is vital for Hollywood action. Therefore, the scene where Tyler reveals to the narrator that they are the same person would be impossible.
DeleteDespite the few inaccuracies of DID, the movie did a good job stressing the notion that alternate identities are present as a coping mechanism. The narrator turned to Tyler to deal with life when he couldn’t. Tyler Durden was a stronger and more confident version of the narrator, essentially everything that he wasn’t. For example, the only way he could sleep with Marla was when he was Tyler. The narrator never had the confidence to approach her and Tyler even asked the narrator to never speak of him to Marla. The personality of Tyler takes over the actions of the narrator when he his asleep and appears to him as a realistic hallucination while he is awake. This agrees with the DSM criteria that an individual experiences amnesia of the other personality. Fight Club definitely brings attention to this disorder despite its controversial display.
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ReplyDeleteI watched the movie The Hours for this assignment. The disorder very clearly portrayed in this movie was Major Depressive Disorder ,MDD, with strong emphasis on the suicidal ideation/actions. The very first scene portrayed Virginia Woolf's suicide. According to the DSM 5, MDD is characterized by display of five or more of the following symptoms within a two week period: depressed mood as reported by the subject or others, lack of interest in all or most activities, significant weight loss or fluctuation in appetite, insomnia or hypersomnia, psychomotor agitation, fatigue or loss of energy, feelings of worthlessness or inappropriate guilt, inability to concentrate or indecisiveness, and recurring thoughts of death or suicide, and suicide attempts. The Hours follows three women through one day in their lives. The first narrative explores 1923 when Virginia Woolf begins to writer her most famous work Mrs. Dalloway. The second centers around a day in the life of Laura Brown, a bored American housewife in 1949, in which she spends part of her time reading Mrs. Dalloway. The third narrative takes place on a day in 2001, in which Clarissa Vaughn hosts a party for her poet-friend Richard who's dying of AIDS. The chapters alternate with rough regularity between these three main characters each showing how they interacting with the story of Mrs. Dalloway, with each other, and how they struggle with depression. The movie showed MDD pretty well in all three of the women it portrayed. Virginia never smiled, rarely went outside or did anything besides write, and was very obsessed with death. She talks about death two or three times in the movie besides her actual suicide, during the bird funeral, and that the characters in the book that she was basing on herself “was going to kill herself out of the blue one day over something of no particular importance.” With Laura Brown, the movie shows how she feels a lot of guilt, worthlessness, and failure. She feels like if she didn't make the cake just right her husband wouldn't know that she loved him, so when she couldn't do it you can tell by her actions, throwing out the cake and being really upset, that she feels like a failure. Also the whole interaction with her neighbor showed how insignificant she felt because she didn't know how to do all the things “required to be a woman like housework, cooking, etc..” except have babies. She also tried to kill herself. I don't know if I would necessarily say that Clarissa had MDD. She was definitely sad and overwhelmed at some points in the movie, the scene in the kitchen with Richard's ex and talking to her daughter about feeling like nothing in her life really was significant, but I don't know if it was a full on depression or just being overwhelmed by dealing with Richard's condition. Richard definitely had MDD since he did talked about dying, worthlessness, had stopped eating although that could be attributed to him having AIDS, and he did eventually kill himself.
ReplyDeleteI picked the movie Girl, Interrupted. There are a few different disorders that are portrayed in this movie, but the main character, Susanna, suffers from depression (I think it is actually borderline personality disorder, but, to me, she fits in the depression category). She did not exactly have a great home life for her mother doesn’t seem to care. Suzanna has also been sleeping around and been sleeping with her mother’s friend’s husband. One time Suzanna took some pills along with drinking alcohol which was a suicide attempt. Soon after, she is placed into a mental hospital, Claymore, to receive help. She met some other girls in the hospital and decides to escape and went and spent the night at a former patient’s home. While there, Lisa (the girl Suzanna escaped with) said some terrible things about the girl which led the girl to commit suicide. Suzanna was very scared about the death and realized that she needed to get help. Suzanna decides to stay at Claymore to receive help and recover from her depression. She writes in her diary and paints. At the end of the movie, Suzanna is released after all her hard work. According to the DSM 5, depression is where someone has ‘discrete episodes of at least 2 weeks’ duration involving clear-cut changes in affect, cognition, and neurovegetative functions and inter-episode remissions.’ My definition would be something like someone who is constantly/consistently in a poor mood with low self-esteem and no interest in the things they used to enjoy. Some symptoms that are apparent in the movie are insomnia, inappropriate guilt (delusional), recurrent thoughts of death, and depressed mood. Throughout the movie, there are scenes playing that show that Suzanna suffers from insomnia. There are times where she sleeps all day and then times where is shows she has a very hard time sleeping at night. She also suffers from delusions which she talks about with a psychiatrist. She also thinks about death, a lot. She had thought about suicide and attempted it. They also talk about what she writes about in her diary, which includes talking about death. She thinks about it almost too much but what set her over the edge was when she found the girl hanging in the bathroom. She decided that she had had enough and it was time for her to change things for the better. She also just has a depressed mood which you can see very often throughout the movie; she does not seem to enjoy herself. I think that Girl, Interrupted does a great job of portraying depression. I have been around depression for the most of my life with family and friends. I can see what it can do to people and I hope that if anyone knows someone who is possibly depressed that they can offer them some help.
