Sunday, October 28, 2012

Psychopathology Film Analysis: Shutter Island


                           Shutter Island  
   
Plot Summary:

            This film initially tells a story about a U.S. marshal, Teddy, who travel to the Shutter Island to investigate on the missing patient in the asylum. Later, the film shifted and showed a brave soul trying to find evidence to expose the Shutter Island as a place for psychosurgery experiment. Only until the end, the whole film revealed itself that it was all about everyone’s elaborate role-play to help Teddy with his delusional and dissociative identity disorder.


Disorder:

Delusional Disorder is persistent delusion with a non-schizophrenic paranoid disorder in which a person nurtures, gives voice to, and sometimes takes action on beliefs that are considered completely false or absurd (Student Notes). Teddy showed delusion of grandiosity, saying that he was going to uncover a mass conspiracy. He also showed clear delusion of persecution. For example, he believed that he was being prevented from leaving the island. He believed that the aspirin, cigarettes, and the food that he took contained drug that made him gradually go insane so that they could eventually use him for psychosurgery experiment.

People with Dissociative Identity Disorder, also known as Multiple Personality Disorder, develop two or more distinct personalities, each with unique set of thoughts, behaviors, emotions, and memories. Those split personalities usually are totally opposite, cannot be integrate by patients, and they are at some point in control. Such symptoms are not associated with medical conditions or the use of substances (Student Notes) (Comer, 2010). From the movie, Teddy showed several symptoms. The most obvious one is the two extremely distinct identities in him, from a hospitalized mental patient who murdered his wife switching to a U.S. Marshal sent there to investigate the case. Moreover, he even created fictional description and environment of his fictional identity. For example, he created fictional character, the person who burned down their house, to take the fault of his wife’s death but in fact he was the one murdering her. To make sense of his new identity, he also created Rachel, a fictional character who took his 67th place in that asylum. Last but not least, at the end of the film showed clear evidence of him switching back to his true, primary personality who do not show paranoia, migraine, or excessive blinking like that alter personality. He then accepted the reality and admitted what he did to his wife.

Causes:

Psychodynamic – Excessive repression, the ego defense mechanism, from traumatic events or experiences such as the murder of Teddy’s family and the WWII against Nazi has caused the disorder. Teddy try to fight off from bad impulses by unconsciously prevent them to reach awareness and assign other personality.

Behavioral – Teddy developed the disorder as an avoidance response that protects him from the stressful events and traumatic memories of his children and wife murder by creating an alter personalities so he did not need to consciously confront those painful memories.

Treatment:

Little treatment is known as the disorder is extremely complicated.  Therapists could:
1. Stabilize & recognize the disorder – stabilize by bonding with different identities and educate them to recognize the nature of their disorder
2. Recover the memories – working through trauma, connecting real life events, identities
3. Post integration therapy – merge all the different alter personalities into one integrated identity (Comer, 2010) (Student Notes).

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