Within the last 20 years, there have been hundreds of films that feature characters with mental disorders. However, mental disorders in film is an ambiguous topic because it’s fundamentally subjective. Some character actions in films can be viewed as “crazy” by some but rational to others. There have been films that have implied a mental disorder present through camera movements, acting, and dialogue. Since implications can be argumentative, I wanted to create a list of films with specific components for this project. This way, I would not be analyzing these films based on assumption. For example, for a film that was about a veteran coming back to war, there would be an element of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
The categories are as follows – films that have:
A Diagnosis or Mention of a Mental Disorder. When a disorder is mentioned, it means the film’s portrayal is meant to be an actual depiction of the disorder, not implying one based on context. For this, I wanted to see how often mental disorders are named compared to certain stigmatizing labels.
Treatment of Mental Disorder. Many of the films from my diagnosis list are in this category as well because sometimes people receive treatment for the mental disorder that they have been diagnosed with. Do films show a positive or negative side to treatment, specifically the drugs and hospital procedures used?
A Therapist or Psychiatrist in Practice. If the film includes someone that works as a psychiatrist or therapist, there is an explicit task of helping people with mental disorders. Therefore, adding this component allowed me to see how people that work in these environments are represented. For example, how often are these professionals portrayed as a person of color, or a woman?
These were some of the questions I planned to answer for my project and to gather information on all these categories, I had to use two different tools: Tableau Public and Voyant Tools.
Tableau Public was extremely helpful because it gave me information based on data sets of the films. I looked at the differences between mental disorder portrayal between men and women and different races. Plus, it was extremely helpful for me to classify certain genres that are connected to these films.
Voyant Tools allowed me to look at screenplays and transcripts to determine the difference in frequency of the stigmatizing labels such as crazy, insane, lunatic, mad, depressed, and so on compared to the actual disorder. When looking at the Voyant dashboards, all of the terms are not present in every film, so only the labels mentioned in the film were added.
The list I created is narrowed down because there were conflicts regarding finding the films I wanted to include. I selected films from the Internet Movie Database by selecting films under the keyphrases “mental illness” and “mental disorder.” I also navigated Wikipedia’s page “Mental disorders in films” and looked at films that have mental disorders from 1990 to the present day. From there, I narrowed the list of only films that followed my criteria, through reading descriptions and scripts and viewing some films.