Psychiatrist Breaks Down Mental Health Scenes From Movies & TV | GQ

you're serious aren't you you're telling us you killed those three young men on the subway and why should we believe you ain't got nothing left to lose not everybody does this it's extremely rare and in fact the joker unfortunately overplays the idea that mental illness and violence are linked hey gq i'm dr eric bender i'm a child adolescent adult and forensic psychiatrist and this is the breakdown first up bojack horseman okay trey and i will be in the coke room doing hand stuff otherwise you don't know anybody here hollyhawk has walked into this party and her friend is teasing her right away you don't know anyone that is the worst thing you could say to somebody who has what's called social anxiety disorder in social anxiety disorder people are terrified that when they go into a setting where they don't know people or even when they do know people that they're going to embarrass themselves that people are going to see that they're anxious they might get so upset they might even have some bodily pains like nausea or stomach pain and they want to avoid the situation as she looks around she starts to get more anxious you see her starting to hyperventilate she's starting to get short of breath they're all kinds of anxieties and they differ in very significant ways sometimes anxiety is really serious and we call things disorders if in fact the anxiety impairs people's functionings during the day or in these cases say if she does have social anxiety disorder she avoids socializing that's pretty important for development that's impairing part of her life in a part of her day if it's a certain situation people avoid that can be called a phobia like a fear of snakes fear of flying so there are specific situations that arise that cause people anxiety too oh what do you see what you're having an anxiety attack so look around the room and tell me what you see i i see people partying and passing out this guy has done a really good job here of using a therapy technique called grounding i have used this with patients when they get super anxious you can tell them to look around themselves and to tell themselves where they are i'm standing here i'm in a room it is tuesday what else do you see um books pizza boxes i see light fixtures i see an odd amount of four poofs that's a terrific technique he also calls it an anxiety attack that is another word people use to describe a panic attack she's clearly having a panic attack here he helps her with this grounding technique you feel any calmer yeah actually it's a trick my psychiatrist taught me i'm peter by the way so this party's kind of crowded you want to go get some air yeah if there are a lot of people around you blocking where you are and where you're breathing yeah absolutely get out of the room and get some fresh air you hear fresh air because a lot of people have trouble they're they're trying to breathe so you want to get them out to a place where they feel like they have more access to air so that can be more psychologically helpful too but i think sometimes it's even more all right let me get out of this crowded environment that's making me feel like i can't breathe the panic attack usually comes on sudden onset and they can tell they're having one they might say yeah i suspect if i go into that situation i'm gonna have a panic attack but when it happens it's just a super sudden onset for most people sometimes people with anxiety tend to drink more use substances more they want to feel relaxed alcohol can relax you to some degree however it can also on the rebound make people's moods feel worse or make anxiety worse so then you can run into bad cycles of people feeling good and then it wears off they take more and they take more so there's this feeling like you can help but in the long run it might be hurting more i can't believe that one of the best portrayals of anxiety and getting help comes from a cartoon about anthropomorphized animals but this is really great first off this guy's saying hey i go to a psychiatrist that's going to make hollyhock feel better he's saying try this it's helped me that's going to make her feel better so this is a really good portrayal next up joker you're serious aren't you you're telling us you killed those three young men on the subway and why should we believe you ain't got nothing left to lose so i think about a couple of things the first thing is psychopathy and psychopathy is not a mental illness it's not a diagnosis psychopathy is a collection of personality traits and that includes feeling no remorse it includes being callous uncaring the joker here is letting us know he's exactly that he has no remorse for killing these three people he also says he has nothing left to lose in a violence risk assessment in forensic psychiatry you look for things that are warning signs such as people who have been isolated and lonely people who have felt traumatized and persecuted and those who don't have any resilience factors factors inside that help them recover from traumatic events or external support and that's exactly arthur fleck that's the joker that can be what's called a pathway to violence not everybody does this it's extremely rare and in fact the joker unfortunately overplays the idea that mental illness and violence are linked it's important to know that we don't know why people get pushed over the edge and there are very very few so that's really