In one of our interviews we asked the question “On a scale from one to five, how much influence does film have on yourself?” This question is to see underlying and personal perspective on how much they believe media affects them. One of our participants, a 19-year-old Chinese-American female said, “A five, [movies] do affect everyone, subconsciously yes”. We had then followed up the question with a more focused question which was, “What is your knowledge on DPD (Dissociative Personality Disorder)”, followed up by “Do you think the movie Split accurately portrays this disorder”. The participant had answered “I haven’t seen Split, only the commercials about it, but from just seeing the commercials, it looked pretty problematic to be honest”. This was very interesting to see as just from the commercials alone, she was able to come to the conclusion that the movie was going to not portray DPD accurately, which would then be inherently problematic. Many of our participants had the same ideas. A reoccurring theme we heard among the participants was that Split‘s inaccuracy was due to the negative portrayal. “It portrayed DPD as a scary mental illness and made it seem as if everyone who has DPD will try to kidnap you or something, very inaccurate and unfair to those who have DPD,” responded an 18-year-old, Mexican female to the previous question.
Along with this, we’d asked about the popular T.V show 13 Reasons Why and it’s portrayal of depression. In this, we had more of a split between answers that we received. One of our participants, a 19-year-old American female, had said that “Oh god that show is the worst, they literally idealize suicide for teen girls…” This was also very interesting to see as she knew exactly why the show was “problematic”, and had seen the show as being specifically impactful towards a certain group of people.
In following interviews, we had asked about other films such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Still Alice, Fight Club, and A Beautiful Mind, what we had found is that in film that is either in the genre of “drama” or “action” such as in 13 Reason Why, Fight Club, or Split, many participants had believed that these films had not accurately portrayed the mental illness that was shown in the film, and that they had dramatized them or “glamorized” them. However, in biographical movies such as Still Alice and A Beautiful Mind, participants had found that these films more accurately portray the mental illnesses, and don’t portray the mental illness at the expense of the person with the mental illness. They have the purpose of showing the symptoms in a more empathetic way rather than in way that portrays having a mental illness as being crazy.
There was an observation we made when analyzing the data. One of our questions was “what movies have you seen that have a theme of mental health” Among the participants, many mentioned the movie “The Theory of Everything” which came to our attention because there is no specific mental illness in the movie, the disease that the movie is based on is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a physical disorder. We were curious as to why the participants mentioned that movie and whether more people would mention it as well. This was something we kept in mind as we continued having interviews.
Another observation that we made was that the students that we interviewed that had taken a college level course like psychology, sociology or something similar were more likely to say that movies had an inaccurate representation of a mental illness. Students who had only taken a high school health course or psychology class were more likely to say that it was an accurate portrayal and or were unsure of what to think.