Portrayal of Schizoprenia in the Film The Black Swan

Although some people with schizophrenia can live seemingly normal lives, the movie accurately displays the overwhelming nature of schizophrenia for a person who is not only homeless and off medication but has PTSD.

Schizophrenia is a complex psychotic disorder evident by impaired thinking, emotions, judgment and behaviors. The person’s grasp of reality may be so disordered that they are unable to filter sensory stimuli and may have intense perceptions of sounds, colors, and other features of their environment. Although there are different levels of severity in symptoms, the Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine (Fundukian, Ed., 2014) states that schizophrenia may typically interfere with a person 's ability to think clearly and to know the difference between reality and fantasy. People with schizophrenic symptoms have hallucinations and delusions, and often have difficulty with everyday life. It is a complicated disease that is not well understood and carries significant stigma for its sufferers.

In the book In Cold Blood, Dr Jones, a psychiatrist, diagnosed Perry Smith with schizophrenia causing him to believe Smith had no control at scene of the murder of Clutter family. “I knelt down beside Mr. Clutter, and the pain of kneeling—I thought of that goddam dollar. Silver dollar. The shame. Disgust. And they’d told me never to come back to Kansas. But I didn’t realize what I’d done till I heard the sound” (Capote 244). Despite Smith’s acknowledgment of Dick’s plan, Smith has trouble fathoming of killing Mr. Clutter. Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by withdrawal from reality caused by a combination of genetics and environment. Readers can infer mental illness runs in Smith’s family since two out of three of Smith’s siblings committed suicide.

Jim Stevens left this poem up to interpretation. The title “Schizophrenia” sticks out because it is a mental disorder that affects how a person feels thinks and acts; thus, it leads the reader to believe this poem has a dark undertone. Each line gives a story of how a family deals with the issues of two people in a relationship. For instance, in the last line of the poem, "It was the House that suffered the most" (Stevens line 1), Stevens indicates the relationship was not a happy one and the house suffered for it. He sets up the image with this opening line and repeats it in the close of the poem. Throughout the poem the house transforms in to a person.

Film industries have been critiqued over their portrayal of mental illness for as long as the field of Psychology has been around, and rightly so. Films often inaccurately portray mental illnesses for the sake of dramatic effect. They will stereotype characters, label them as ‘crazy’ and unstable, and in the case of Silver Linings Playbook, cast the therapist in an uncaring, trigger happy, and unprofessional role. Psychologists are just in their outrage, because the effect on public understanding of people with mental illness is damaging, to both normal people and those who have a mental illness. To explore these issues in Silver Linings Playbook, we need to first, introduce the psychological disorders that are in the film, examine the

exaggerating symptoms and stereotyping individuals with a mental disorder. For example, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film Psycho, in which man with schizophrenia murders guests in a hotel, influences viewers to believe that all individuals suffering from schizophrenia are dangerous. However, that is rarely the case (Polatis, 2014). Therefore, it is refreshing to find a movie that accurately portrays the true personality of and individual living with a mental illness. The movie Silver Linings Playbook chronicles the experiences of Pat Solitano, a man suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder who was recently released from a psychiatric facility. Although this paper focuses on Pat’s experiences, it is important to note that the film not only takes on the task of portraying bipolar disorder, but also mental illness in general with other major characters suffering from a mixture of psychological or personality disorders. The film opens with Pat at Karel Psychiatric Facility in Baltimore, Maryland. We later learn that Pat was institutionalized for nearly beating to death the man with whom he caught his wife Nikki cheating on him. The rest of the film details

Understanding mental illness for the average person can be challenge or even unattainable. Unknown aspects from each individual illness grasps differing urges that are unrelated to the majority of people. The film industry, however, is used as a productive machine of creating empathetic relationships between its audience and the people being portray in the film. A combination of the film industry and the implementation of characters struggling with mental illness delivers a provoking message to an audience of people willing to learn the situations of all people. The movie A Beautiful Mind manages to fulfill the dramatic effects of a film and the realities within an individual suffering through mental illness.

Many films today go beyond simple dramas and acts of heroism. A recent interest in the individual and why each person does, acts, lives the way they do makes for wonderful film adaptations of the tortured human soul. Cult films like Donnie Darko received a very strong following due to its strong portrayal of a young man dealing with psychological issues, the question of God, feeling alone, and death. More than any teenager should have to deal with but considering our day and age, it is not surprising that the following Donnie Darko has earned through beautiful portrayal of a tormented soul is made up of mainly adolescents. In the film, Donnie is said to suffer from paranoid schizophrenia.

