What Is Shutter Island Mental Illness

Throughout the years' people have struggled to understand how to engage with people with the psychological disorder. To this day there are many misperceptions about the mentally ill and not a lot of people are educated on how to handle a certain situation when they come across a person with a disorder. For someone to be diagnosed and have those symptoms to be classified as a disorder, those deviant behaviors need to cause that person or others around them in distress. Distress is basically a subjective feeling that something is really wrong. This feeling of distress that can lead to harmful dysfunction. When a person becomes dysfunction that person’s ability to work and live will be clearly impaired. In the film Shutter Island, we encounter
several examples of people that have been diagnosed with different disorders. The setting of the movie takes place in Boston in 1954, then later shows the main character Marshall Edward “Teddy” Daniels being taken to Shutter Island.
The doctors inform him that he was brought to the Ashecliffe Mental Institution on a mission to find the whereabouts of a recently disappeared patient named Rachel Solando. The main psychiatrist, Dr. John Cawley refuses to turn over records to Teddy and his partner Chuck. The two guys later discover that Solando's doctor, Dr. Sheehan had left the island on vacation right after the patient had disappeared. In the beginning, it shows how Teddy believes his wife (Dolores) had died in a fire in their apartment.
Teddy starts to have migraine headaches from the hospital's atmosphere and experiences waking visions of his involvement in the Dachau liberation reprisals. This vivid visions are an example of Teddy’s post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Teddy than tells his partner Chuck about Andrew Laeddis, which in his head was the maintenance guy at his apartment where his wife died during the fire. Teddy claims Laeddis burn the apartments and killed his wife. He believes Laeddis is in that asylum and that’s why he took on the mission of the missing patient. Teddy also says that Laeddis claimed he heard voices that told him to do it.
These are signs of Laeddis suffering of schizophrenia. Teddy then goes out in the storm looking for the missing patient in the cemetery shack. Teddy than alerts Chuck that he want to “blow the lid off” - expose the asylum. While in the cemetery Chuck tells Teddy, to think about what if the Doctors wanted him to there, what if they tricked him to get assign to be there. After that he questioned whether Rachel was real or not. After coming back inside from the storm, they were soaking wet so they were give staffing uniforms. He was also given some “pills” for his migraines. When falling asleep he has real like dreams in which he sees his wife turning into ash in their apartment. He also has flashbacks of him in the WWII shooting German guards. Teddy’s disturbing “dreams” of the WW2, seeing the prisoners talk to him and seeing the victims talking to him. He recalls seeing the little girl from WW2 who is dead when they get there to save the prisoners. And in his head the little girl asks him why didn't he save them. In this visions he also sees “Andrew Laeddis” who speaks to him briefly, then also has visions of seeing Rachel and his dead children. These flashbacks are reviving trauma When waking up he blames the migraines for the hallucinations. After the storm Teddy and Chuck make their way to the Ward C. The Ward C is where they contain the most dangerous patients who are extremely violent. In the Ward C they get attacked by a patient, Teddy then uses excessive force with him.
Teddy continues to explore the Ward C.
Here he finds an old colleague named George Noyce, whom teddy claimed throughout the movie was the one who told him about the asylum. George exposed the experiment to Teddy. George claims Teddy is, in fact, Andrew Laeddis. Teddy once again shows signs of having a delusional disorder because of his distressing recollections of the past, distressing dreams of events that he has built in his head. This leads him to feel as if he was reliving the events due to his dissociative flashback episodes. When heading to the cliff to the lighthouse, he went down to save his partner that he believes has fallen off the cliff. After reaching the bottom of the cliff he hallucinates encountering the missing patient “Rachel” in the cave. In which Rachel reveals to Teddy that she was a former psychiatrist after talking to her Teddy was convinced that the asylum has been drugging him through the migraine pills that he’s been taking and also with the new cigarettes Dr. Crawley has provided for him. She also revealed to Teddy about the surgeries that were done in the lighthouse. He becomes certain that that is what is causing him to experience disturbing dreams and horrible migraines. He feels as though everyone in the institution is purposely attempting to keep him as a patient. He experiences hyperarousal after this event. Hyperarousal causes the person to feel easily startled, and feeling tense and on
edge.
In the quest of finding out the truth, Teddy went to the lighthouse. He was disappointed when he didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. Dr. John Cawley was expecting him, where he confessed to Teddy that he is a patient to that hospital and he has been there for 2 years. The psychiatrist then tells Teddy that about his Delusional Disorder. He explains to him that he has created fictional characters by using anagrams from his name, and the names of his wife. Dr. Cawley informs Teddy that he is the one who murdered his wife after coming home and find his children drowned in the river. He then obviously refuses to believe this story. He can not believe he murdered his wife or that he even had any children. Dr. Crawley then persisted in trying to explain to Teddy that he had been trying a new type of therapy. This therapy was called role-play therapy, this was used in the attempt for Teddy to realize he is, in fact, Andrew Laeddis, the person he hates. Dolores was Bipolar and had many manic episodes. She can also be suffering from Borderline personality disorder because (BPD) because she was unable to handle anger and frustration, and had fear of abandonment and severe feelings of emptiness which is what drove her to kill her children. In the end, Teddy fakes a relapse and therefore he is taken to have a lobotomy to cure his disorder.
Since the context of this movie was set in the 1950s in which the psychological treatments was in its first stages. In Ward C in the movie Shutter Island, it is shown that patients were treated as prisoners being put into small cages with little to no resources. This is inaccurate because, in the 1950s, Wards looked more like a classroom full of beds, not prisons. Also throughout the movie patients are called “crazy” and as we all learn having a mental illness doesn’t mean a person is “crazy.” It only means they have an abnormal behavior that intervenes in their everyday normal lifestyle. Some of the more accurate aspects of the movie were the different treatments offered to their patients. Throughout the movie Dr. Cawley and Dr. Naehring experience conflict representing the differing beliefs of the humanistic and experimental psychologist of this time. This was the old and new ways of thought for this time period. The experimental treatments used in this movie where the electric therapy and the prefrontal lobotomy. The drug Thorazine also mentioned in the movie which was accurate since this drug was introduced in the 1950s.