ReplyDeleteThe movie I chose was "Fight Club." The disorder protrayed in the film is dissociative identity disorder. The DSM-5 describes the disorder as the presence of two or more distinct personal states or the experience of possession and gaps in memory of everyday events, personal information, and traumatic events that would normally not be forgotten. The symptoms cause distress in socializing, at work, and other important areas. This disturbance is not part of generally accepted cultural or religious practice. Furthermore, the symptoms are not caused by the effects of substances or another medical condition.
ReplyDeleteIn the movie, the main character "Jack" is a skinny and weak man who is bored with his life and cannot sleep. To help his insomnia, Jack visits support groups for a variety of aliments, so that he can cry, and intern, sleep. After doing this for a while, a woman, Marla Singer, starts attending the groups as well, and Jack cannot fake cry with another faker in the room. Jack confronts Marla and the two negotiate which groups they would attend. While traveling for work, he meets and exchanges numbers with a man, Tyler Durdan, who is everything every guy wants to be, smart, cool, calm, and attractive. After arriving to his apartment building shortly after a bomb went off in his apartment, Jack calls Tyler for a beer. After their drinks, in the parking lot, the two have a fight, instigated by Tyler saying "How much can you know about yourself if you haven't been in a fight?" After exchanging blows, the two notice they are being watched and ask the viewers to join. The film then cuts to the pair walking to a beat up house in the middle of an abandoned industrial park, where Jack starts staying with Tyler. The two start regularly having organized fights with others. Marla comes back into the picture and Tyler tells Jack that if he discusses anything about Tyler with Marla, their relationship is over. As Jack becomes more involved with Marla, Tyler and fight club become more of a gang, having orders, like to start a fight with a stranger and lose. Soon member of fight club begin moving into the house, in a near paramilitary living conditions and have assignments like vandalizing stores and chain coffee establishments. Soon Tyler disappears completely, and Jack discovers that Tyler has been traveling the country and establishing more fight clubs. Jack confronts Tyler in a hotel room and discovers that Tyler is a figment of his imagination. Jack follows Tyler's trail to a van rigged with explosives in the parking garage of credit card office. After Tyler "knocks" Jack out, Jack wakes up on the top floor of a adjacent building to watch the explosion. Tyler has a pistol in Jack's mouth, but Jack realizes that he is, in fact, holding the gun, and pulls the trigger, symbolically killing Tyler and becoming the leader of fight club and project mayhem.
To an extent, "Fight Club" portrays dissociative identity disorder. But with dissociative identity disorder, patients cannot converse with their alternate personalities, like Jack regularly does, and the two personalities cannot exist at the same time, which is apparently what happens most of the film, such as Jack imagining himself watching Tyler. But it does cover the loss of time and important events, like having night jobs and traveling hundreds of miles with no clue. People with dissociative identity disorder either entirely do not remember the other personality, or they feel as though they are possessed, but in "Fight Club," Jack created Tyler as a crutch to help himself become who he wanted to become, but could not control how far it went.
The movie I chose to analyze is Fight Club. In Fight Club he displays Associative Identity Disorder. I have seen Fight Clubs a few times and it is one of my favorite movies. In the end when he figures out that he is Tyler Durden I was quite shocked and didn’t see that coming. After knowing what happens and watching it again it is really interesting because you see it through the point of view of already knowing it is only one guy, and that allows you to see the whole film in another light. If you’ve only seen it once I urge you to watch it again with that in mind.
