Latest / Wellness in Today's World / Ep 9: The Intersection of Psychology and Film
Transcript
- 0:05Welcome to Wellness in Today's World with Dr.
- 0:08Debra Kawahara, a space where we discuss the latest insights in psychology, wellness, and everything in between.
- 0:16Hello, I'm Debra Kawahara.
- 0:17Thank you for joining us today.
- 0:19Have you ever watched a movie and wondered, "What would a therapist think about this movie?" Well, today, psychology meets cinema in the most compelling way.
- 0:32Our guest is Dr.
- 0:33Danny Wedding, an award-winning clinical psychologist, professor, and author, whose passion for film is matched only by his deep expertise in mental health.
- 0:46He's the mind behind the critically acclaimed book, "Movies and Mental Illness," now in its fifth edition.
- 0:55A groundbreaking book
- 0:57that uses iconic films to illuminate the complexity of mental disorder and psychopathology.
- 1:04Welcome, Dr.
- 1:05Wedding.
- 1:06I'm so pleased to have you here today.
- 1:08Thank you Debra, I'm pleased to be here.
- 1:10It's nice to see an old friend and get to talk to her a bit.
- 1:13Yeah.
- 1:14So let's kind of start off with what prompted you to write this book, "Movies and Mental Illness"?
- 1:23What sparked kind of your curiosity and genesis of the book?
- 1:29You know, I'm neurotic enough that I can't just do things like watch a movie for fun.
- 1:35I have to feel like I'm accomplishing something.
- 1:38So I got in the habit of taking notes when I'd see a film that I liked, especially one that was psychologically relevant.
- 1:44And those notes kept getting thicker and thicker.
- 1:47The pile got larger and larger.
- 1:49And I eventually turned those notes into a couple of journal articles.
- 1:54And then the journal articles eventually became a book,
- 1:57and several other books, and it's a nice thing to do in retirement, to devote yourself to films.
- 2:03It's a nice way to combine being retired and keeping your hand in as a psychologist.
- 2:09I try to watch every psychologically relevant film that comes out, and that's almost a full-time job.
- 2:16Yeah, I mean, I know I've talked to you and kind of seen all your writings.
- 2:21You are definitely a movie aficionado.
- 2:24This is the fifth edition of the book.
- 2:27How has the book evolved over time, especially with this fifth edition in 2024?
- 2:34Okay, well, this is the fifth and most recent edition and I'm really pleased and proud of the book.
- 2:42It's got over 500 pages.
- 2:44I've used the book as a textbook in courses in abnormal psychology and psychopathology.
- 2:50And as Debra knows, I used to be the associate dean for international programs at the California School of Professional Psychology.
- 2:57And I used film clips in my classes often and
- 3:02discovered that my students loved the film clips that I pulled from movies that seemed relevant to me, that seemed interesting, engaging.
- 3:12And I discovered that my students loved it.
- 3:16I taught abnormal psychology and psychopathology in Hong Kong, in our program there, and in Mexico City.
- 3:23And the students gave me lots of feedback about films that I should see.
- 3:28And those films have just grown into uh this book.
- 3:32And as I continued to teach and use films in teaching, I continued to write and the book continued to grow.
- 3:39And now the book's big enough that I'm gonna have to cut it back and eliminate a lot of text, because 500 pages is about the maximum that you can include in a textbook.
- 3:51I know this latest edition has about 1,500 films that you've reviewed and rated in this latest edition.
- 4:00How do you decide which movies to include?
- 4:05You know, it's a tough decision, and I try to look for films that will help educate students about mental illness or addictions or developmental disabilities.
- 4:19Almost every film that we talk about is relevant in some way to psychopathology.
- 4:26I don't watch films
- 4:28just for the sake of entertainment; I try to watch films that I can learn from and my students can learn from.
- 4:35You might be interested in knowing that in the first edition, we had to pay Jack Nicholson $300 to use his image from "As Good As It Gets" for the cover of the first edition.
- 4:49And then with the second edition, when it came out, we paid uh Russell Crowe $1,000
- 4:55to use his image from "A Beautiful Mind." And then for the third edition that came out, we couldn't afford to pay Jack Nicholson or Russell Crowe anymore.
- 5:06So we just got a depressed teenager to lean over and let us take a silhouette.
- 5:11So it's been a lot of fun, but I've got colleagues all over the country who will drop me a note when they see a film that is relevant
- 5:21to this book.
