Close Monster Psychological Disorder Essay

Abstract

It is common that films include characters that suffer from psychological disorders, whether it be the main plot point of the film or hardly mentioned at all. While PTSD has been acknowledged as a serious mental health issue for decades, media portrayals of PTSD have drawn more attention in recent years. This essay seeks to explore the psychological disorder known as PTSD as well as its symptoms, prevalence, and recommended treatments while observing it in the context of the film Closet Monster and its connection to queer individuals. The film Closet Monster does a fantastic job at depicting the psychological disorder through its main character Oscar, a queer teenager attempting to discover himself and overcome his traumatic past which

Additionally, they can be classified into four categories: intrusion, avoidance, changes in cognition and mood, and changes in arousal and reactivity. Symptoms that fall into the intrusion category deal with reoccurring thoughts, memories, dreams, and flashbacks of the event. These visions can feel so realistic that the person might feel like they are reliving the experience. The avoidance category contains symptoms such as avoiding reminders of the traumatic event such as people, places, and objects, avoiding remembering or thinking about the event, and not talking about what occurred or how they feel. Furthermore, PTSD causes alterations in cognition and mood which affect the person’s ability to remember important parts of the event and distorts beliefs themself or others. They may also experience negative emotions and feel distant from others or events. Irritability and anger, acting irrationally or destructively towards oneself, feeling paranoid, and having problems concentrating or sleeping are all symptoms of changes in arousal and reactivity (American Psychiatric Association,

In fact, every year, three-point-five percent of adult Americans suffer from PTSD. For adolescents aged thirteen to eighteen, the lifetime prevalence of PTSD is eight percent. Moreover, approximately one in eleven people will receive a PTSD diagnosis during their lifetime. PTSD is twice as common in women as it is in men. In comparison to non-Latino whites, PTSD rates are higher among three ethnic groups: U.S. Latinos, African Americans, and Indigenous people (2020). Regarding queer people, due to their range of stressors, they are more likely to develop PTSD in their lifetime, with prevalence estimates up to forty-eight percent of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people while forty-two percent of transgender and nonbinary individuals meet the criteria for the disorder (Valentine et al.,