important at the same time there are people who are repeatedly traumatized neglected abused and there's a rage that can develop inside them and i see that sometimes in psychotherapy when i'm talking to people who've been chronically abused or traumatized but again those people do not for the most part go out and commit any violent acts my life is nothing but a comedy let me get this straight you think that killing those guys is funny i do and i'm tired of pretending it's not there's a difference between psychopathy and psychosis psychosis is a break from reality people are hearing things seeing things it's called hallucinations those are psychotic issues the joker doesn't seem to have any of that in cases of psychopathy people use others in their lives to get what they want other people are pawns oh why is everybody so upset about these guys if it was me dying on the sidewalk you'd walk right over me we see his mood go back and forth from irritable to seemingly crying to almost laughing a little bit that can be called a couple different things one word is lability where you have such shifts but what explains it even more is probably a diagnosis of what's called pseudobulbar affect and what that means is there's a disconnection between the front of the brain the cortex and the back of the brain the cerebellum that connection actually helps us express our emotions when that's broken either because of trauma and we know arthur flack has a history of trauma to his head even that connection can get disrupted and what happens is there can be a sudden onset of crying or laughing even though the person might not even feel as if something's humorous or that they're sad it just starts what do you get i don't think so when you cross a mentally something that also shows that this is more of what's called psychopathy and not a psychosis a break from reality is that he's telling murray exactly what's going to happen this is what you get he knows clearly what he's doing that shows he's of a sound mind he does not have any psychotic issue at this time he's not hearing voices he's not seeing things he doesn't have delusions in fact his complaint about feeling discarded that is a common feeling among people who do try to seek help in the system for the traumas they've experienced psychopath you hear that word and you do think of a serial killer because a lot of the serial killers show psychopathy they don't care people are just pawns in their lives they're there for entertainment and i think in the joker's case you might look at him and say here's this dude dressed all and clown makeup there's got to be something wrong with him well he's actually trying to be noticed in some ways this guy's lacked attention for his entire life and he's been neglected he ends up getting pushed over the edge and again we don't know why that happens and he turns to violence there is a genetic component to mental illness and his mother did have severe depression it's also much more common that people realize one in five americans will have a mental health challenge within a year and in fact half of americans will have some mental health issue during their lifetime while the joker ends up portraying this link between violence and mental health issues that doesn't exist or it perpetuates that stereotype it does do a very good job of showing that resources can get pulled at any time at the end of the movie the social worker is explaining that nobody cares about people like him that in fact money goes away and that does happen a lot so clinics might be there and then they're relying on funding that suddenly gets pulled and that translates into less help for people who really do need it next up rain man sally gibbs dipped sally 461 00192 how did you know my phone number how'd you know that you said read the telephone book last night tip sally okay so this is something it's pretty rare it's called savant syndrome first off the idea of someone being able to read a phone book and memorize it and know phone numbers that is a pretty extraordinary ability right now they're supposedly maybe one in a million people living with savant syndrome that means there's a certain gift and it's usually in a few areas it could be an art in arithmetic or math it could be in music so here we see raymond is able to memorize phone numbers he has this savant syndrome he also has autism autism is a developmental disorder which means that as someone is developing they don't develop in the way most people in society would develop and in autism you look at two main areas you look at how somebody's developing and how they're communicating and that includes do they make eye contact and communicate with language do they actually seek out reciprocity or do they offer reciprocity meaning can they participate with someone in a conversation in a normal way or do they not point things out not try to draw attention to things in their world and not respond to people and you look and see how they respond to non-verbal cues non-verbal language people with autism can have some deficits in some of those areas another area you look at is the interests of people with autism where someone maybe just hones in on one thing and sticks with that and has an unusual attachment to that one thing or do they have a broad range of interests also you look to see if somebody has what's called stereotyped behaviors it's an attempt to really soothe oneself but it doesn't really fit we see a little bit of