Author 1: Yamilet G Martinez-Montes
Hello!
I am a first year (freshman) at Western Washington University in the city of Bellingham. I am majoring in Linguistics with a concentration in modern and classical languages. Before this class, in high school I took honors English during my Freshman and Sophomore year and then AP Language and AP Literature in my Junior and Senior of high school. I would not call myself a writer, I think that I am pretty decent at writing. When I usually write, I write mostly for myself. I write on social media, and for class assignments that require it. Writing is something that has always been a challenge for me even as a kid. Over time, with the help of my many great teachers, I learned to become a better writer and a person who convey their ideas in a more clear way.
This whole experience of taking English 101 has definitely helped shaped the way I convey my ideas. This project has helped me learn how to center my ideas and how to narrow them down in a way that makes sense. Since this was a project by project system – meaning we had many small projects that would eventually lead to the research – it really helped me focus on specific aspects of the research that I had to do to the point where it wasn’t as overwhelming. It was great to have something to research that I was passionate about. I love film and cinema and I have struggled with mental illness in the past, so it was a great way to connect both ideas. It was also very interesting to see what the students here at Western Washington University had to say on the topic of mental health portrayals in modern and classical movies. It was an amazing experience, to see responses and analyze potential patterns in the data collected.
Our project, centers on the portrayals of mental illness in movies and tv shows. In this research project, we explore the minds of students who attend Western Washington University and how they feel about movies and Tv shows like Still Alice, A Beautiful Mind, Fight Club, Split, 13 Reasons Why, Silver Linings Playbook, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We discovered that movies that were in the genre of action or drama were more likely to be seen as an inaccurate portrayal, and movies that were based on a true story were seen as accurate.
Author 2: Jacob Rivera
In writing and researching a topic such as mental health in relation to our modern mediascape, it had really helped me gain a greater understanding of the influence of media on our every day lives. Media is prevalent in every facet of our lives in our current society and mental health is a very touchy subject, and to research on such topics, as I am personally very interested in, it is really self-fulfilling to be able to learn more about these topics. Having faced issues with mental health, this topic had hit close to home and so gaining a greater understanding of mental illnesses had been personally very fulfilling.