2023-05-03 09:58:46
By Emilio Tejera (CSIC)*
Shakespeare released in The Tempest that mythical phrase of “we are made of the same material with which dreams are woven”. But, for a century now, “dreams” have been made above all from celluloid, light, sound and, lately, digital media. Cinema is always a reflection of reality and its time and, as such, references to our brain and mental illnesses could not be missing.
At first, timidly. It is difficult to establish which was the first film that dealt with mental illness: in 1908 there is an adaptation of The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a work where Stevenson wanted to reflect the duality of the human being, but which has always been seen as a metaphor for the so-called multiple personality disorders (better called “dissociative identity disorder”). However, it was in 1914 when he appeared The woman of misteryprobably the oldest film that deals specifically with this pathologyand one of the first to use mental illness as the main argument.
Still from the silent film The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, directed by Robert Wiene in 1920
However, It will be in the fifties or sixties when mental disorders begin to be exposed with all their drama, and we enter the consultations of psychiatrists and psychologists, sometimes with diagnoses, pathologies or treatment methods that are not part of the usual clinic. On tapes like Suddenly Last Summer, Remember, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Three Faces of Eve, Psycho o the odd couple characters with mental disorders appear. In general, these stories reflect very well the perspective of the time, where patients are observed from the outside, sometimes with a halo of condescension, and the figure of the doctor occupies a central role.
a change of direction
Gradually, the focus shifts towards the person suffering from the problem: if Some one flies over the cuco’s nidus pointed out the criticism of psychiatric centers (partly with a point of injustice), modern fictions try to put themselves in the shoes of the patients and indeed the recent series Easy stresses the importance of autonomy and that affected people —well treated and advised— are free to decide, as far as possible, about their fate. Throughout this time, certain fictions (Rainman with autism spectrum disorders; An amazing mind with schizophrenia; Memento with anterograde amnesia; El indomable Will Hunting with high intellectual capacities) have made certain ailments and conditions fashionable that have begun to abound profusely in the cinema, and have even influenced the way these disorders are presented and, of course, our way of treating those who suffer from them. suffer.
Movies and series have not always been rigorous when treating mental problems: many times diseases are misrepresented or mixed, the causes are simplified, the diagnoses are made with a simple glance, the treatments last days (instead of years) and the patients are cured spontaneously, sometimes, by a blow to the head or by a voluntary impulse, phenomena that for Of course they don’t happen very often. Also the association between mental illness and violence towards other people has been exaggeratedwhen the most common thing is that patients attempt against themselves.
Sometimes we ask too much of the cinema: the film Adam it reflected Asperger’s syndrome so well that it was criticized that the protagonist was an excessively “archetypal” patient; instead, the character of Jack Nicholson in better impossible he was reproached for displaying an unpleasant character, which does not have to be associated with patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
al final, it is difficult for a single film to completely sum up a mental disorder, just as a single patient cannot represent an entire group. Each person is unique, with their particularities and experiences, something that recent works of fiction are already beginning to reflect, where mental illness is a normal event that can be cured or with which one sometimes lives, which can happen to anyone and for which you can always ask for help from professionals. And that, often, has its origin not so much in those who suffer it as in the environment with which we have had to deal.
Carrie (1976) has the power of telekinesis, but many of her problems stem from anxiety caused by bullying from her classmates.
Lately, in society the importance of mental health has been highlighted a lot, and with good reason: hopefully this will serve to make more and more media available (including the still-in-development filmotherapy, which uses cinema to help patients). After all, as they say, the health of a society is defined by how it treats its patients. And it is to our advantage that this film, more than any other, ends well.
* Emilio Tejera he is a doctor and biochemist; he works as head of the Molecular Biology Unit and as a member of the Scientific Culture area of the Cajal Institute (CSIC). An expansion of this article in talk format can be found here.
#cinema #treated #brain #mental #illness