Understanding Personality and Mood Disorders: Insights from Mommie Dearest

Nearly 1 out of 5 Americans suffer from some kind of personality or mood disorder (Mental Health by the Numbers, 2017), are you one of them? To identify that you need to understand what it is, a personality disorder are patterns of inflexible traits that disrupt social life or work and may distress that affected individual (Rathus, 2010). Personality disorders aren’t the only thing that affect us, because there are also mood disorders which are your general emotional state or mood is distorted or inconsistent with your circumstances and interferes with your ability to function. (Rathus, 2010) You may be extremely sad, and empty and then all of sudden you become really happy. To learn how to identify these disorders is through a movie. The film Mommie Dearest, directed by Frank Perry, is a story about Joan Crawford in the mid 1960’s who traumatized her daughter, Christina. So later in Christina’s life she wrote the book Mommie Dearest to

The name comes from an early description of the disorder as being on the “borderline” between neurosis and psychosis. Some symptoms are when you often feel “empty”, you’re constantly afraid that people you care about will leave you, most romantic relationships are intense, but unstable, or you’ve attempted to hurt yourself (Smith, 2017). One example that Joan showed was when the kids were playing outside and they made her mad because they were supposed to be quiet. Later on, in the day, Joan was still upset about that morning so it led to her taking Christina’s babies. Another example is when she finds out she was going to have to leave Metro. She was calm and quiet at first but then it led to her acting out in front of the mayor, with crying, and shouting (Mommie Dearest,