For those of you who have seen this flick, I am writing a paper that focuses on mental disorders in the movies. My focus is the Fisher King with Robin Williams. My job in the paper is to argue whether or not he has a disorder using the 6 elements to detect abnormal tendencies, and if the disorder in portrayed correctly.
it looks as if to me, Williams in Skitzophrenic. It’s kind of weird that all of a sudden he just develops this disorder, however i know that disorders can sort of hibernate (sorry if im not putting that correctly, but it kind of describes it to me) and then can be brought out by certain changes in their enviornment, their bodies. or specific events (such as William’s wife being murdered in front on him,i believe this was the trigger)
Anyways, this is my first psych class out of intro, and i’m curious as to whether william’s condition is portrayed properly. My prof asked me to think about whether or not he truely is skitzophrenic, and others told me it’s just not being portrayed properly. I don’t really know too much about skitzophrenia, but i get the feeling it’s not portrayed completely correctly.
I apologize for anything incorrect I may have said, if I have please let me know, since i’m just a beginner at this
You’re writing about one of my all-time favorite movies. I don’t think it offers any insight into the nature of schizophrenia (note the spelling), though. Williams’ character, Parry, was suffering from a trauma-induced psychosis. He heard voices, and he was suppressing his entire identity. I don’t know of any disease that actually works like this. It’s like a mixture of Dissociative Identity Disorder and schizophrenia, though it isn’t an accurate picture of either one.
Fortunately, this wasn’t a biopic. “The Fisher King” is a fantasy, and I wouldn’t view it as anything else. The pulse of the movie wasn’t Parry’s condition, but Jack’s transformation. Parry’s mental illness was, in my view, purely symbolic, and wasn’t meant to be a literal representation of actual psychological conditions.
(By the way, I thought “A Beautiful Mind” did a horrible job of portraying schizophrenia, but that’s another story!)
Thanks for the info. From what I gather, i didn’t think it was portrayed correctly, I really wondered about all the suppression of identity, and the hallucinations puzzled me a little bit too, because they didn’t seem all that realistic. I’m watching the movie again tonight to analyze it, it’s really one of the better movies to do this paper on. I talked to my professor about “A Beautiful Mind” and he thought it was a terrible portrayal too, I don’t really know too much about the subject though.
Also, forgive my spelling, after I posted I figured out the correct spelling, I could never spell for shit…thank god for spell check or i’d be screwed!