Movies & Mental Illness

Abstract

In our society, movies hold a prodigious power to reflect and sometimes shape our culture. In the last 10 years, we've gained easy and inexpensive access to large numbers of movies through libraries, rental stores, cable TV, and the Internet. This should be good news for teachers of all kinds, but how often do we use movies in our teaching? For most of us health educators, the leap from viewing movies as easy entertainment to using them as effective teaching tools requires guidance by experts who know both the movies and the health topic of interest. For teachers of topics relating to mental illness, the first hurdle is the question, “What do we do with so many good movies and so many bad movies about mental illness?” The number of movies about mental illness overwhelms most of us. Then the process of finding the right movie for a class session, selecting the key sections, and preparing the relevant questions can seem like more work than it's worth. In their second revised and expanded edition of Movies & Mental Illness, Wedding, Boyd, and Niemiec have provided us an informative guide that draws on nearly 1000 films. This encyclopedic but friendly paperback volume is written for teachers and students of psychopathology courses and is intended for use as a supplement to core psychopathology texts. Medical educators such as teachers of behavioral science curricula in family medicine, other primary care disciplines, and psychiatry will find it a valuable time-saver for those who want to add drama to the classroom. The authors, 2 psychologists and a social worker, organize this second edition of Movies & Mental Illness around 13 diagnostic or assessment categories. Each chapter begins with questions to consider while watching the specific movie the authors selected to illustrate the category. The authors then demonstrate their clinical approach in the form of a “fabricated case history” of the key character. A Beautiful Mind and John Nash provide the focus for the chapter on schizophrenia, and Psycho and Norman Bates provide the focus for the chapter on dissociative disorders. Elaboration on the disorders, including theoretical background, and on other movies, including “additional questions for discussion,” gives breadth to the chapters. The authors are not timid about pointing out the misrepresentations of mental illness that contribute to stigma, as listed in Appendix E. However, the book might have been stronger if the authors had acknowledged the potential influence of the disproportionate number of female villains (32%) to female heroes (12%) in Appendix B on perpetuating gender stereotypes. The authors have accumulated a wealth of knowledge, most compactly collected in “Appendix G,” their annotated list of nearly 1000 movies, organized by psychopathologic topics, each movie receiving the authors' 5-point rating for the movie's value as a teaching film as well as a work of art. They also maintain a Web site with this information plus periodic updates at http://mimh.edu/danny_wedding. The only shortcoming of the book is the absence of an index. I've found this book useful for teaching a class of psychiatry residents a session on the psychodynamics of depression, for which I showed a clip from House of Sand and Fog, prompted by this book's chapter on mood disorders. I also used this book to select movies and notes for a Web site for medical students interested in psychosomatic medicine. With the help of Movies & Mental Illness, learning and teaching about psychopathology should become more fun, more dramatic, and more effective.