With Dan unaware of his actions, and constantly facing mild dissociative disorder, a police officer was assigned to follow his every step. The last section of the novel, Asylum by Madeleine Roux, included many obstacles the protagonist had to face. Dan Crawford, began the novel by spending his summer in the New Hampshire Prep program, as he began to uncover secrets hiding in the dorms he uncovered secrets about his past. With residing at Brookline, a shutdown mental hospital, many spin tingling secrets began to rise. Since Dan is a foster child and his biological parents decide to hide, much of his history has been covered.
Imagine any dystopian novel you have read recently. The plagued life they live, the crumbling government, and the aspiring heroine who attempts to make change to their world. “American Psychosis” is an article where the author, Chris Hedges examines the problems he sees in our society. He believes that our civilization is plagued by social media and criticizes American culture saying that everyone is the same. He pulls us in by talking about something we can all relate to, which in this case is the celebrities we see on TV.
Psychosis is a strange phenomenon as most who have it don’t realize they do. Often times, psychosis can be cured with therapy, but otherwise, it requires medication. Rog Phillips, in his story “The Yellow Pill”, addresses both these methods of curing delusions in an individual with psychosis, but the reality is, only one man needs therapy as the true setting is on Earth. At the beginning of the story, Jerry Bochek, a man who shot and killed six people and wounded two others, was brought into Dr.Elton’s office by four police officers and was wearing a straight jacket. Jerry was waiting in the reception room and the narrator states that Jerry, “was smiling, relaxed, and idly watching Helena''(Phillips).
Each conceals their actions and desires from the outside world, and occasionally even themselves. The theme of internalized darkness is prevalent in all characters within the film, and is a vital contributor to the development of the plot. An early example of internal darkness present in the film is found in the scene “Marion Drives Away.” In this scene, Marion is running away from her hometown of Phoenix, Arizona with 40,000 dollars she has stolen from her position at the bank.
The transport of Jews from ghettos to concentration camps during the Holocaust traumatized each victim on a personal level. Elie Wiesel’s autobiography, Night, perfectly captures the chaos of these events in the excerpt: The fire! The furnace! Look, over there!
In Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945), Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson), a cashier and amateur painter, receives a watch from his employer in honor of his twenty-five years of work. After leaving the party, Christopher witnesses as Kitty (Joan Bennet) being attacked, Christopher stuns the attacker – who is actually Kitty’s boyfriend, Johnny (Dan Duryea) - and once he helps Kitty up, he falls instantly in love with her. Christopher accompanies Kitty all the way to her apartment. Outside of Kitty’s apartment, Christopher offers Kitty a cup of coffee and Kitty accepts. As they begin to talk about themselves, Christopher pulls out the watch that his employer gave him and mentions that he is a painter; Kitty begins to think that Christopher
Matthew Arner offers a glimpse into his life as an individual living with a psychiatric disorder in the first person account, A Psychotic Experience. Arner discusses symptoms he experiences that affect his everyday life. He mentions symptoms such as lack of appetite, insomnia, delusions, and suicidal ideations. As the symptoms of his disorder are debilitating, Matthew describes challenges he faces and experiences he unfortunately misses out on as a result of his disorder. He recounts a morning in which he could not go surfing with his brother as they planned because of his poor sleep cycle, a consequence of his insomnia.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, considers the qualities in which society determines sanity. The label of insanity is given when someone is different from the perceived norm. Conversely, a person is perceived as sane when their behavior is consistent with the beliefs of the majority. Although the characters of this novel are patients of a mental institution, they all show qualities of sanity. The book is narrated by Chief Brodmen, an observant chronic psychiatric patient, who many believe to be deaf and dumb.
This dialogue directly shows how the narrator, with a mental illness that confines her logic, imagined many women “creeping” around her private front
The main character, Charlie, has suffered from schizophrenia since the story began, hurting his self-confidence when beginning high school. The first time his condition is emphasized in recorded time is after he takes acid and has a trip. Once he is in the hospital and is discussing what he went through on this “trip” he says he has visions, immediately forcing his mother to become stressed and concerned for his health and well being. Once again, Charlie’s serious case came up after his friends left for college. He resorted to having visions of his aunt’s death, causing him to feel the need to kill himself.
Frightened by a mentally ill man in the nearby “yellow house,” the narrator turns this neighbor into a character, the Hairy Man, a figure that is “wooly-headed and bearded.” The narrator finds peace in her Dad’s assertion that the Hairy Man only comes at dark. The narrator’s unconditional trust and belief in her father’s words also displays her innocence. As a fifth-grader, she still takes what her cherished parents say to heart. She often interjects with the repeated words “my mother said’ or “my father said.”
Although The Starry Night has almost reached the same level of fame as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa in the last century, at the time of its creation, neither the artist nor other spectators deemed the piece particularly impressive. It is characteristic of Van Gogh’s most expressive period, when he was increasingly troubled by a mental illness that would lead to his suicide a year later. Many art historians have offered various interpretations of the piece and debated the extent to which it was influenced by the artists illness; some have suggested that the bold clashing of gold and blue reflect Van Gogh’s inner turmoil, while the authors of Janson’s History of Art believe it more accurately presents a “utopia he dreamed of… in harmony with universal
Depression. An endless struggle towards the surface of an ocean of self-doubt and worries. Mental illness is not always clear to see and can be expressed in many different ways. Vincent Van Gogh expressed this through his many paintings. It may not be apparent when first looking at Van Gogh’s paintings, but after a while, a pattern can be seen or inferred.
Psycho (1960) Alfred Hitchcocks powerful and complex psychological thriller, horror film “Psycho” (1960) was classes as the first sub genre of horror, the slasher. The film ushered in the era of slashes with graphic content of blood-letting and shocking killings of the time. Although this was Hitchcock’s first horror film, he was labelled as a horror film director ever since. The film contains disturbing themes of corruptibility, confused identities, voyeurism, human vulnerabilities and victimisation. These themes symbolise the effects of money, oedipal murder and the dark histories.
Ken Kesey uses his novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, to describe the lives of patients in a mental institution, and their struggle to overcome the oppressive authority under which they are living. Told from the point of view of a supposedly mute schizophrenic, the novel also shines a light on the many disorders present in the patients, as well as how their illnesses affect their lives during a time when little known about these disorders, and when patients living with these illnesses were seen as an extreme threat. Chief Bromden, the narrator of the novel, has many mental illnesses, but he learns to accept himself and embrace his differences. Through the heroism introduced through Randle McMurphy, Chief becomes confident in himself, and is ultimately able to escape from the toxic environment Nurse Ratched has created on the ward. Chief has many disorders including schizophrenia, paranoia, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder, and, in addition to these illnesses, he pretends to be deaf and dumb.
