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Schizophrenia In Movies

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Schizophrenia is universally understood to be a mental illness that’s chronic, debilitating, and seems psychotic. By definition, schizophrenia is a mental illness that involves a breakdown between thought and behavior with faulty perception, action, delusion, and mental defragmentation. Symptoms can include hallucinations, delusions, with lack of pleasure in everyday life and often social isolation. Contrary to popular belief, schizophrenia is not the same thing as multiple, or split, personality disorder, where a person’s identity is split into fragmented, distinct personality states. Because of this very popular false belief, people with schizophrenia are often misunderstood, socially isolated, called crazy, and are incorrectly portrayed …show more content…
In movies, schizophrenics are often painted to be violent, alcoholics, non-curable, and strapped to beds in a mental hospital with screaming voices driving them to be unrestrainable. Some movies though, portray schizophrenics positively, but still incorrectly. Because of movies like the first two listed, schizophrenics end up being absolute geniuses, such as ending up at Harvard despite the odds of having a mental disorder that debilitates the mind, sometimes to an extreme extent. These assumptions might be harmless, just viewing a group of people a certain way because of how movies portray them. But, many normal people living with the disorder feel shame, isolation, and have trouble owning up to their reality. A writer on Psychology Today explains her experience with reactions she gets from admitting that she’s schizophrenic-when she can bring herself to. She expressed her concern that someone will view her differently, hurt her, or even report her to the police. People who don’t believe her claim that it can’t be true, because she seems so …show more content…
He’d be in an all-white room with special medication, heavy monitoring, and it seemed like absolute torture. But, the average schizophrenic goes through a very different exam and treatment. A suspected schizophrenic will go through psychiatric evaluation to see if they meet diagnostic criteria for the disorder in the (DSM-5) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association. The condition is lifelong, with hospitalization sometimes needed, but not always. Medication and psychosocial treatment is common, will full-team approach sometimes needed in clinics for some cases. Medications for schizophrenia vary, but control symptoms by affecting dopamine levels, with the main medication being antipsychotic, with some being antidepressants or anti-anxiety drugs. This, to me, is very different from my original assumption of schizophrenia treatment. It’s actually very similar to many mental disorders, with therapy and medication helping to alleviate symptoms, with hospitalization sometimes necessary for more severe

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