self-soothing here in rain man where raymond at first is rocking back and forth like this he's trying to calm himself down so these are things that i look for in autistic spectrum disorders it's also important to note autistic spectrum disorder or autism it's a wide spectrum just like if you say you're sick you might have a cold or you might be in the icu and need surgery if someone has autism they could be impaired severely and raymond is more towards that end or someone can be highly functioning and have what used to be called asperger's disorder where they don't really have the problem of never developing language which can happen in severe cases of autism they might develop language but there are these other quirks about them chris i don't have my toothpicks no you don't need toothpicks i don't want my toothpick you don't need toothpicks for anything pancakes keep sliding off you're gonna eat with a fork i don't have my maple syrup either i'm gonna be without my maple syrup and my toothpicks here we see what's called an adherence to a routine that doesn't make sense to most people but to someone with autism like raymond that routine really is important and you can see his brother just wants to get breakfast he just wants to eat but when there's a shift from that routine it can be very hard for someone with autism to deal with that in terms of why a lot of people believe it is a comfort it's a soothing thing and when he's pulled away from that he has some trouble definitely definitely not gonna not gonna have my my pancakes so tom cruise well he seems to be a jerky guy in the movie in some ways he's responding to raymond at least in this scene the same way most people would feel frustrated i see this with families sometimes with children with autism for instance or even adults they just want to eat breakfast they don't want to go through this routine of like putting things out in a certain way so a lot of times families will say to me do we do this do we just go with these routines or what there is a method of teaching people with autism to discover and to work on behaviors that are not adherent to their routine applied behavioral analysis is the technique and you are really positively reinforcing behaviors that help someone deal with shifts in their routine you reward that and that teaches them that they can actually do something outside of their routine they want there are times when you do feel forced to go along with this adherence to routine but there are ways to change that a2 82 a2 it's a lot more nade two to three plus 246 total change what also is seen here is more of this savant syndrome about half the people with savant syndrome have autism the other half have other abnormalities in their brain development in fact the person kim peak whom supposedly raymond babbitt was based on he actually had a different type of issue with his brain not related to autism but again savant syndrome is very rare rayman does a wonderful job of bringing to the screen a topic that was not talked about at all this was great it started a conversation the challenge here is that rayman ends up making people think that if you have autism you have some superpower and that's not the case next up the undoing the defendant's mother told you that jonathan suffered neither guilt nor grief in reaction to his four-year-old sister's death they were certain once the shock wore off the suffering would begin but it didn't it never came there's a difference in my mind between suffering and remorse not being able to suffer to me doesn't suggest that someone doesn't care some people really push away those feelings they don't let themselves feel sad about it just because somebody doesn't grieve the way we would expect doesn't make them a psychopath but the lack of remorse seen again and again and again and again that could make somebody a psychopath if i'm looking at a lack of remorse i'm looking for other qualities about somebody too a collection of personality traits to say they're psychopathic so that might mean somebody lies consistently about their background and who they are where they are what they're doing somebody is very glib able to feign interest in things i don't look for just no grief and no remorse i'm looking for this collection of things together you told your friend sylvia steinitz that you believed your husband suffered from narcissistic personality disorder wasn't a professional diagnosis but your opinion narcissistic personality disorder is another type of personality disorder a narcissist they do have a sense of grandiosity a sense of self-importance there might be fantasies about unlimited power beauty money things like that there are a number of other ways someone can be a narcissist but there's a term called malignant narcissism which is used to describe people who do have the narcissistic personality disorder that include this lack of empathy that include using people in exploitative ways in fact when we look at serial killers sometimes we say that serial killers have malignant narcissism that there's this lack of empathy and again these are psychopathic traits as well psychopathy is really interesting because even in populations that are very genetically isolated you might get a psychopath popping up just they're born that way that's the idea that innately there's just this callous uncaring nature to them the old way of looking at psychopathy they had what were called factor one traits there were traits