How Is the Portrayal Of Schizophrenia In Film?
Schizophrenia is a psychological disorder where individuals experience absurd paranoid thoughts or just affective flattening. The start of the disorder is generally around age twenty-one. Some 42 percent of individuals have a tendency to have their symptoms disappear, 35 percent have an intermediate effect, and 27 percent do badly. People from wealthy families and decent health care facilities have better results than those from poor households with very little access to health care.
The press, however, particularly the films, depict schizophrenia in another light compared to true disorder. Frequent misconceptions are that schizophrenics are abusive, beverage alcohol heavily or use narcotics, act comically, or suffer with a non-curable disease. Some consider that schizophrenia is punishment for behaving immorally, or contact with a schizophrenic can result in psychological illness. Other people consider schizophrenia is caused by poor parenting which schizophrenics behave unpredictably, or are isolated loners.
To be more exact on the way the films depict schizophrenia, 45 films working with schizophrenia1 were examined along with the principal motif within the movie noted. The significant themes implied that individuals with schizophrenia are geniuses.
As schizophrenia is a mental disorder, many delusions and hallucinations happen inside the mind, making the disease difficult to portray in a picture. Possibly the funniest film about schizophrenia, A gorgeous Mind (2001), explains the personality's hallucinations at a greatly exaggerated fashion, because hallucinations are largely auditory instead of visual. Frequently film writers and writers are badly educated about schizophrenia, leading to erroneous portrayals of those people with the disease, as addressed at the two typical cases outlined.
Violent or Genius?!
1. The Schizophrenic Character Is Violent
Several movies depicted schizophrenics as violent personalities, war heroes, serial killers, or gangsters. The 1989 film Santa Sangre depicts an adult with schizophrenia rising up in a really violent environment full of murder and drugs. Back in Nightbreed (1990) a physician gives medication to a patient with schizophrenia and requests him to commit murders, he can. Back in Spider Forest (2004) a patient with schizophrenia would be the major suspect for a series of murders because his finger prints were discovered, but is overly cut out in reality to provide his version of their accounts. From Black Swan explained (2011) the primary character, Nina Sayers is pressured into shedding her "sweet girl" persona and embrace her darker side to fully take on her black swan role and to please her demanding and sexually aggressive director, which pushes her over the edge.
Alas, many movies depict people with schizophrenia like serial killers. This may result in confusion among the households of people who have schizophrenia who may think their relative could develop violent behavior. Many psychiatrists assert that instead of psychological disorders, it's alcohol and medication which tends to induce violent behavior and mass murder or serial killings.
2. The Schizophrenic Character Is a Genius
Another 1999 film with a schizophrenia is fight club explained where Brad Pitt's character Tyler Durden battles with Edward Norton depicted as another personality inside the Narrator’s head, a spin you simply learn in at the conclusion. This movie has tricked people to confuse schizophrenia with synesthesia, a neurological disease which makes learning much simpler. In the end, in accordance with Harvard, the Liz Murray Story (2003), the most important character is the daughter of a schizophrenic mother and a chemical addict father who ends up analyzing and making it into Harvard.
The most important offender is that this may lead some households to feel that anybody with schizophrenia may have hidden talents or genius skills, often includes present in some types of dementia but infrequently in schizophrenia.