Movies and other forms of popular entertainment sources have often presented varied information and as well as misinformation about schizophrenia, most specifically in regard to its negative portrayals, which can lead to confused public opinion. In summary, majority of movies and popular entrainment media sources portrays people with schizophrenia as violent and with homicidal and suicide thoughts. In addition, most characters in these media sources are portrayed as Caucasians, males, and with supernatural abilities (Gaebel, 2011).

The purpose of the movie “A Beautiful Mind” is to raise awareness among the general population to ease misconceptions about schizophrenia and to show examples for better understanding of this mental illness. By emphasizing several virtues that the main character, his wife, and his friends present throughout the movie, viewers can learn to be more respectful of those who suffer from schizophrenia and

In the beginning of the film, Nina was depicted as an average, normal person living in New York that yet lacked the freedom to express herself as a sexually free, young woman due to her mother’s controlling behavior. When she wins the coveted Swan Queen role, the feeling of immense pressure that comes with the role causes Nina to lose her tenuous grip on reality and descend into a living nightmare. For example, she experiences symptoms such as interpreting normal behavior from Lily as an attack because of Nina’s jealousy toward Lily’s effortless embodiment of the Black Swan (Schacter, Gilbert, Wegner, & Nock, 2014). Nina’s attention to negative behavior to Lily is a result of her own imagination – she starts conceiving events that did not happen such as a lesbian fling with Lily and her constant attempts to sabotage Nina’s ability to perform as the Swan Queen. In addition, she suffers through hallucinatory episodes that involve bodily horror, such as her skin tearing off her body and the appearance of an evil twin, every time she reaches a step closer to her full transformation of the Swan Queen.

The main character in the film Black Swan, twenty-eight year old female Nina Sayers, displays signs of numerous disorders through her abnormal behavior. Nina’s life is consumed by her occupation: professional ballerina/dancer. Nina resides with her mother and rarely socializes with others. She has difficulty concentrating, is restless, irritable, suffers from muscle tension, and sleep disturbances from nightmares. Nina also feels very uncomfortable in social and intimate situations. She appears to be unable to successfully interact with those around her. The interaction that Nina has with her fellow dancers appears to be strained and superficial. Nina exhibits behavior that indicates she views all other dancers as competition instead of

Black Swan and Whiplash both feature intense practice sequences that build upon the narrative of obsessing over a craft. This intense and obsessive practice leads up to the conclusion of the films; where each character gives their absolute best performance. Nina’s final transformation into an impure and sinful character is completed when she grows black wings and slams her mother’s hand in her door. During the performance, Nina gets into an altercation with herself and stabs herself in the pure White Swan costume. Andrew transforms into “one of the greats” as he is embarrassed by Fletcher on stage. They both have their careers riding on their performances. They both fail to begin with; Andrew not knowing the chart the rest of the band is playing and Nina falling during act I of Swan Lake. Yet their greatness is proven when they give the final goodbye to their parental figures and former youth. Andrew runs off stage, hugs his dad and his former reality, as he knows his life will never be what it once was. Nina exchanges eye contact with her crying mother as she looks proudly onto her daughter dancing like she never could.

Black Swan is a psycho thriller film that narrates the life of a ballerina called Nina Sayers (played by Natalie Portman). She is a young, ambitious dancer working for a prestigious NYC ballet company. According to the movie, she was around twenty-some year old when the story begins. Even though the main point of the movie is how bad Nina wanted the lead role for a theater production called Swan Lake, the dark drama around the movie is built by the psychological illness of its protagonist. Nina’s disordered relationship with her roommate/mother Erica, played by Barbara Hershey, sets the stage for Nina’s psychological breakdown. In the movie, the role that Nina always wanted requires her to play both the black and white swans. Her innocent, almost child-like personality makes her a perfect hite swan; however, she was having trouble getting into the character of the white swan’s dark and seductive counterpart. This film brilliantly captures the brutal physical and emotional demands that ballerinas face in their short-lived career span.

This paper, broken into two sections, includes a mock case study of a young woman, from the movie Black Swan, who meets criteria for a Schizophrenia spectrum disorder, followed by current research on schizophrenia and recommended treatment. Because specific temporal information is unavailable and the key difference between schizophreniform disorder and schizophrenia is duration, the diagnosis made for the purpose of this paper is schizophrenia. The research portion will cover current research and treatment of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a disorder defined by a heterogeneous set of irregularities across multiple modalities, including “cognitive, behavioral, and emotional dysfunctions” (American Psychiatric Association, 2013, p.100). This mock case study is an important reminder for counseling students: Client symptoms may not always be transparent to clinicians. Clients may purposefully withhold information, lack insight to report, or may have sufficient factual insight to avoid the perceived stigma of reporting.