about your personality and they had factor two traits that was the criminal behavior so there's different layers of criminal behavior and doesn't have to be murder some people think that there's white-collar psychopaths so to speak where in companies people are doing things that are kind of dodgy not exactly following the rules and maybe those are psychopaths too there was a book a couple years ago exploring how many ceos might have psychopathic traits perhaps there's something about power perhaps in order to get to that level you have to not care about other people you have to demand a certain level of treatment and respect and that's what narcissists do so there are all these different factors of narcissism but like i said it doesn't mean they all lack empathy however perhaps there's some degree of that in certain people that do make it into those positions doctor in your practice do you not tell patients that sometimes they so want to believe in their partners that they they choose to unknow things and see things there are cases of serial killers where their partners had no idea that they were out there killing hundreds of people that's pretty common that people don't know about that side of their partner i think as a psychologist or as a psychiatrist you might actually try to hone in more on people's personalities but you know separate business and pleasure so maybe there was a lack of ability for her to see that it wouldn't surprise me next up as good as it gets i think what this character is certainly trying to depict is something called obsessive-compulsive disorder or ocd now obsessive-compulsive disorder means that an individual has obsessions or intrusive thoughts that don't feel right to them they feel what's called ego dystonic it doesn't mesh with how they actually think or believe or feel but something so powerful about them that they obsess over them and then what we saw here is what's called compulsive behavior the compulsions are the behaviors you do to get rid of that anxiety over the obsessions it's a pretty extreme example jack nicholson's character has the obsessions over being dirty and the obsessions over numbers and the obsessions over this i mean that's a pretty extreme example but that's what hollywood does to try to depict these things what's not seen is just how powerful the obsession itself can be you kind of glean that from the fact that he's doing all these things that that obsession about being dirty is so upsetting to him but that part's left out it can be an extremely uncomfortable feeling not to participate in the compulsive behavior his anxiety level might be sky high and that's why he's doing this to avoid that feeling so he's driven to do it to get rid of that severe severe anxiety there are ways to treat this there's cognitive behavioral therapy it's a way of challenging your thoughts the cognitive part even more specifically is something called exposure response prevention you expose yourself to the thing that makes you so anxious so if it's that he's going to be dirty you might have him touch something that's dirty and then wait not wash his hands immediately and the idea is with repeated exposures he could actually have his anxiety level go down over time we don't know why it happens it does just come in and start and you really do need to treat it with exposure and response prevention and also some medications people can actually have rituals or routines that they do that seem very obsessive but never really get diagnosed so for instance if you're always worried about the door being locked and say you live with somebody who doesn't always keep it locked and you go back and check that serves a functional purpose that means there's a reason you do that making sure you're safe but at the same time for some people there might be an element of an obsession about that a fear that somebody's going to break in a fear that the door is not locked so you can have ocd symptoms and not get diagnosed hi help if you want to see me you will not do this you'll make an appointment so here we do start to see just how upset jack nicholson's character is with these anxieties and these obsessions these compulsions that he has if someone has ocd they're not necessarily going to be a jerk and act this way the psychiatrist responds well by putting limits on things and boundaries we're not going to do this now if you want an appointment make an appointment i think that's also really important in treatment with anybody to have good boundaries but you do start to see how hard this is for this character typically this doesn't happen with ocd there are other mental health issues where maybe somebody has really bad boundaries i think that's what they're hinting at too that he has other personality traits that make it hard for him to interact with people in his world but at the same time you see how much pain he's in if you take responsibility to keep breaking the room around two years ago i also regrew my beard but you're not interested in changes in niche that's not typical for someone with ocd that they don't have any interest in other people i think what they're getting at here is that there's something about this character that's beyond ocd that could be a personality disorder there's a difference between obsessive-compulsive disorder and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder ocd the phrase is you're uncomfortable you're really uncomfortable with what's going on