Psychopathology in Popular Film

I am providing the students with two options for their paper. First option is Analysis of Psychopathology in Popular Film, and the second, is Analysis of Psychopathology in a piece of literary work. Both, Literature and Popular media and films are a rich source of material addressing psychopathology and mental illness. You will be asked to view a relevant film or read a work of Literature. Then, I would like students to write a paper that addresses a number of relevant themes including the following:

1) A comprehensive description of psychopathology (symptoms) or particular Psychopathological dynamics (Oedipus complex, Existential Angst) depicted, including a formal DSM/ICD diagnosis of the protagonist or main character. This should include specific and relevant symptoms and biographical information that indicates how the person displays these dynamics or meets criteria for a particular mental disorder.

2) Identify a minimum of 3 SCENES either in the film or story that best the above points.

3) A reflection on the positive and negative messages that the film or story portray regarding the particular disorder or psychological dynamics.

4) Discussion of how well or poorly the movie or Literary work characterizes the particular form(s) of psychopathology depicted.

You will choose the movie or literary work you want to write the paper on, please don’t flood my inbox with questions regarding what movie or book to choose.. For film suggestions, please refer to the “Psychology and Films Links” section below in the syllabus, but you can use ANY film with a psychopathological content. For literary works, there are plenty of choices, both classical and modern, and you may want to do a web-search for specifics. A very short list of authors I do like are as follows: Sophocles, St Augustine, Avicenna, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, some of the Russian novelists are great (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekov), Robert Louis Stevenson, American novelists (Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, etc), many mystery novels from Agatha Christy or Arthur Conan Doyle, and many others. You may also choose a biography in lieu of a novel, but you need to check with me on that one.

The paper should be written using APA format ONLY, and it should be minimum 2,500 and no longer than 4,000 words long NOT counting title page and bibliography. The paper has to have a title page, followed by an Abstract in which summarizes the main idea of your paper. Then you should have an introduction followed by the main body of your paper where you cover numbers 1-4 above each section subtitled. Finally it needs to have a Conclusion and a Bibliography (I expect 6 citations of which at least three are from peer review Journals). Therefore your paper outline should be as follows and I expect to see those sections clearly indicated in your paper:

Title Page
Abstract
Introduction
Description of Psychopathology
Description of 3 scenes.
Characterization
Positive and Negative messages
Conclusion
Bibliography