ReplyDeleteIn the DSM 5 it describes Associative Identity Disorder with a few different factors. You have at least 2 different personality states that will disrupt and block one of another. The two personality traits are quite different and you usually do not remember what happens between the two. The diagnostic criteria states: “Recurrent gaps in the recall of everyday events, important personal information, and/or traumatic events that are inconsistent with ordinary forgetting.” These symptoms can very much affect your personal and work life. There is no sort of substance or prior illness they attribute to being the cause of Associative Identity Disorder.
The main character and narrator of the movie is a very man who starts going to different self-help meetings for different diseases and vices. After sharing his feelings there he can sleep. He eventually meets Tyler Durden who is the complete opposite of him In everyway. He and Tyler start hanging out, breaking rules, and eventually start fight club. This movement to liberate people from the shackles the modern world has on them. You see Tyler teaching the narrator all of these things throughout the movie. Eventually running the show and controlling everything he does. You eventually find out Tyler Durden is the narrator. He has been telling everyone he meets and recruits that he is Tyler Durden. Really for the most part the only person that sees him for his other alter ego is he. Even when he is Tyler he is more aware of what is happening because he tells his followers that know one is to stop the movement not even him. And that if he tries to cut off his balls. When he travels that country as Tyler Durden or becomes him at all he remembers nothing and has gaps in his memory.
I think you meant Dissociative Identity Disorder.
DeleteThe movie Pi is about a Schizophrenia who has a focus on math, and how math rules the world. The DSM 5 describes schizophrenia as having delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior, and negative symptoms. In the movie there are many different points that show the disorder in many different ways. The main character goes into great details in his everyday life but has episodes that he cannot control. He recognizes when the attacks are coming and tries to medicate himself but it does not help. He is clearly socially awkward and does not like to talk to other people if he can help it. He is does not trust anyone and believes someone is out to get him, because he has all the locks on his door. A good example of his hallucinations is when he is having one of his episodes and he sees the door shake and be broken in. These episodes seem to get worse as the movie goes on. The end of the movie it shows him being “attacked” by the jews and the people that want his formula for making money. But the really question is was that real and it makes him not as crazy as he seems or was that just a his point of view, a look into his mind showing the true fear of a Schizophrenic. The end of the movie is hard to judge what happens, I believe the end of the movie it tells from his point of view and when he grabs the drill his mind is finally getting rid of the old crazy self that makes him crazy. I think a key point to this movie even with his crazy episodes that throw him on the ground, he still is organized and realizes what is going on but he cannot stop it. Movies like this are hard to really judge the characters true mind, because we as an viewer may have a hard time determining what is real and what he is seeing and feeling in his mind. I believe this movie is a good portrayal of schizophrenia, with sense like the man singing on the train that disappears, and the brain that shows up at multiple sense but they are not really connected and the viewer does not see how the brain was moved from place to place. These are great examples of delusions and hallucinations. One of the symptoms of schizophrenia is disorganized and catatonic behavior, now this was a symptom that was harder to show because the character looked organized, but if you look at the movie his thoughts bounce around faster than he can even think which makes it a disorganized mess.
ReplyDeletestimulant use disorder the DSM5 states it as- A pattern of amphetamine-type substance, cocaine, or other stimulant use leading to clinically significant impairment or distress
ReplyDeletei watched requiem for a dream where it starts with Harry Goldfarb and his friend tyone selling Harry's mothers T.V. to buy drugs presumably amphetamines harry moves in with his girlfriend another amphetamine addict and sells the drug while his mom gets a call saying she will be on a tv show she gets excited and wants to diet to fit into her favorite red dress for her television appearance. she ends up seeing a doctor who prescribes her some amphetamines and is soon addicted. you see harry and his girlfriends relationship struggle as there addictions become worse, they are constantly focused on getting more, and desperation kicks in when they are coming down. In the end harry's girlfriend starts to sell her body for the drug, Harry loses his arm from shooting up and is also in jail with his friend Tyrone, and his mother has lost it completely with amphetamine psychosis. A very sad ending for all of them his poor crazy mom :(
The DSM5 states as one of the symptoms : A great deal of time is spent in activities necessary to obtain the stimulant, use the stimulant, or recover from its effects. Harry's whole life is focused on obtaining the drug so everything he does is usually one of those three things especially later in the movie when the addiction is at its peak. Harry and Tyrone also attempt to drive all the way from new England to Florida to obtain more of the drug. so i feel the DSM5's definition and this movie correlate very strongly with the movie pushing each aspect of amphetamine addiction to its extremes.