- 5:22I really cherish that and appreciate it when it happens.
- 5:25And so my viewing is guided by my friends and colleagues who recommend particular films.
- 5:32I've had lots of colleagues in Division 46 from APA, which is Media Psychology and Technology, and from Division 10, which is Art, Aesthetics and Creativity.
- 5:44My friends in those divisions frequently recommend films that I should see.
- 5:49Do you think that only students in psychology or related mental health disciplines...
- 5:57that you need to be a student or instructor in order to use your book?
- 6:02Or can the book be used by someone that just is interested in mental illness and psychopathology?
- 6:09You know, I started off writing a textbook for my students and the first two editions focused on pedagogy and using films to learn about mental illness.
- 6:20But we quickly discovered that lots of people buying the book were not teachers or professors or even students; they were people who just loved cinema.
- 6:29And that turned out to actually be the larger audience.
- 6:32So starting with the third edition, we shifted our focus and we kept
- 6:37all of the pedagogy, the critical thinking questions, and the structured mental status exams, and the patient interviews, all of that has been retained, but it's been stripped
- 6:49from the book and is now on a website.
- 6:53So when you buy the book, you get access to the website, and then it provides a lot of materials that students can use.
- 7:01For example, they can see a mental status exam
- 7:04of a character from "Fatal Attraction," for example, and that will maybe help them learn about the disorder, about borderline personality.
- 7:12So all of the teaching material is still there; it's just not in the book, per se.
- 7:18And so the book is now targeted at the general reader who has an interest in mental illness and an interest in films and wants to see those two interests come together.
- 7:30So I know when I was able to preview the book and look through it and things, I know when I was looking at the table of contents, it's actually structured with the different mental
- 7:43disorders.
- 7:45And then you kind of choose the movies that would best illustrate them.
- 7:51you know, As a therapist, as a psychologist, I know sometimes when I see films, you know, it's like, "Oh my gosh, that portrayal is not exactly in line with how therapists truly
- 8:04work or how they work ethically.
- 8:06You know, what bounds, boundaries do we have?" And so I was wanting to ask you, how do you balance cinematic quality with
- 8:17psychological accuracy?
- 8:19It's a real challenge for us.
- 8:22And there are a lot of bad movies out there.
- 8:25And there are a lot of movies that suggest, for example, that people with mental illness are uh likely to be violent and dangerous.
- 8:33And yet we know, we have good evidence to show that a person with mental illness is far more likely to be the victim of violence than the perpetrator of violence.
- 8:42And people with mental illness do sometimes commit crimes and do terrible things.
- 8:46But the vast majority do not.
- 8:49So we try to educate the public and we talk about films that present a misleading portrayal of what mental illness is or what psychotherapy is or what mental health
- 9:02professionals do.
- 9:03And we talk about that in the book.
- 9:05And so we include great films that are highly useful for pedagogical purposes.
- 9:11And we also discuss films that aren't that accurate or aren't that uh relevant
- 9:17or aren't that meaningful, but still need to be discussed because they present one of these false messages that we find so often in cinema.
- 9:26Can you give an example to our listeners about either a good portrayal or one that just stands out because it's really...
- 9:35does some kind of ethical violation or something that we would consider outside the bounds of what a therapist would be doing in therapy?
- 9:45One example that comes immediately to mind is M.
- 9:49Night Shyamalan's movie, "Split." And it's about a man with a dissociative identity disorder, what we used to call multiple personality disorder.
- 10:01You see him committing a number of crimes, kidnapping and murder.
- 10:06And he has, I think, 27 alters.
- 10:09In some ways, the film is a good springboard for a discussion of dissociative identity disorder.
- 10:16But there are things that simply don't hold up.
- 10:19For example, one of the alters is diabetic.
- 10:22The rest aren't.
- 10:23Only one is.
- 10:24And you see in the film the diabetic alter injecting insulin.
- 10:29And the fact is that this would have probably killed him and all of the other alters as well.
- 10:36He would have gone into a hypoglycemic shock and possibly died.
- 10:41And so these are the kind of things that I want my students to bring up and discuss.
- 10:47So, the most prevalent and recurring theme is that people with mental illness are dangerous.
- 10:55There are other myths that are out there as well, but there are just
- 10:59literally thousands of films, like "Nightmare on Elm Street," that involve characters who have a history of uh mental illness.
