marientina

Adding to my database of mental illness movies for the last two months: Trauma ,The Machinist, K-Pax

Meanwhile, my insomnia is growing.

Interestingly enough, I have found this database (a bit outdated) but useful. Almost every movie describes some kind of mental or cognitive disorder. I suppose strangeness is what makes life interesting.

Apparently, bipolar disorder is snubbed from films since schizophrenia is so much more eventful. Manic episodes in bipolar disorder can contain acute paranoia and even insomnia induced hallucinations similar to schizophrenia, which is why so many bipolars are misdiagnosed, including my mother in the early 90's who was turned into a vegetable for several months by a negligent psychiatrist. Add misdiagnosis to social stigma and it is no wonder why so many people with mental illness don't want to ask for help.

p.27 from Surviving Manic Depression:

As early as 1973, a study of patients with mania reported that 60 percent had grandiose delusions, 42 percent had paranoid delusions, and many had both. It is a relatively short leap, after all, from believing that you are the president of the United States to also believing that foreign agents are after you.

Also from the same book, p.298

And during 1999, at the same time that NIMH was funding only 7 research grants on clinical or treatment aspects of manic-depressive illness, it was also funding 7 new grants to study pigeons, 8 new grants to study songbirds, and 4 new grants to study fish. Clearly, something is fundamentally wrong with the priorities of the federal agency, and individuals with manic-depressive illness bear the consequences of these misplaced priorities.