Johannah is a 34-year-old female. Born in the Netherlands, she married an American and came to this country when she was 25 years old. About a year later, Johannah began a series of admissions to psychiatric facilities. She was diagnosed with major depression and later with schizoaffective disorder. About a month ago, Johannah stopped keeping outpatient appointments, stopped taking her medications, stopped bathing, and stopped eating, but was sleeping all the time. Johannes mood symptoms suddenly became less noticeable, and she began wandering her yard after dark, saying the neighbors were in trees. Johannah began to carry a gun to protect itself against the neighbors, who she thought were out to kill her. When she started to fire the gun into the trees, her husband got a court order to have Johannah committed for treatment.…
In the nostalgic memoir, “Girl Interrupted,” Kaysen’s imagery helps her share her experience with having to spend nearly two years in a mental hospital after being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. The patients of Mclean Hospital spent their days in empty rooms, and some were even lucky enough to have the ability to look out of “ tiny, high, chicken-wire-enforced, security-screened, barred windows.” Some people glorify mental illnesses or mental hospitals, but they do not realize the horror behind having to suffer from an illness. Living in a mental hospital is like living in prison since patients cannot escape until they are given permission by a doctor. In addition, mental hospitals contain “little bare rooms with…
One of the themes shown in Cosi is insanity. While the patients were viewed as crazy…
The definition of abnormality is crucial to establish whether someone is diagnosed as mentally ill, and the treatment that the patient receives is primarily based on the diagnosis. To determine if someone bizarre behavior is an indicator of a psychological disorder, mental health professionals may use specific criteria such as context and persistence of the behavior, subjective distress, effect on functioning, to name a few.…
How many people do you know that aren’t a little weird? None. Every single person on this planet has weird quirks. And some people are just plain fucked up. Two great examples of these traits are the people in the two stories I read. First, is Rose from Silver Water, she’s the one that I am going to describe as fucked up. In other words, she is clinically insane. The second is First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. He’s saner than Rose, but he’s strange. All in all, I would characterize both characters as dysfunctional. Like I said, everyone has at least a little dysfunction in their lives, as do Rose and Jimmy Cross. Having some dysfunction is normal and is a part of everyday life whether we like it or not. Dysfunction is a large part in Silver Water by Amy Bloom as it describes how Rose’s illness affects those around her, especially her family. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is also focused on dysfunction because in my opinion, serving in a combat position in the army can cause a person to be screwed up. In this essay, I will describe the similarities and differences in Rose and Jimmy Cross’s dysfunction.…
David Rosenhan is known for the classic, yet controversial study “On Being Sane in Insane Places” of progress within the mental health field. Rosenhan’s study (1973) of eight people with no previous history of mental illness were admitted at various mental hospitals in America and complained of individual symptoms (auditory illusions, e.g., ‘thud’). He investigated whether psychiatrists could distinguish between those genuinely mentally ill and not. Each pseudopatient behaved normally, and symptoms were not re-reported. However, the average length of hospitalisation was 19 days. This shows context has a powerful role in determining how behaviour is labelled. This led to question the truth in psychiatric diagnoses. The predominant issue was unauthorised diagnoses and needless treatments for a fictional mental illness tolerably accepted. Today, it is the difficulty in gaining treatment for real symptoms of mental disorders.…
The Unangan people mainly engaged in cod fishing in the islands of Alaska. Fishing formed their main economic activity which they enjoyed with no disruptions until the invasion of the Russian missionaries who contributed to the killing of most of them before handing them over to the Americans through the selling of Alaska to the American administration (Sutton, 2011). The Unungan people believed in order and their political; orientation allowed for respect to family headmen from whom the headmen from the most powerful family headed a village. The administrative order of villages was highly embraced and even during periods of migration in the summer, nobody was allowed to breach the village territorial boundaries (Sutton,…
“I’m crazy!” Joan Crawford first says this in a scene where she is arguing with Greg Savitt about how he supposedly put Mr. Mayor above Joan. She yells at him for being a lousy gentleman to her and insults him and his career. Greg then goes up to her and beings to shake her and asks if she is crazy, pleading for her to tell him she is crazy. This scene gives an example of one of Joan’s psychological disorders, borderline disorder, because of her instability in moods that takes place in the movie Mommie Dearest. Joan Crawford is not just a Hollywood actress and a mother; she is also a mentally ill woman who possesses multiple personality disorders that include, obsessive-compulsive disorder, borderline, narcissism, and bipolar disorder.…
