research in mental illness

The Virgin Suicides

"Coppola creates a cold, dark, and often haunting movie, with subtle unsentimental music and dream like sequences."

"There are isolated moments of emotion and off-beat humor, but still a story that is amiss, much like the Lisbon sisters."

"The Virgin Suicides studies mental illness and seemingly irrational actions from the point of view of those unable to understand it. The Lisbon sisters are in fact a maystery and they remain that way to the end credits. So I was unsure of what The Virgin Suicides was trying to say, and have concluded that it didn't really know what to say, or didn't have anything to say at all except "look at me, I'm kind of odd and pretty.""

Laura Kyle http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=3859&reviewer=369


Silver Linings Playbook

The problem is this: when Tiffany and Pat Sr. make a bet, the movie veers straight into the Hollywood formula promised in the trailer. Glossing over the irreparable damage that the characters, especially Tiffany and the Pats, continue to do to themselves and to others, the movie delivers a happy, crowd-pleasing ending that we can see coming a mile away.

Yes, a rom-com is hardly ever done so well, and it’s really hard to deny how much more earned this one feels than the typical variant. Still, I felt cheated. And it’s not that I think a movie with a happy ending can’t be good. Instead, hadn’t the movie just shown us that idealized romantic love isn’t the only story there for telling? That idealized romantic love probably isn’t so ideal?

I wanted to be told about the imperfect happiness of a sought-after silver lining, not some sort of totality of silver linings.

Latina Vidoldova http://tsl.pomona.edu/articles/2012/11/30/lifeandstyle/3408-movie-column-a-rom-coms-portrayal-of-mental-illness



General films

The history of mentally-ill characters on screen is characterised by stereotypes, the dominant ones being the comic “loony” (see, for example, Jim Carrey in Me, Myself & Irene and The Cable Guy), the idiot savant (Dustin Hoffmann in Rain Man; Peter Sellers in Being There) and the psycho killer, with Psycho’s Norman Bates (played by Anthony Perkins) providing the template for countless horror villains ever since (eg. Halloween; The Silence of the Lambs). These stock characters invite fear, laughter, pity, sometimes sympathy – but empathy is rarely felt.


http://theconversation.com/mental-illness-on-screen-a-new-world-of-hopes-and-aspirations-22304