ocpd obsessive-compulsive disorder the phrase is you make other people uncomfortable because you want things in a certain way and you believe it should be in a certain way not because of ocd just because of the way you're wired here they're mixing a little bit of both next up girl interrupted am i in trouble for kissing an orderly or giving my boyfriend a job susannah is supposed to have a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder what that means is somebody's interacting with the world vastly different than the cultural norm and it causes problems for them borderline was originally used to describe someone who's on the border between neurotic meaning managing a lot of anxiety and psychotic having a break from reality you have some very interesting theories about your illness you believe there is a mystical undertow in life quick sense of shadows we see a couple things that suggest she does have borderline personality disorder you have references to reckless behavior which can occur and they're hinting that it's the sexual episode she's had there is this description of quicksands of time which might be more philosophical but the idea of shadows is she seeing things at times does she feel like there's something else there there can be chronic feelings of emptiness there can be an unstable sense of oneself that's what's being identified here by the psychiatrist your progress has plateaued does that disappoint you i'm ambivalent in fact that's my new favorite word this is actually really good therapy the psychiatrist identifies a plateau and she feels this patient can handle it and pushes her a bit to say you know what what do you think about your treatment it means i don't care that's what it means on the contrary susanna ambivalence suggests strong feelings in opposition she says she's ambivalent and she's really identifying something i see in a lot of patients there are two types of feeling there's both a desire to get better and there's this desire to give up a lot of times those are the opposing feelings so you really do see ambivalence in patients and identifying it is very important for the therapy the prefix as in ambidextrous means both the rest of it in latin means figure the word suggests that you are torn the doctor does a great job in pointing out that it's not about not caring it's about the conflict between really wanting to get better and feeling like this is so hard i'm never going to get better and i can't do this ambivalence isn't a diagnosis but it's commented on it certainly can be commented on and it is fodder for the therapy i mean that's certainly something to talk about and she picks up on it well i signed myself in i should be able to sign myself out you signed yourself into our care we decide when you leave you can sign yourself involuntarily and you can argue that it's time to leave the hospital they can't keep you like this unless and you're staging itself danger to others or you're gravely disabled how much will you indulge in your flaws what are your flaws are they flaws if you embrace them will you commit yourself to hospital for life you typically don't have this kind of intensive psychotherapy when someone is in the hospital for a short time this was a different time the 60s and this psychiatrist does a really good job she's actually bringing forth all the questions that someone with the borderline personality disorder might be facing but not know how to articulate they're wondering are they really a bad person that unstable sense of self or are they not are there different ways to see things if i go down this path of thinking about myself how will my life look if i go down this path how will life be so she does a really good job articulating for the patient what might be inside her what she might be thinking what she might be feeling and that can be a really effective therapeutic method there are a lot more pressures on kids and adolescents these days what used to happen is if you were getting bullied at school you were having a disagreement with somebody you could go home and have a respite at least for you know 10 hours 12 hours now you can't it's non-stop there is social media there are text messages that it's just non-stop not only in a negative way because maybe people are cyber bullying but also kids today feel like their social life revolves around who's commenting on this and who's done what so there's this drive to be social that way to keep up and that can cause a lot of anxiety another good thing that girl interrupted does is it shows someone who can participate in their treatment and who's not quote-unquote crazy a lot of depictions of mental illness show people who are so affected by their illness that they can't function in society susannah here does not have psychotic illnesses she might have some beliefs about herself that aren't true but that could come from trauma it could come from other things so girl interrupted does a good job of showing that you can have somebody who is quite functional for many people mental illness is a part of who they are it doesn't define them next up inside out wouldn't it be great to be back out on the ice oh yeah that sounds fantastic it's a pretty good depiction of depression in a teenager people often expect kids and teenagers to appear sad when they're depressed but more commonly you see teenagers as irritable there is literally the absence of joy in her mind and she's not necessarily sad she's irritable