Movies And Mental Illness: Using Films To Understand Psychopathology

"John Milton, in Paradise Lost, tells us that we must 'strike the visual nerve, for we have much to see.' So, too, in this present work, do Wedding, Boyd, and Niemiec admonish us that there is much to learn by seeing with the mind's eye what these well-chosen films, by turns sad and silly, offer us in illuminating the psychopathologies set forth in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. "Wedding, Boyd, and Niemiec provide a brief synopsis of the particular film in relation to the major category of psychopathology being covered in a chapter, and they relate the manifest and latent content of the film to the various diagnostic symptoms within a category, such as childhood disorders, and further provide an illustrative case study to assist in the process of generalizing from the film to actual diagnostic work. "The authors provide a lively expository style, and the use of epigraphs for each chapter is a particularly happy device for setting a tone for each chapter. "[This work] is likely to become a classic of its type and a particularly useful teaching tool for the diagnosis and understanding of the various psychopathologies for students of the helping professions. I commend it to the reader, be the reader student or professor." Allan Barclay, PhD, St. Louis, Missouri "If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed" stated the famous director Stanley Kubrick, who proposed some of the best representations of madness in cinema with his famous street hoodlum, Alex (Malcom McDowell), in A Clockwork Orange (1971) or Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) losing his mind in The Shining (1980). Since the silent days in the beginning of the 20th century, cinema has proven to be an art particularly suitable to portray human psychological experiences and is replete with characters who illustrate psychopathology. In Movies and Mental Illness: Using Films to Understand Psychopathology, Danny Wedding, Mary Ann Boyd and Ryan M. Niemec review nearly a thousand movies that depict psychopathology. Following the nosology of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) of the American Psychiatric Association, the authors relate a variety of films to major categories of psychopathology. The book is organised into fourteen 'clinical'chapters, each focusing on a different disorder with one or two movies as primary illustrations of each disorder. For the authors, films are a powerful teaching tool to enhance students' understanding of psychopathology. In order to stimulate ideas and discussions, each clinical chapter starts with a "Questions to consider" section related to a recommended film (e.g. Hitchock's Psycho (1960) for dissociative disorders or Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction (1987) for personality disorders, followed by a constructed case history and mental state exam of the chosen movie's central character. As a movie fan and a psychologist, I was eager to review this book. Reading it made me want to watch unseen and previously seen movies considering the reflections proposed by Wedding, Boyd, and Niemec. Another significant strength of this work is the filmography organised by diagnostic category provided in Appendix G (each film is rated from 1 to 5, based on its usefulness for educational purposes). It is regrettable that the authors fail to systematically name the directors in this impressive list of recommended films. Moreover, despite a series of appendices, the absence of indexes for films or subjects makes it difficult to find information at times. As a final point, non-American films are still underrepresented (however, the authors' e-mail addresses are given in the Preface and suggestions are welcomed for the next edition of Movies and Mental Illness!). In conclusion, I am convinced that this work is a helpful and creative resource to initiate discussion of mental illness concerns. Gregoire Zimmermann, Swiss J Psychol 65 (1), (c) 2006 by Verlag Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG, Bern