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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