While doing some research for the short essay earlier this week to see if I could find some scholarly sources on the portrayal of mental health in M*A*S*H, I stumbled across People Like Ourselves: Portrayals of Mental Illness in the Movies (2003)by Jacqueline Noll Zimmerman, which appears to cover a wide range of books, movies, and television shows that portray mental health. She appears to cover a lot of topics, including the price of conformity, the denial of reality, Hitchcock’s interpretations, women with mental illness, divine madness, war, and general violence. She looks at all these different genres and critiques how mental illness is portrayed. While she does not cover M*A*S*H, I’m still interested in many of the movies and shows she does mention, particularly the war genre, since that’s the area I’m most interested in. I think I’ll be looking into a copy of this to read sometime in the future, even if she doesn’t cover the show I was originally looking for.
Jacqueline Noll Zimmerman. People like Ourselves : Portrayals of Mental Illness in the Movies. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2004.
“How Creativity and Mental Illness Are Linked.” n.d. Www.youtube.com. Accessed November 10, 2021. https://youtu.be/VWzhVauFbSU.
My post for this week is about this video on the link between mental illness and creativity. The video discusses the notion of the struggling artist and how this is a trend we have seen throughout time. Mental illness and creativity work in the brain in similar ways and this is why mentally ill or distressed individuals seem to have an added sense of creativity. Many of the movies and shows our class have watched deal with incredibly creative people and their struggles with mental illness. Creativity very often is stemmed from free association of thoughts and ideas. Society also seems to gravitate more towards art made by distressed individuals.
This week’s topic is quite interesting. One of my favorite pieces of art is the Pieta sculpture in Vatican City. I have never had the privilege of seeing it in person but I find it to be incredibly moving. Several years ago I read that Michelangelo most likely suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome. My adult son has Asperger’s and I can attest to the fact that he has always “marched to the beat of his own drum.” Here’s a link to an article that I found interesting:
This article reveals that studies show that artists are more prone to mental illness than the general population. Citing a Scientific American article, this article shows that writers and artists are “20 times more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder…and 10 times more likely to suffer from depression.” The article argues that while mania and depression do contribute to bouts of creativity (particularly mania), the long term consequences of not treating them can be catastrophic. Professor Kay Redfield Jamison, who is a leading authority on mental illness and creativity and is bipolar herself, contends that lithium does not stifle creativity as some artists proclaim. https://www.artshub.com.au/news/features/20×20-why-creative-people-are-more-prone-to-depression-261229-2368732/
Hey everyone due to some technical issues I am gonna post a link to my film review. As the original post I did is not showing up on the course website for some reason. So be sure to give it a look if you please.
“How many people do you think throughout history were diagnosed as schizophrenic, psychotic, bipolar, or maybe just plain crazy when they had something that could’ve been so easily diagnosed?” For my mental health related movie/tv show project, I decided to watch the movie Brain on Fire that was released in 2016. This movie is biographical and is […]
Are societies monsters simply born evil or does society create its own monsters? The Joker movie produced and directed by Todd Philips showcases a very different version of the character, this time played by Joaquin Phoenix. Rather than looking at the typical clown prince of crime DC comics and media, Philips instead looks at the joker as a man suffering from severe mental health issues and is pushed to the breaking point and is eventually turned fully into the famous villain by abuse and neglect towards him from others. The movie begins with the joker, Arthur Fleck, putting on his outfit for his job as a clown for businesses and entertaining children. As he is doing his current job of flipping a sign for a business, a group of teenagers steal his sign and lead him to an alleyway where they destroy it and beat him up.
“Joker,” directed by Todd Philips, October 4, 2019, movie, accessed November 8, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykAHr1DcQMI.
The movie shows off Arthur’s first meeting with his therapist and leads to him riding on a bus where he entertains a kid in front of him but he is told by the boy’s mother to leave him alone. Arthur also begins laughing uncontrollably which the mother thinks is him laughing at her, but is really caused by a mental health issue.
. The movie continues showing more of the joker’s life such as his mother, a female neighbor that acts nice towards him, showing his coworkers. This continues until a scene where Arthur is on a train home and gets attacked by three men and he ends killing them with a gun he reluctantly received from a coworker.