The movie Girl Interrupted gives a glimpse into the world of the psychiatric hospitals and their patients in the late 1960’s. Each of the characters exhibit symptoms of various psychological problems, while still being personable enough to allow viewers to sympathise with them. At some point in our lives, each of us feels as if we are on the outside of society like Susannah, or tries to manipulate others like Lisa. We do not, however, carry it to the extremes that they do. We are able to maintain control over our lives, and live in relative peace and harmony with those around us. One example from the movie of someone trying too hard to control the things around her is Daisy Randone’s obsessive compulsive disorder. Some examples of this behavior are; her obsession with chicken, her refusal to allow anyone into her room, her addiction to laxatives, and her eventual suicide. Some of the other residents talked about the fact that Daisy always checked in for a short stay around the holidays, and always had a private room. They also suspected that Daisy might be the victim of incest as well.…
According to Elyn Saks' autobiography, she was born in Miami during the 1950's. She grew up in a happy family where she had very loving middle-class parents and two younger brothers (Saks, 2007). Because she was the oldest child, Elyn wanted to excel at everything, be the perfect model for her brothers, and make parents proud. She started having OCD tendencies when she was eight years old, which later developed into paranoia. As her obsession got worse, she started having recurring delusions of a man standing outside her house waiting to kill her and her family. Aside from OCD and paranoia, she also struggled with anorexia - a eating disorder - and lost a lot of weight. During high school, she experimented with low-level recreational drugs and her parents reacted by admitting her to a rehabilitation center. She became quite withdrawn at school and kept to herself mostly. Once, she read a book where the main character was mentally ill and she related to it in such a way that caused her to have a schizophrenic breakdown. She was 16 years old at the time (Saks, 2007).…
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a complex and dramatic mood disorder identified by a large range of negative behaviors. BPD is formally identified as a “Cluster B” personality disorder presenting with dramatic, highly emotional, or erratic behavior. (Article: Personality Disorders) Common features include attention seeking, manipulation, strong anger, loneliness, unstable relationship patterns, poor self-image, emotional extremes, and impulsivity. There are also often severe abandonment issues, fears of rejection, instances of self-mutilation, and suicidal behaviors. (4.4.13) There is not a decided cause for BPD, though there are many theories. Many health care professionals settle on a mix of many factors and conditions, calling it a biopsychosocial model of causation- meaning that, genetics, psychological predisposition, and ways that a person interacts with their social surroundings as a child can contribute to this disorder. (Article: Borderline personality Disorder) In the film “Fatal Attraction”, Alex Forrest is the poster child of BPD, she hits every neurotic note and screams a chorus of psychotic symptoms. When the viewer first encounters this soft-spoken, gentle-looking woman one may assume that she would be the victim in the film. The viewer is soon set straight about Alex’s intentions with the married-father, Dan Gallagher. After a mutually enjoyed one night stand, Alex calls Dan’s house although she was not given the phone number. She insists on seeing him again and this time when he tries to leave she has a huge outburst of emotion, screaming, slapping Dan and ripping his shirt. Moments later she is reasoning with him to stay, begging him to hear her out, but when he comforts her he discovers that she has cut both of her wrists. This is an example of attention seeking, self-mutilation brought on by a shift between idealizing Dan in one moment and devaluing him the…
Shawn Stevens has coordinated several ongoing research projects that will strongly help establish QOL, prospective studies, protocol outcomes, and randomized trials in the future. The CI team, along with the student audiologists, have been involved with submitting several abstracts, and manuscripts with the attempts to have more published literature and/or outcomes…
There are several mental disorders depicted in Girl, Interrupted. Susanna has borderline personality disorder. This was portrayed very well, considering the clinical description of the disorder. She feels that time can go backward and forward, she frequently has flashbacks, is generally pessimistic, tends toward the company of men,…
clinically insane. Another reason is that sometimes the individual did not know what he did was…
Psychological disturbance will certainly touch us, to some extent, at a certain point in our lives. Just as medical students may develop the notion that they may have the physical diseases that they have just learned to diagnose, students in abnormal psychology might see in themselves the symptoms of abnormal behavior. There may be two reasons behind such thinking. First, as you study the causes of mental disorders, you will probably find at least some of them in your own family background. Most people, when asked to search their past for experiences that could have led to some form of a psychological collapse, would perhaps not find it difficult to do. Second, you yourself have probably experienced to some degree a number of these symptoms that you will be reading about, just as everybody or most of us have. Hardly do we encounter an individual who has never become anxious or depressed, not felt physically ill or irritated when experiencing conflict, or not become so frustrated and angry when the whole world seems to be against him. While all of us may have had the same experiences and symptoms as do persons diagnosed to be abnormal, most of us have been able to go through life’s challenges without suffering from an actual breakdown in our psychological functions. The enormous task of identifying that breaking point will definitely be difficult, if not virtually impossible, but is certainly one of the most challenging tasks in the whole realm of the field of psychology.…