- 11:10Freddie Krueger in "Nightmare on Elm Street" was born after his mother, who was a nun, was put in a psychiatric hospital and raped by a thousand people, ostensibly, and...
- 11:21a thousand patients.
- 11:23One person wrote on a website that "Nightmare on Elm Street" is an example of psychopathology magnified and that uh Freddy Krueger was the product of a thousand mad men
- 11:38sperm getting all mixed together.
- 11:40And this is somebody who knows nothing about mental illness and even less about reproductive biology.
- 11:46So there are a lot of bad movies out there.
- 11:48And "Nightmare on Elm Street" is just one example.
- 11:51So I hear that the book is also able to maybe correct some of the misinformation about mental illness, about psychopathology, and individuals who are living with these disorders
- 12:05and illnesses.
- 12:06I think it does that.
- 12:08And I think that if anybody reads the book, they'll come away and be a much more sophisticated viewer and much more sophisticated in their understanding of mental illness.
- 12:18I know you have reviewed thousands upon thousands of films because you've been doing this for a long time.
- 12:25And I know when you've talked about this, you're watching like three or four movies a week.
- 12:32And so you've been doing this a long time, but I'm going to have you narrow it down to, what are
- 12:39your top three films of all time that you believe portray mental illness the best?
- 12:47What would you say that would be?
- 12:50For a film aficionado, that's really hard, you know, picking your top three.
- 12:54And there are so many good films out there, but I've thought about this and it's a question I'm asked often, actually.
- 13:00And my all time favorite film of all time would be "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Jack Nicholson, it's a classic film.
- 13:07One of the joys of working in this area...
- 13:10And I've been able to lecture around the world.
- 13:13And I've done Fulbrights in South Korea and in Thailand.
- 13:17And it was a joy for me to discover that many of my students had seen the films that I loved and were familiar with US films.
- 13:26That's a major export for us.
- 13:30And it's also a joy for me to introduce my students to films that maybe they haven't seen, but are classic.
- 13:35And so "Cuckoo's Nest" is one of those.
- 13:37I've had
- 13:39over 100 students tell me how much they've enjoyed that film and they just didn't know about it because it's been around since 1975.
- 13:47So it's 50 years old.
- 13:49It is available on streaming services and they always enjoy it and they're always grateful.
- 13:54So I love seeing Jack Nicholson play Randall P.
- 13:58McMurphy in that movie.
- 14:00And it is interesting because we know that,
- 14:05that Randall P.
- 14:05McMurphy is not mentally ill.
- 14:08He doesn't belong in the psychiatric hospital.
- 14:10He was arrested for having sex with a 15-year-old girl.
- 14:14So it's an opportunity for my students to discuss how the mental health system and the criminal justice system come together and how sometimes people with mental health problems
- 14:26wind up in the criminal justice system.
- 14:29So, "Cuckoo's Nest" would certainly be one.
- 14:33I had a professor in graduate school who told me that frequently on a college campus, the only thing that separates frank mental illness from harmless eccentricity is tenure.
- 14:45And I think there's some truth to that.
- 14:48So the film helps make that point.
- 14:51Another movie that I loved is "Shine," which came out in 1996.
- 14:58And it's a historically accurate film about David Helfgott, who was a very gifted pianist and a wonderful musician.
- 15:07And the film has its flaws.
- 15:09It implies that he has a schizophrenogenic father and that his mental illness resulted from mistreatment by his father, who was opposed to many of the decisions that he made in
- 15:21life, like going to Juilliard.
- 15:23But...
- 15:24It's a great movie and a fairly accurate depiction of what mental illness looks like.
- 15:31And then a more recent film that I loved and thought was terribly accurate and right on point was "The Father" with Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman.
- 15:41And it is a wonderful introduction to Alzheimer's disease or dementia in general
- 15:47and what it looks like.
- 15:49There are a lot of good films that deal with dementia.
- 15:52And uh if you have a family member who is going through that, or you're trying to cope with that, one way to better understand what happens with dementia is to watch movies
- 16:01about it.
- 16:01And so "The Father" is one of the best.
- 16:04I'm a big fan of Anthony Hopkins.
- 16:07He got his second Oscar for this movie.
- 16:10The first was for "Silence of the Lambs," and he's just a superb actor.
