Top 7 Movies about Mental Illness | by Marissa Katrin Maldonado
Image Licensed by Adobe Stock By Marissa Katrin Maldonado Hollywood has created many different movies depicting mental illness, to varying degrees of accurately representing the actual mental health disorder itself. Some of its most popular movies feature a blend of a mentally ill character with horror, such as Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” adding terror to the mix. Some movies, such as “Frances,” (1982) about the life of actress Frances Farmer whose alcoholism led to a mental breakdown, took us inside a psychiatric hospital where the viewer watched in horror as the character receive a lobotomy. The difficulty in portraying sensitive subject matter like mental illness is in avoiding caricature while still depicting the reality of mental health disorders and the treatment of them. The temptation a scriptwriter and director might have is to go for the shock value or to exaggerate the reality of mental illness. There is also the tendency to use mental illness as th