Please watch a movie (or read a book) that describes a character that has one of the psychological disorders from the chapter. What is the name of the disorder that the character has and what are the symptoms?
Suggested movies: Sybil, A Beautiful Mind
Or you can choose other movies and books
Your answer should be 2 pages, double spaced. Please respond to 2 others.
Please don't forget to respond to student A and B
Student A's opinion
- I decided to watch Good Will Hunting this movie really shows the long term effects that can occur in someone's life if they don't get help after suffering a traumatic event. The main character is Will Hunting (played by Matt Damon), he is an orphan that has lived most of his life from one foster home to another. In the beginning of the movie he looks like a street kid that has no real motivation to do anything else but be a janitor at a prestigious college. Will seems to really like the life he lives, he has a loyal group of friends and that's all that he needs. One night Will solved a difficult problem, initially no one knew who did it and there was a lot of curiosity about who the mathematician was. When the professor couldn't find the student that solved it, he set up another problem. The next day Will returned to work he saw another problem on the board and was solving it, when Professor Lambeau surprised him. The Professor was so impressed by Will's potential that he decided to help him.
Professor started working with Will, and after many therapist appointments he brought him to see Sean Maguire. Sean was a college friend of Lambeau's, and he was also from South Boston like Will and the professor thought Will would connect with him. At the beginning Will didn't open up at all, and went as far as to challenge Maguire delving into his personal life to test him in a way. At the same time Will met a girl one night at a bar, and he really connected with her. Even though he liked her, he didn't make a move so she had to. Even though there were some signs of some kind of detachment issues in Will, once he started to see Skylar it all started to be revealed.
In the therapy sessions we learn that Will had been abused at the foster homes, and he really only spoke to his three loyal friends. Maguire eventually had to insist that Will would either have to truly open up to him or he wouldn't see him again. Will was extremely intelligent, self-taught really so he knew exactly how not to get to close to anyone. At a point Skylar is wanting to know more about him, and Maguire is also getting close, so Will starts to recede into himself. One night when Skylar wouldn't accept his detachment he told her the truth about him, here we get confirmation that he suffers from Traumatic and Stress Disorder. Will can't trust that anyone will stay and be supportive and take care of him when he is vulnerable and needs it. This is directly linked to the abuse he suffered at the hands of his foster family. Will completely pulls away from Skylar and Maguire and even Lambeau, he just wants to stay in the little world he created with his friends.
The movie does an excellent job of highlighting that even someone with such a capable mind, will find ways to keep themselves in a world that makes them comfortable. Will needed to be challenged by Skylar and Maguire if he wasn't forced to see that there was something else for him he would have never moved passed his abusive past. A very poignant scene in the movie is at the end when Will and Maguire are having a session, Maguire just reminds Will that all the abuse he went through "was not his fault". I think that is important because in a way Will was punishing himself for the abuse, which is part of the Traumatic-Stress Disorder.
Student B's opinion
- I chose to pick my own book, having read it previously and loving it so much that I post it noted much of it so I could go back and analyze what the character is doing and why she was doing it. I chose Every Last Word, by Tamara Ireland Stone. The title is so fitting for the book because it is a phrase of three words and threes are something that the main character Samantha McAllister is particular to.
Samantha McAllister has Purely-Obsessed OCD and anxiety, thought the book tends to focus on the anxiety as a result of her OCD and her social circle. OCD, or obsessive-compulsive disorder is a disorder in which intruding thoughts that occur again and again are followed by some ritualistic behavior. In Samantha's case, for the most part, she can control the compulsive part, it is the obsessive part that she has no control over. She also has anxiety, but that is partly a result of her toxic group of friends constantly judging every move someone makes and her keeping her Purely-Obsessed OCD a secret from everyone but her family.
One instance in which Sam struggles with her OCD is when she holds a pair of scissors in front of her friends and a thought pushes its way into her mind. She thinks of cutting her friends ponytail off and she struggles to push that thought out of her head forcing her to leave her friends and go to her mom who was trained by her psychiatrist on how to calm Samantha down.
Samantha also has an obsession with threes. Whenever she goes on the elevator to go to her psychiatrist's office, she pushes the elevator button three times. Sam is also a swimmer, but she always swims in lane three. Her coaches think she's quirky and that's exactly what she wants them to think, she doesn't want people to know about her illness. When Sam is anxious, she scratches her neck. If she was around people who did not know about her OCD, she would restrain herself to scratching only once, but in private, she scratches three times. Samanatha also has an obsession with the odometer in her car. She claimed she has a strange charge in her whenever the last digit hit the number three so now every time she parks it has to land on three or she can't park. Her compulsions that she does have, lowered her anxiety.
Sam's obsessives over information as well. One example is when she is asking about one of her friend's ex's. She says that there was a familiar swirling in her mind that needed information. So she starts asking question after question, not to be nosy, but to fill that need. She normally does not sleep at night and one of the major reasons she does sleep is because of her sleeping medication. At night, she normally spends time obsessing over her bad friends or writing poetry or learning new information. She says that she obsessives until her brain is exhausted and that she is consumed by worries she cannot turn off at night. Samantha says her spiraling thoughts are like following a white rabbit down the hole, trying to feed her brain information.
In terms of her anxiety, she eased her anxiety with some of her compulsions, like writing poetry at night for hours on end or scratching the back of her neck. In the book, there is a major plot twist at the end in which the new friend, Caroline, that Samantha had made earlier in the year, turns out to be imaginary. Samantha's psychiatrist never specifically gives a name to what is now going on in Sam's mind. Her psychiatrist does say that to her, it sounded like whenever Sam was overly anxious, Caroline became real to her in moments of extreme anxiety. Samantha had met Caroline on the first day of school and she was already highly anxious because of her friends. Her anxiety might have sent her mind looking for a new way to cope. Caroline calmed Samantha down whenever she was nervous. This book was one of the best books that I've read about mental illness because of how real the characters were made to appear and how much mental illness places a role in one's everyday life.