- 16:15And interestingly, Hopkins has been diagnosed in the past as having Asperger's syndrome.
- 16:22He's got a remarkable ability to master his lines so he can read a script one time and hang on to all of the lines, which I think is remarkable.
- 16:32So those are three examples of films that I think are wonderful illustrations and wonderful teaching films.
- 16:40Well, now I'm going to actually ask you, because we've got you as the movie aficionado, what are maybe some films that you found that personally you really liked, but just didn't
- 16:55quite meet the criteria for the book?
- 16:57Well, I often have to reluctantly leave out movies that I love because they just don't say much about mental illness.
- 17:06We still treat this as a textbook and we still want to have students read it and we still want them to learn from it.
- 17:13So sometimes I'll mention films in passing, maybe just in a paragraph or two that I have loved and want my students to see
- 17:22but aren't necessarily directly relevant to psychopathology.
- 17:25"Antonio's Line," an old film, about 30 years old now, and "Pelle the Conqueror," an even older film, are two movies that I just love and cherish and watch repeatedly.
- 17:37A more recent film like that is "Oppenheimer." And maybe you've seen it, Debra.
- 17:43It's a great movie.
- 17:45And uh I think it's a
- 17:47a fascinating historical film.
- 17:49And Robert Oppenheimer was an amazing character who struggled with mental health issues throughout his life.
- 17:57And when he was at Cambridge, he was depressed.
- 18:00He once put cyanide into an apple and left it for his professor to eat and then later realized that that was a mistake.
- 18:08And so he went back and recovered the apple before anybody ate it.
- 18:13But he really was depressed as a graduate student.
- 18:16And then actually as an adult at one time, he was diagnosed with dementia praecox, which is an older term for schizophrenia.
- 18:24And yet here's somebody who's just brilliant.
- 18:27In many ways it's like "A Beautiful Mind" because it reminds us that even people who are geniuses, who are brilliant, who have amazing minds, they sometimes have to deal with
- 18:39mental health issues.
- 18:40And so Oppenheimer was an example of that.
- 18:43Interestingly, Robert Oppenheimer actually gave a talk at an APA convention some years ago.
- 18:49And it was just fascinating to have a physicist come lecture to psychologists.
- 18:54And he pointed out that physics was an old science and psychology was a new science.
- 18:58And we had a long way to go.
- 19:00Just remarkable, right?
- 19:01That, what I think it shows is that mental illness, mental disorders, psychopathology doesn't discriminate, right?
- 19:12Yeah.
- 19:13you can be brilliant.
- 19:15uh And in fact, being brilliant can sometimes make life more difficult.
- 19:20One poet wrote, "Genius is to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide."
- 19:26Yeah.
- 19:27I actually think that is an important thing to talk about because I think people have a certain stereotype, you know, about who, what people look like with mental illness or who
- 19:42have certain mental disorders.
- 19:45And I think we know as therapists, as clinical psychologists, that
- 19:51people across the board have them and there's no particular way that they look, that they live, you know.
- 20:01I've spent my life teaching in medical schools.
- 20:03Many of my patients were physicians and nurses who were colleagues, but they were dealing with the challenges that life presents and I've enjoyed working with those groups.
- 20:15I've by and large had high-functioning patients throughout my career.
- 20:18But they certainly still are dealing with mental illness, mental disorders, psychopathology, but they're functioning really highly in these professional roles.
- 20:29Sometimes life is challenging and demanding.
- 20:31I mean, going through a divorce is gonna be depressing for anybody, no matter how psychologically sound you are.
- 20:38Yeah.
- 20:39I mean, you just said how Oppenheimer as a graduate student was depressed.
- 20:44We know how strenuous and rigorous graduate school is; it's not surprising that many graduate students may be depressed, may be anxious, may be having to deal with adjustment
- 20:58disorders because of the different things that graduate school requires of you.
- 21:04I just want to say it isn't just a certain type of person that is going to be dealing with these types of pathologies or illnesses.
- 21:15And our students have deal with things like student loans and student debt.
- 21:20And that's a tremendous burden.
- 21:22But we also know, I guess I want to put this caveat, that it is our responsibility to know when is it getting in the way for us to give competent professional services.
- 21:35So it would never be compromising the services that someone is receiving.
- 21:41Yeah, a lot of graduate programs in psychology require psychotherapy for their students going through the program.
