Awakenings Movie Psychology

The movie Awakenings starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro portrays the true story of a doctor named Dr. Malcolm Sayer, and the events of the summer of 1969 at a psychiatric hospital in New York. Dr. Malcolm Sayer, who is a research physician, is confronted with a number of patients who had each been afflicted with a devastating disease called Encephalitis Lethargica. The illness killed most of the people who contracted it, but some were left living statues; speechless, motionless, and helpless.

The movie Awakenings is a true story about a neurologist played by Robin Williams, at a hospital in the Bronx, who discovers a drug L-Dopa in which helps temporarily with unresponsive patients. Leonard Lowe who is played by Robert Deniro and the other patients are given this new age drug and are forced to adapt to the world around them that has been changing ever since they began to be catatonic.

of the chemical messenger dopamine, which affects parts of the brain that control reward and

Of the six most common neurotransmitters, dopamine is probably the one people know the most about. Dopamine is involved in controlling the reward and pleasure system in the brain. It allows us to recognize rewards and helps give us the ability to go after them. Learning, behavior, and cognition are also affected by dopamine levels. As with anything, if you have an imbalance, then bad things can happen. Parkinson’s disease can be caused by low dopamine amounts. People who have low dopamine levels can be addicted to substances easier.

There are always losses to each pleasant situation and unfortunately in the 1990 film directed by Penny Marshall, Awakenings, this theme appears throughout. In a chronically ill hospital where Dr. Malcolm Sayer is recruited with little to no experience with people, he works with multiple patients that are in a sleep-like state including Mr. Leonard Lowe. Set in the late sixties, there were not many medical advances that already existed to help these patients but Dr. Sayer makes unheard-of discoveries. Many awakenings occur in this film, but with these renewals comes gains and losses. Dr. Sayer, the staff, and the patients inhabited in this Brooklyn hospital gain and lose different things with their explorations.

The major support and refutation of the dopamine hypothesis has come from the examination of dopamine receptors in these regions of the brain. There are two main types of dopamine receptors, D1 and D2. However, within the category of D2 receptors, there are three subtypes, D2, D3, and D4. (5) Through PET scan analysis of dopamine usage in the brain and post-mordum molecular analysis of brain tissue, researcher were able to determine relative levels of dopamine receptors in patients with schizophrenia compared to non-schizophrenics. Overall analysis of dopamine

After attaining the seminar about new treatment L-Dopa and seeing astounding results on Lowe (patient) awakening completely from his catatonic state by using L-Dopa, Dr. Sayer believed that drug might help others as well. He ran trial for his own group. Later, they found out that this treatment is just a temporary triumph. The situation

In the movie, Awakenings, Dr. Sayer is a neurologist who begins studying the patients in his hospital that have survived the epidemic of encephalitis lethargica. Because of the encephalitis lethargica, the patients have become catatonic and unresponsive. After much studying, Dr. Sayer sees that the patients are responsive to certain stimuli such as catching a ball or listening to music. Dr. Sayer decides to conduct an experiment where he gives his catatonic patients the drug L-Dopa, which is an agonist for the hormone dopamine, which is supposed to be made and released naturally in the human brain and controls behavior and cognition.   At first the drug works and his patients seem to awaken from their catatonic state.

Some dopaminergic (i.e., dopamine-releasing) neurons run from the substantia nigra to the corpus striatum; their loss gives rise to the clinical manifestations of Parkinson's Disease (Korczyn 1994); others, involved in the rewarding effects of drugs and natural stimuli, run from the mesencephalon to the nucleunucleus accumbens.

Over the years, experiments have produced evidence to suggest that dopamine plays a role in the development of Schizophrenia (Howes, McCutcheon, & Stone, 2015). Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is produced in the substantia nigra and ventral tegmental regions of the brain. The belief that dopamine was involved in Schizophrenia arose after multiple studies performed with compounds produced an increase in extracellular concentrations of dopamine (Lieberman, Kane, & Alvir, 1987). The patients that were administered these compounds had similar symptoms to those observed from patients who were diagnosed with Schizophrenia (Lieberman et al., 1987).

The movie Awakenings is directed by Penny Marshall in the year 1990. Given the title Awakenings, the movie was about the dream of a doctor named Dr. Malcolm Sayer portrayed by Robin Willliams, whose goal is to cure the survivors of the outbreak of Encephalitis Lethargica and was paralyzed by Parkinson’s disease for decades. Dr. Sayer treated them by a miracle drug: Levo-dopa that was able to revive them again. After these awakenings, the true problems unveil, between the benefits and the counter side effects of the drug and the patients that weren’t able to accept the reality in time they have missed. This is some of the different factors of the movie that contributed to inspire works Dr. Sayer throughout the movie, which is the purpose of this paper.

Dopamine agonists, pharmaceutical drugs utilized to treat motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease have recently revealed to be strongly associated with the development of adverse pathological impulsive compulsive disorders (ICD) in Parkinson’s disease patients. Parkinson’s disease is a chronic neurodegenerative disorder linked with the loss of dopamine in the substantia nigra within the midbrain. Dopamine is a salient chemical neurotransmitter which relays signals between adjacent neurons involved in the initiation and control of voluntary motor movement, mood and behavioural aspects such as reinforcement, motivation, repeated actions and

Imagine looking at two individuals, one is obese and the other is average weight but exhibiting obvious venous drug injection punctures in his/her arm. Which most one of the two would you say is “unhealthy”? While many people would probably consider the obese person as somewhat okay, in contrast they would probably argue that the drug addict is in much needed immediate help. According to our societal acceptances, obesity is welcomed as opposed to drug use behaviors. Therefore in this paper, I will focus my discussion on the comparison of the dopamine reward pathway amongst obese individuals and drug addicts, as well as the controversial arguments whether or not obesity should be considered a disease.

The film Awakenings is an emotional film that tells the story of a doctor, named Dr. Malcolm Sayer played by Robin Williams, who starts work at a chronic hospital in the Bronx during the late 1960’s. As he examines patients at the hospital though he comes to observe a good many of them are experiencing the same symptoms of a being in a catatonic and unresponsive state yet still having the ability to react to certain stimuli. One patient in particular, named Leonard Lowe played by Robert De Niro, catches Sayer’s attention and he decides to administer a new drug known as L-Dopa in hopes of saving him from his coma-like state. The drugs works and soon all of the once statuesque patients are reanimated, but only for a short time, and sadly soon Leonard and the rest of his fellow patients regress to their original catatonic state. However, although this films proves to be deeply emotional with an extremely touching story many concepts that relate to psychology are also present within it as well. Some concepts present within the film Awakenings are that of the principle of ethics, the frustration-aggression theory, conformity, and also the idea of empathy-altruism.

In the article “Dopamine and Teenage Logic” by Daniel Siegel he states that “Dopamine is a neurotransmitter central in creating our drive for reward” (Source B). This indicates that dopamine is one of the key causes of risk-taking. Teens often take risks because they are focused on the reward they get after they take it, rather than what would actually happen to them during and after they take the risk. There are two significant ways that dopamine affects our brains; increased impulsiveness, and the susceptibility to addiction by the release of dopamine.