Teaching Psychiatry with Hollywood

"In the United States, a growing number of psychiatry professors see an answer in Hollywood and its large output of films that deal with disorders of the mind. Carol Bernstein, a teacher of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine, has found a good response to a course she co-presents called: “Teaching Psychiatry? Let Hollywood Help!”

Its popularity seems to disprove the charge that Hollywood “trivialises” mental disorders, Dr Bernstein says. The course attracts doctors from all over North America, and increasingly from Europe—although many European psychiatrists have their doubts about teaching by film.

Roelof ten Doesschate, head of a large psychiatric hospital in the Dutch city of Deventer, worries that films like “As Good As It Gets”—a portrayal of an obsessive, cantankerous writer—understate the wretchedness of real-life mental illness. Dutch hospitals already use actors for training purposes, hiring them to play disruptive patients—so the idea of using simulation to teach medical students is not too shocking. But the American practice of using film clips to teach already qualified doctors, training to be specialists, does alarm Dr ten Doesschate; at that level, he feels, only flesh-and-blood patients will do. “For registrars it's a poor solution, they need to be doing real work.”

But Dr Bernstein sees teaching by film as both valid and necessary, especially for instruction about personality disorders like paranoia, obsessive compulsive disorder or psychopathy. Sufferers from such disorders are hard to find. Psychopaths often shun psychiatrists, and, she notes: “A paranoid patient isn't going to consent to have a lot of people interviewing them.”...

Even in the old world, teaching by film has its advocates. Dinesh Bhugra, dean of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Britain, has long supported the educational use not just of Hollywood films but also of Bollywood films from his native India. The professor, who began his training in India, is convinced that movies remain under-valued as teaching tools in both countries. “In Britain, cinema still has generally a low cultural value, and in India it is a snobbish thing to look down on Bollywood,” Dr Bhugra laments. Such arrogance is missing the point, he argues: whatever their artistic merits, Bollywood films are a useful way to teach medical and psychiatric students about “cultural issues to do with the family, or shame versus guilt”.

- Psychiatry and films, Great plot, shame about the characters

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