she doesn't know what to do or what to say that might be polite because she's not focused on that did you guys pick up on that uh-huh something's wrong should we ask her let's probe but keep it subtle so she doesn't notice so how was the first day of school she's probing us the other part of this that's really good is the depiction of the parents while humorous the mom's wondering what do i do what do i do for my daughter something's not quite right they have a sense that something's not okay i think it's pretty clear as you see her more throughout the movie that she's suffering from some depression in depression you look for a depressed mood or that irritability in an adolescent you look at loss of appetite difficulty with sleep are the things that interested her still joyful to her so hockey used to be it doesn't seem to be anymore how she's concentrating she's not even focused on the questions it's kind of huh what you look at all of these things and together they describe a picture of depression kids feel a lot of different things and especially in the teenage years what they're interested in is new to them they don't know how to explore that sometimes so all these feelings do intermix and do exist in the head of a teenager i'm somebody who doesn't believe that teenage years need to be all kinds of crazy i think actually they can be enjoyable years but it's important for parents to let kids explore life and to take chances school was great all right riley is everything okay sir she just rolled her eyes at us what is her deal riley also just moved from minnesota to san francisco which is like moving to the moon so it's totally understandable that she would feel out of place even little things are hard for her to get used to when i see kids one of the things i ask are there any major life changes because it can really be jarring to somebody riley i do not like this new attitude oh i'll show you attitude no no no no stay happy what is your problem just leave me alone it is common for kids and teenagers though to have mood issues to have depression to have anxiety and in some areas the bay area for instance new york is a high pressure so you often see kids with a lot of anxiety that's it go to your room now good job gentlemen that could have been a disaster well that was a disaster with adolescence there are certain approaches that i recommend parents take you learn a lot more from an adolescent when you are sitting side by side with them or walking side by side with them as opposed to direct eye contact that's more threatening for a teenager so if you go to a baseball game or if you're driving or walking you're going to get a lot more out of that teenager than you would if you're sitting there talking them eye to eye also probing is a good word you don't have to probe the teenager you can make observations you can make quick observations that can be really helpful for fostering conversation this movie is actually really supposed to be about mental health they had consultants working on the film psychologists and people who really did explore emotions they really wanted to get it to be an accurate depiction of mental health issues so i really like this movie and i think they did a good job depicting that and also the parents feel so helpless and they just want their kid to feel good and that's a message i see all the time from parents next up lars and the real girl midwest living or country home that's what i would say first thought you'd have about this guy is that he's psychotic he has some delusional thinking here meaning he believes this doll is real despite evidence to show she's not real in real life you'd never see a psychotic issue like this because this lasts through the whole movie and psychosis is generally not that persistent when someone has a psychotic disorder you'd have episodes of that lars in the movie is being depicted as somebody who really has no interest in relationships he's wearing gloves at times too doesn't want to touch people so it's never really explained in the movie what lars has but when i look at him i think he has some form of autism probably what would have been called asperger's we don't use the term asperger's disorder any longer what used to be those criteria are now fit under autistic spectrum disorder he can communicate with people but he has trouble with relationships he doesn't know how to have them and that can be part of the problem in terms of how they socialize and communicate with other people the fact that he does want to have it makes me think he falls more in line with an autistic spectrum disorder as opposed to other psychiatric illnesses that you might see where someone stays away from other people and fails to have relationships with them one of those things is schizoid personality disorder where a person doesn't want to have any contact with anybody they see no meaning whatsoever in relationships he seems to see something because he wants to have this relationship with bianca he brings her to the doctor and is concerned about her blood pressure and i really think the best way to think about lars is what's the poetic meaning behind it but if we're looking for a mental health diagnosis it probably falls more in line with autistic spectrum disorder i want you to bring her in every week for special treatment can you do that yeah are you sure that that's necessary i like to look at the whole emotional picture of lars that's certainly what the doctor