This scene becomes a pivotal moment because it will be his first of many people, he ends up killing and starts showing his dissent increasing due to his actions and circumstances. Events start to become worse for Arthur with him getting fired from his job due to him having a gun, his mother getting sick, the city defunding the therapy and medication he needs, and the police getting closer to him in their investigation. All this leads to the next pivotal scene where he finds out that his mother had been lying about him not being adopted, who his father was, and that she also had severe mental health issues and abused him as a child. On, top of this, Arthur finds out that all the nice interactions he had with his neighbor did not actually happen and instead were in his head.
This culminates with him killing his mother, coworker, and eventually a talk show host. The host invited him on to his show after a video of him giving a bad stand-up routine went viral, and Arthur kills him on-air while saying that people end up like him when those with mental health issues are abused.
This movie fits into the class and our understanding of mental health because it shows how important treatments for those who severely need them are, but also what could happen when mental health people are constantly ostracized. Whether through mental institutions, defunding programs, or treating mental health people like second-class citizens, all this affects those with these issues severally. While most people with mental health issues will not turn into murders or even harm others, when a person does not get the help they need and is constantly manipulated or abused by those around them, they could easily eventually break under the constant pressure.
Bibliography:
“Joker.” Directed by Todd Philips, October 4, 2019. movie. Accessed November 6, 2021.
Benny and Joon is a sweet, romantic comedy about siblings who lived together and try to deal with Joon’s mental illness. The movie does not specifically state what Joon’s diagnosis is, but I would guess that it was schizophrenia judging by her behavior. Benny struggled with providing the care for her that she needs because her housekeepers kept quitting when she scared them off. He contemplated putting her into a group home when Sam (Johnny Depp’s character) comes into their lives after Joon lost a hand of poker to Benny’s friend, Mike. Since they inherited a new roommate, Benny entrusted Sam to look after his sister as the temporary housekeeper. Sam was an eccentric person who had a passion for old movies and physical comedy, and eventually Sam and Joon fell in love. At first Benny struggled with the idea of Sam and his sister’s relationship since he had always been her overprotective, big brother, but after she tried to run away with Sam and had a psychotic episode on a bus, he learned to let go of Joon to let her learn to live her own life independently so that she would be happy. This movie tries not to focus on mental illness itself, but focuses on how mental illness can impact the family.
Joon making breakfast in a snorkel mask.
Joon was a talented artist who channeled her feelings into her paintings and drawings. She was a bit eccentric as well. She wore helmets in the car and a snorkel in the house. She also tried to direct traffic in a busy intersection with a ping pong paddle and her snorkel mask. Joon also could not be trusted alone since she liked to light things on fire and had a tendency to wander.
Symptoms: Joon also had some obsessive compulsive tendencies in the film. She had a set routine and lashed out when she got stressed or agitated. She called Benny’s garage obsessively because she thought that needing more peanut butter from the store was an emergency. When Sam played music too loud while he was cleaning the house, she stormed into the house, unplugged the boom box, and kicked him out of the house. Another example was the scene where Benny and Joon got into an argument over ping pong and she claimed that he was trying to cheat her, threw the paddle at a lamp, and stormed off to her room.
She talked to herself and sometimes heard voices in her head as well. There was a scene at the beginning of the film where Benny was frustrated after the last housekeeper quit and he stated that she was not to leave the house alone, to which she replied, “Define alone.”
The iconic dancing rolls scene.
Treatment: Joon was taken to a psychiatrist regularly who also talked to Benny about her treatment recommendations. Joon had medication that she took, and her psychiatrist recommended that she was placed into a group home several times throughout the film. She stated that she would have had the support of her peers and would have been under less stress. They also had the resources to help her get a job.
Benny rejected the notion that he could not handle his sister’s illness anymore, but did contemplate it when his friends pointed out that he was missing out on his life by focusing so much on hers. He turned down dates with women because he felt like he did not have the time for them.
Making grilled cheeses on an ironing board.
At the end of the film, she was admitted to a mental hospital to treat her illness after she had the manic episode on the bus. She refused all visitors, so Benny and Sam decided to sneak in. Sam decided to sacrifice himself by creating a diversion in the hallway so that Benny could see Joon, finally. They talked it over with her psychiatrist and against her better judgment, approved for Joon to move out with Sam into her own apartment. The last scene is Sam and Joon making grilled cheese sandwiches with an iron meant for clothes.
