WHAT I LEARNED FROM : Psychiatrist Breaks Down Mental Health Scenes From Movies & TV by GQ
Today I discovered a video by GQ, which is a channel that covers every part of man’s life. They talk about entertainment, sports, fashion, and many more. In this video, the psychiatrist broke down mental health issues from a situation in different movies and tv shows. In the blog, I only brought what I feel very attracted to the most: the first three Movies/TV series: BoJack Horseman, The Joker, and Rainman.
The scene was showing that the character ‘Hollyhawk’ who has a social anxiety disorder, things that make people with social anxiety disorder terrified are when they don’t know any people in the settings they were in, or they would like to get to know people but they’re afraid of embarrassing themselves. They can have nausea or even stomach pain if they’re very anxious. As she gets more anxious more nervous, she gets short of breath.
There are ways to help people with this anxiety disorder. In this scene, a man uses a therapy technique called ‘grounding’. Grounding is when you tell the people who are very anxious to look around themselves and say where they are right now to make them calmer.
I’m interested in Social Anxiety Disorder because I think teenagers are terrified of embarrassing themselves in front of other people, leading them to not socialise with anybody because of the fear of failure. Also, the fact that anxiety can cause by hormone changes in the age of 13-18 and that the number of teens who have social concern raised up to 20% make it sounds very concerning to a teenager like me. There are several causes of this disorder: High expectations, The world that makes them feel scared or threatening, and how their self-esteem is lower from social media.
The psychiatrist explains why Arthur’s tones and emotions are going back and forth from almost crying to almost laughing; there are two ways to describe it: Lability and Pseudobulbar Affect.
Pseudobulbar Affect is a disorder when there’s a disconnection between the front brain (the cortex) and the back brain (the cerebellum).  The connection helps people to express their emotions. When it's broken, in this case by trauma, as Arthur has a background about being traumatised by his head, it disconnects the parts. It can cause sudden crying or laughing even the person doesn’t think the situation is humorous or sad. This can be seen in the scene from an animation called Batman Beyond: The Return Of Joker. From what I could recall, he’ll constantly laugh nonstop until he kills The Joker during Joker Junior's set. The laughing suddenly turned into crying, which might be the disorder that he got from brainwashing. From what I thought, the method of brainwashing might disconnect the cortex, and the cerebellum, causing him to have the Pseudobulbar Effect.
The psychiatrist also explains the difference between psychopathy and psychosis. In psychosis, the patient will hear non-existence sounds or see stuff not present in the setting or what can be easily described as a hallucination. In The Joker, We can see that Arthur is suffered from psychopathy as he clearly knows what’s going to happen; he’s not hearing voices nor having illusions.
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As a kid who grew up with brothers who loved to watch superheroes movies, I’m very attracted to how Bill Finger creates complexity in Joker and Batman. Joker himself has different backstories. The first 1940 tells about a psychopath who kills for fun by using what he calls a Joker’s Venom. The second one was in 1951, in which The Joker already committing a crime in the name of Red Hood but accidentally moved into a pool of chemical water. Another one where he became The Joker because the death of his wife drives him insane, the one (actually two) that said he was a hitman in a crime family before, A foster child name Sonny, and many more. However, all of them leads him to trauma, and he becomes same the iconic villain, The Joker (Although I do like Deathstroke more than him)
Rainman shows me the syndrome I feel attracted to and interested to more research in, which is a Savant Syndrome. A Savant syndrome is a very rare condition (approximately 1:2000 in persons with mental retardation) where people can demonstrates certain abilities far in excess of average. In this movie, it shows the idea of a character called Raymond who read a phone number  book and be able to memorized every information in it.
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He also has autism, which is a developmental disorder. It means that people who has autism developed differently from how people in the society would do. In autism, you’ll look in two different areas, how they developing and how they communicating. We can see an example in a series of  A Good Doctor, which the main characters has autism and likely to have a savant ability in memorizing human body’s anatomy. We can see the action of  him being sensitive to loud noise and having difficulties in forming an appropriate sentence which is a trait of autism.
I’m interest to Savant Syndrome because I want to know how can people’s brain can be super developed that a human can play Tchiakovsky’s song or any classical piece by just reading it once, or how a man watching a city in a helicopter and can draw every single details of it.
For me, using Science in movies are quite challenging and I really admired people who can make the movie interesting and fun while carrying a lot of  educational information. As people seek entertainment in medias, adding some knowledge without making it less entertaining is the best way to expose people into the other parts of life. Maybe that’s one of the reason why I watch The Little Einstein when I was young and decided to studied music for IGCSE (not a very wise idea, but still worth it)
https://youtu.be/Sbp_EeBk-As  — Link to the video
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