Customer Reviews

Movies And Mental Illness: Using Films To Understand Psychopathology

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

You may think Movies and Mental Illness is a book intended strictly for the mental health professionals and/or educators. Although I do not fall in either of these categories, I was enlightened by the wealth of knowledge offered by this book.

I felt the authors did a remarkable job educating us on mental disorders, the misconceptions associated with them, and the powerful effect film has on public perception of those with mental disorders.

Each chapter discusses a psychological disorder and includes several well-known films that portray each one. The authors showed us a fabricated case history of a lead character in the film with a particular disorder. Also included is the patient's psychological history, behavioral observations, diagnosis, treatment plan, and the prognosis. I found the tables and charts that were included throughout the book to be very helpful and user-friendly.

This book is a useful resource for everyone.

A really fine layman's guide to several prominent mental illnesses where specific films accurately portray manifestations of and reactions to those illnesses. It is now much more enjoyable to watch those films again with a better understanding of what the characters are attempting to portray. Highly recommended to any movie viewer who would like to know more about specific mental illnesses, but aren't able to attend psychiatric Grand Rounds as a physician.

A good book covering a host of movies across time. Apart from one movie at the beginning of each chapter for a disorder category, not much diagnosis detail. Written by sound researchers in psychotherapy

I liked this book a lot, it helps you understand the psychopathology easily with the film examples.

It contains a list of a lot of movies that can teach you about the mental problems.

When I learned that I needed this book for an intersession class I was taking, I was looking forward to reading it. Within the first few days I had the book, I found multiple typos and grammatical errors throughout the text. As I continued reading I discovered that it seems the writers of this book have not actually viewed many of the movies they discuss. I'll give a few examples. They say that Donnie Darko is about a college student (what??) when most of the movie takes place in his high school, Requiem for a Dream is a movie about "uppers" (they conveniently forget to mention heroin, which 3 of the 4 characters in the movie are severely addicted to), and they seem to think that Pulp Fiction is an excellent depiction of heroin abuse (again, what??). On page 82, when discussing the film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the writers comment that the movie "glorifies drug use," but on page 214 they say "Although the movie does not glorify drug use, it clearly models the behavior." Really?

There is no index in the back, so if you're searching for a particular movie you must look through almost 100 pages of films in the back, supposedly organized by disorder. They do not get into the actual disorders in detail.

Every day that I use this book I find more things in it that are completely absurd and INCORRECT, which makes me want to throw this text across the room. I don't think I've ever written a bad review of any book before, but this one is seriously flawed. It could have been an excellent tool if it were written by people who knew at all what they are attempting to talk about. I seriously hope the next edition is better than this.