Schizophrenia In The Film, Patch Adams, And 'Patch Adams'

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Throughout this paper, we gathered information on schizophrenia to better understand it as a disease and a mental illness, as well as how it affects people in day to day life. We used a variety of different resources such as: The course textbook (The World of Psychology), the website given to us (mentalhealth.com) and the CMHA website, journal articles, and media sources, taking elements and different aspects A Beautiful Mind (2001), Patch Adams (1988), Shutter Island (2010) and Friday the 13th (1980). We researched the formal definition of the illness, finding the social and quality of life impacts. We analyzed different films, comparing different interpretations of schizophrenia in each. We realized that this illness is widely misunderstood …show more content…

The use of media in ending the stigma on mental health is becoming more prevalent. While, the use of media is a wonderful tool in informing people, mental illness is still widely stigmatized in many platforms. We see the negative connotation put on mental illness, specifically schizophrenia, in many films. “Patch Adams” (1998) is a well known award winning movie. It touches on mental health throughout various aspects of the movie, but in particular we are going to discuss the character with schizophrenia and how he was portrayed. The movie presented Larry as being odd, socially awkward, and at times a little bit ominous. Later on in the movie he ends up murdering a doctor who was checking in on him, then proceeds to kill himself. This associates a stigma with schizophrenia. The stigma is that people suffering from schizophrenia are “unstable”, “crazy”, “insane”, “psychotic” just name a few works, don’t have self control, thinking violently and maliciously, usually being portrayed as criminals. For example, in “Friday the 13th” (1980) which is a popular series of horror movies, the villain is a woman with schizophrenia. This woman could not handle the death of her son so she commits homicide on many camp counselors that work on the campsite where her son drowned due to negligence. In the movie Shutter Island (2010) Leonardo Dicaprio plays a character who has schizophrenia, and happened to kill his own wife. On the opposite …show more content…

It is especially crucial for our group members, as future nurses, to have a good understanding of mental health because we work so closely with our patients, and other members of our healthcare team. The Canadian Mental Health association - Mental Illnesses in the Workplace (n.d.) writes that because some symptoms of mental health diseases cause a person become more withdrawn, or act in a way that they usually don’t it could potentially put a strain on relationships between co-workers (para.5). Not only is it important to have a good understanding of mental illness in relation to our members of the health care setting, it is likely that we may be caring for patients with mental

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