here does what lars does have trouble with is interacting with other people at times he's seen wearing black gloves even he doesn't want to touch people said it hurts if you look at the psychological way to interpret that the emotional part of it he had a mother who died early to the point that his father wasn't available to him that's some significant psychological trauma for a kid not to have parents who are emotionally available so wearing those gloves might signify it's painful for him to even imagine being able to touch somebody because he feels so removed and so isolated from people so there's a real emotional meaning behind this movie and the doctor picks up on it i look forward to getting to know you bianca so this doctor is also a psychologist in the movie in this case she's recognizing that this doll means something to lars it's not just a psychotic disorder which means it's not just some delusion there's something here more emotional for him and she picks up on that she asks him to come back and she's starting to some might say play into the delusion but i think what she's doing she's creating what's called a holding space what that is in psychology is a place for someone to make a transition from something very difficult emotionally to another place that can be also difficult emotionally i think for lars he's transitioning from not really knowing how to have relationships with people to even trying and this doll is kind of the object that he starts to use to make that transition it's a good thing this is in wisconsin because good luck getting somebody to buy into this in new york city but in this town this doctor can foster the whole town the inquire about bianca and make it seem like she is real because she sees it is something important to lars i think again this is more of a magical movie in that sense there is that emotional component to it if you are a functioning person in therapy coming every week there could be some therapeutic component to talking about the doll he's not hurting anybody with the doll he's not causing any violence he's not doing anything that would make it seem like he's not functioning or needs to go to hospital so this is certainly a path to try to understand him more next up silver linings playbook mom i can't find my wedding video mom wake up what is it where's my wedding video it's after three o'clock what are you doing i looked in here but this is all you're up here for your sewing and everything this is a good depiction of a manic episode a manic episode means that for about a week someone has had increased energy with no need for a full night's sleep maybe just a couple hours they can be really elevated with their mood and they can be irritable there's also a grandiosity a sense of self-importance possibly even doing things that are somewhat dangerous or reckless and we're seeing him start to spiral into this manic episode here we know the character has a bipolar disorder bipolar disorder means that there's this change in mood from baseline to this expansive elevated state there can be the other side a depressive episode but it doesn't have to be for somebody to be diagnosed with a bipolar disorder some people with bipolar disorder have only a manic state every now and then they don't have the depressive low you can get something in a manic episode called increased goal-directed behavior you can be really focused on one thing some people it's like i'm going to write the next great novel i'm going to change the course of humanity i'm going to rebuild this wing of my home this is a much smaller task but he does get very focused on finding this wedding video it's not unheard of to have a task that doesn't seem to mean a lot suddenly take up all of someone's time when they're in the middle of a manic episode hey it's my wedding it's my wedding video what's also important to note is that their family are woken up in the middle of the night the family involvement is quite often seen a family can get really disrupted because of an untreated episode or because of these episodes you have to make some hard choices if this were going on and he's manic like this and he were actually violent with the family and not able to stop he might have to call the police and have him brought in to a mental health hospital so that he can be at least evaluated for some time and calm down he's a cop what are you doing it's a medication problem yeah he's fine he's fine now you want to send him back to baltimore the mother says it's a medication issue it can be really demeaning to a patient to feel like everything's dismissed and it's just about medication it's true that that often is said and it's really painful to the person who has the bipolar disorder or any mental health issue it's common with mental illness that people do have strong feelings about their medication there can be side effects in a bipolar disorder if it's a manic episode you would try to put the brakes on with an anti-psychotic medication and those medications do have side effects they can make people very sleepy there can be weight gain but it's a bigger danger to have somebody who's manic who can do dangerous things you can use some medications including antipsychotics as mood stabilizers for long-term treatment family members can really support people with bipolar disorder or even other mental health issues in many ways or you can ask them what's it like to have this they might not want to talk about it but just