Shutter Island Mental Illness

1033 Words3 Pages

The idea of how an antagonist's negative historical experiences instigate mental illness and mental instability is expressed effectively in both films. Through the analysis of both Ghajini and Shutter Island, it is perspicuous that an individual is altered significantly by their experiences and circumstances. An individual's trauma, negative experiences, memories are all aspects which consolidate to manipulate their perception of reality, their psychological thought process, and their mental stability. Consequently, when a person experiences a severe traumatic experience, their mind becomes vulnerable and is engulfed with an excruciating trauma that the individual isn't able to cope with. Accordingly, this establishes mental illness within …show more content…

Both individuals encounter a loss in their family which proves to be excessively traumatic for them that they are consumed by guilt, anger, and grief as they couldn't do anything to prevent the incident and ultimately they developed mental instability. Witnessing the lifeless corpses of their beloved family members, established post-traumatic stress disorder within both individuals which manipulated them to become vulnerable, disassociated from reality and affected their emotional state of mind to the extent of which they could not feel joy, hope or serenity. It is interesting that although Sanjay went through a moderately similar experience, he did not disassociate himself from the actual experience of Kalpana’s death but instead disassociated himself from reality to visualize the experience to guide him to find her killers, as he had accepted what had happened to him. Whereas Teddy disassociated himself from the memory of the event in order to avoid the experience altogether as he couldn’t bear the agonizing truth which distorted his perception of …show more content…

Hannibal Lecter, Zoom, Sanjay and Teddy are all Individuals who have witnessed and encountered the loss of their family, this negative experience ultimately altered their perception of the world, reality, their psychological behaviour and consequently their future. Essentially, it is the integration of a character's jovial memories with their dismal memories which maintains the stability of good and bad within an individual. Accordingly, the desolate experience of witnessing the loss of family manipulated Zoom and Hannibal Lecter diversely in comparison to Sanjay and Teddy. The universal aspect between Zoom and Hannibal Lecter was that they have only suffered negative experiences, atrocious memories and discouraging circumstances within their life which caused an instability between good and bad which ultimately inspired them to percept life diabolically and think from a dark psychological cerebration. Whereas the same experience distorted the mental stability of Sanjay and Teddy, both characters have experienced a combination of exuberant and discouraging experiences and therefore, they possess a stability of good and bad within their life. Consequently, the experience didn’t corrupt their morality or make them evil, however, the traumatic experience devastated them significantly, establishing

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