Mental Disorders

Mental Disorders

Initially, myself and my group where very interested in creating a psychological opening, it seemed very interesting and we could exploit this genre to create something innovative, possibly using mind games and tools in media to trick the our particular audience.

We then began to research what types of films, narratives and subjects this audience most likely wanted to see so that we could start developing a narrative of our own and move onto production of our media text.

We further concluded films which represent mental disorders were popular with this audience with such films as “Seven”. Many of these films show the condition, the effect of the symptoms and either a disintegration or relief of the mental disorder itself.

Next, we researched particular mental disorders shown in this thriller genre: 

o   Multiple-personality disorder 

o   Schizophrenia 

o   Bipolar 

o   Anorexia Nervosa 

o   Dementia 

o   Alzheimer’s 

o   and more...

It would not be possible to accurately represent these conditions without analysing them in detail. The most favourable option emerged as Schizophrenia, due to its suspicion around the condition as it is not often shown in society and respected as a temperamental and taunting condition; which can make the most basic tasks in life extremely difficult.

Myself as producer suggested we should look at particular cases of people with the condition through both recovery and experience of the condition and possible death. The website featured below was particularly helpful in showing us how to represent the condition of schizophrenia. 

YouTube was also very resourceful for gaining knowledge about the condition and understanding how society sees the condition.  

To conclude our subject-genre research we gathered some important facts to know about schizophrenia in regards to our opening sequence:

o    

• Hallucinations can be very random and very traumatizing for the person who experiences them.
• Not every person who has the condition experiences the same symtoms.
• Society now has a new perspective on the disorder and it has now begun to be accepted.
• We can experiment and explore with media effects to present the symtoms of hallucinations which will produce alot of enigma as it is not what is expected yet then this will still link in with the genre.