Sam creating a diversion at the mental hospital.
To connect this film to what we have learned about in class, this film is definitely a more modern day depiction of schizophrenia. She had outpatient therapy, and lived at home with her brother. There was a psychiatric facility, but Joon checked herself into it, and she was allowed to reject visitors if she pleased. She was also in control over if she left or not, so it was not a prison sentence. The group home that they tried to get her to go to seemed like it was more of a college-like dorm experience since they said that she would be among her peers and they would help her get a job to gain her own independence.
Since Joon’s condition was not clarified in the movie, it is hard to compare her specific diagnosis to the other mental illnesses that we have discussed this semester already. Her version of schizophrenia was similar to Alice Wilson’s in Metzel’s book, The Protest Psychosis, where she seemed to be doing fine until she wasn’t anymore. Joon did not adjust well to change and her anxiety would trigger episodes where she would need medical intervention to help her. Benny said that she talked to herself and heard voices in her head, but that was not apparent in the movie.
Ron Howard’s 2001 film A Beautiful Mind is a dramatization of the mental illness struggles of Nobel laureate mathematician John Nash (1928-2015). The film is important for having introduced to the public what schizophrenia actually is, and how someone with schizophrenia may perceive the world. Nash, played by Russell Crowe, is a brilliant mathemetician who believes he is working on a top secret mission for the government to crack Soviet codes. Along with this delusion, he hallucinates a government agent, Soviet spies, his college roommate and a young girl. As Nash’s delusions get worse, he is taken to a psychiatric hospital where a psychiatrist explains to him and his wife (played by Jennifer Connelly) that he has paranoid schizophrenia. After being treated with with Thorazine and horrific insulin shock treatment, he is discharged and given medication that he does not like due to its negative effects on his creativity. He stops taking the medication, which causes his delusions and hallucinations to reemerge. Things come to a head when a delusional Nash almost drowns his infant son in the bath and he accidentally hits his wife while fighting an imagined attacker. His wife places an emergency call to the psychiatrist, who convinces Nash to stay on his meds. The rest of the film involves Nash gradually accepting his condition and ignoring his hallucinations and delusions. The final scene is his winning a Nobel Prize in economics.
While this movie has been rightly hailed for introducing to the public what schizophrenia is and showing how a person with the disease might perceive the world, it is not without its critics. A 2002 review by ABC News states that some doctors are concerned that many schizophrenics seeing the film will go off their meds like Nash did, believing like him that they can beat the disease.1 The article also points out that visual hallucinations like what Nash had in the film are uncommon. Auditory hallucinations like hearing voices are much more common, and when people do have visual hallucinations, they are not life-like like in the film, but are “distorted or cartoonish.”2 The article does maintain that the film does a good service by increasing awareness of the disease and showing that there is no complete cure for it. The Guardian published an article, which took exception with the film leaving out the sordid details of Nash’s life, such as his illegitimate son, his abuse of his wife and their 1963 divorce (though they did remarry in 2001) as revealed in Sylvia Nasar’s biography.3 Jonathan Metzl, in his book Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became A Black Disease (2019), agrees that the movie does over-simplify John Nash’s life for the sake of Hollywood.4 Additionally he asserts that the film perpetuates an old stereotype that schizophrenia is a disease of white male geniuses, which overlooks the fact that since the 1960s, African American men have been disproportionally diagnosed as schizophrenic.5 Flaws notwithstanding, A Beautiful Mind is a beautiful film, which hopefully promotes better understanding of how terrible the disease is.
Trailer of A Beautiful Mind.(Movieclips Classic Trailers, A Beautiful Mind (2001) Official Trailer – Russell Crowe Movie HD, November 15, 2013, accessed November 8, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWwAOutgWBQ.
ABC News, “How Realistic is A Beautiful Mind,” January 17, 2002, accessed November 8, 2021, paragraph 9, https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/DrJohnson/story?id=126426&page=1.
ABC News, paragraph 18.
Alex von Tunzelmann, “A Beautiful Mind Hides Ugly Truths,” The Guardian, December 19, 2012, accessed November 8, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2012/dec/19/a-beautiful-mind-john-nash.
Jonathan M. Metzl, Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became A Black Disease, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009), 208.