saying something like if you ever want to talk about this i'm certainly willing to talk about it with you i want to be here to help you so just knowing that somebody's there for you to talk about can be super helpful support and love are very important when it comes to helping somebody with mental illness it can't cure it that's the knock on the movie is that everything turns out fine and there's some hint that pat starts taking his medication again but it's a hint it's not something that's shown very clearly so you do need to have love you do need to have support but it's not going to clear everything next up a beautiful mind saw my name on the lecture sleeve who are you talking to tell me who you see here we see a depiction of schizophrenia and schizophrenia is often misunderstood schizophrenia is a psychotic illness it's an illness meaning there's a break from reality schizophrenia is the diagnosis you give after seeing someone have a consistent psychotic episode or episodes over a certain amount of time so at first it would be a psychotic episode or a psychotic break but you wait to diagnose schizophrenia until time has passed and it's still there a month long of hallucinations or delusions or thought disorder in schizophrenia visual hallucinations are not as consistent as this guy charles his so-called roommate i think they're trying to obviously get you to see that he's seeing something that's not really there but you don't usually see something as consistent it's more of a blur it's more temporary the doctor really does try to ask john what's going on what are you seeing and that's a good technique what i often like to do is say something like do you feel like your mind is playing tricks on you do you feel like you're seeing things other people aren't seeing or hearing things other people aren't hearing sometimes that can be a little bit more gentle than what are you seeing but i think it is a good idea to figure out what is this person seeing there's no one there john there's no one it's right there some of these medications do have side effects that can include drooling but it shouldn't be a deterrent from taking medication because the medications can help with delusions and hallucinations that really impair someone's ability to function one thing that a beautiful mind did was it kind of correlated having schizophrenia and having a psychotic illness with having genius or that he's a genius because of his schizophrenia that's not the case you're not going to become a genius because you have a psychotic illness like schizophrenia he might have a high intellect and also have schizophrenia but it's not the cause of it in fact there's what's called a downward drift if someone has a psychotic illness and doesn't get treated over time it becomes harder and harder for them to function in society not that they get smarter and smarter and they actually have a really hard time functioning in their daily life my name is john nash i'm being held against my will somebody call the department of defense you do sometimes see patients yelling out like that who are delusional or are paranoid that they're being held against their will and sometimes they are being held against their will because they're believed to be a danger to themselves or others or because they actually can't provide themselves with food clothing and shelter they're gravely disabled which is more of what he is but you do see people sometimes yell like this this is an old psych ward it's pretty big and there are a lot of people around i think in this shot here there's maybe six mental health providers i feel like in some states there might not even be six mental health providers there's such a shortage of mental health providers but a psychiatric ward can look like this where there are rooms and those rooms are private rooms for people this is dramatized to some degree they usually don't look like jails so that part's a little bit off but i can see that they're trying to show that the patients are housed here in their individual rooms and doors on the left i think it's really important for media to get depictions of mental health right because people get a lot of their information from these movies even though it's not necessarily accurate it's important to be accurate i was at a convention once this girl stood up started crying and said when am i going to see a depiction of someone with mental illness who's not going to make me feel like i'm going to turn into a serial killer so that's reason enough to have accurate depictions so people don't feel shamed about themselves so people don't feel ashamed to go into treatment so people can have conversations and people can really pursue the help that they need thanks so much for watching these clips with me i enjoyed breaking them down and i hope you did too hope to do it again with you in the future [Music]

Channel: GQ

Views: 2,264,029

Rating: 4.9646578 out of 5

Keywords: the breakdown, breakdown, * psychiatrist, psychiatry, psychiatrist breaks down, psychiatrist break down, mental health, mental health scene, joker breakdown, eric bender, bojack horseman breakdown, the undoing breakdown, joker psychiatrist, rain man breakdown, as good as it gets breakdown, girl interrupted breakdown, inside out breakdown, a beautiful mind breakdown, the breakdown psychiatrists, psychiatrists, gq, gq magazine

Id: Sbp_EeBk-As

Length: 41min 22sec (2482 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021