- 21:48And that's one of the reasons you do that.
- 21:50You want to be sensitive to the fact that your own emotional needs and problems sometimes get in the way of being an effective therapist.
- 21:59Mm-hmm.
- 21:59And I think that is one of the things that I think for your book to point out good portrayals and bad portrayals.
- 22:08ah Because I think oftentimes that is not...
- 22:13by you being able to do that, you're clearly saying this is okay.
- 22:18This is what it should look like and what it shouldn't look like.
- 22:23So important in terms of the education of the public.
- 22:26You know, Debra, I've gotten a lot of ideas from editing PsycCRITIQUES for 14 years.
- 22:32A lot of recommendations for films came out of that process.
- 22:37And every week we would publish 10 reviews, 10 book reviews.
- 22:42But I brought back the practice of reviewing films.
- 22:45And E.G.
- 22:46Boring was a Harvard psychologist who started the journal "Contemporary Psychology:
- 22:53the Journal of Book and Film Reviews," back in the 1930s.
- 22:58So it's been around for a long time.
- 23:00PsycCRITIQUES was the online version of that.
- 23:04Boring had movie reviews in the very first issues of the journal "Contemporary Psychology." And when I took over as editor of PsycCRITIQUES from Bob Sternberg, I brought
- 23:15back film reviews.
- 23:16And so we would do about 50 reviews a year.
- 23:20And oftentimes I draw on those in looking for material for the book.
- 23:24So it was like continuing this type of work in PsycCRITIQUES, and then now you compiled it in these five editions of the book.
- 23:36uh
- 23:37we don't publish the reviews, but oftentimes I will select quotes or even an entire paragraph from a review in PsycCRITIQUES and incorporate that into the book.
- 23:47As, you know, I'm thinking about the book and hopefully our listeners consider the book, what would you want readers to walk away with after engaging with "Movies and Mental
- 23:59Illness"?
- 24:00Well, I hope that the students who read the book would walk away much more sophisticated about psychopathology.
- 24:07That was the initial intent of the book and why it was written in the first place.
- 24:11I think more contemporary readers who aren't necessarily mental health professionals may walk away with a compendium of films that they want to see.
- 24:23And we have a very large appendix in the book;
- 24:27we rate films according to a Psi system and we have the Psi symbol for psychology and we rate films using one to five Psis, one to five stars.
- 24:40And so any film that has a rating of four or five is probably worth a person's time to see.
- 24:47It has literary and film excellence
- 24:51but it is also a film that will help educate you about mental illness.
- 24:56A lot of people just buy the book to get those recommendations.
- 25:00They like the four and five Psi reviews.
- 25:03And so any film that gets five Psis is one that my co-authors and I have agreed on is well worth seeing for just anybody.
- 25:12So it's a way to guide your decisions about what to view next.
- 25:17Have you noticed any surprising uses of the book outside of kind of traditional academic settings?
- 25:26Whenever I travel, uh I try to visit libraries and I always check to see if my books are in the library.
- 25:33And oftentimes, "Movies and Mental Illness" is there.
- 25:36So I know it's being pretty widely used and it's been successful.
- 25:41Oftentimes, people do creative things with movies.
- 25:45I have a new friend, Ted Perkins, and Ted...
- 25:49just published this book.
- 25:51And he is somebody who was in the movie industry and he used films as a way to treat himself, actually.
- 26:00He dealt with his own substance use disorder by watching lots and lots of movies; movies that deal with substance use disorders and alcoholism
- 26:11like "The Lost Weekend" that are sometimes classic films about alcoholism.
- 26:17He wrote his book "Addicted in Film: Movies We Love About the Habits We Hate." He has developed a recovery movie meetup system where
- 26:26people who are dealing with substance use get together and watch films, sometimes in a group, and then discuss it afterwards, and they use films as a vehicle to support
- 26:38sobriety.
- 26:39So I think it's really interesting, and it is motivating.
- 26:42And if you're watching a movie about alcoholism or drug abuse every week with a small group of friends, it's not AA, but it's a little bit like AA.
- 26:52uh
- 26:53And it seems to have been effective and helped a lot of people.
- 26:56So I'm hoping to continue to work with Ted in the future.
- 27:00Yeah, it sounds like a powerful intervention with the media, medium of film or movies.
- 27:09You know, Ted's got some data suggesting that it really is an effective approach, and it certainly worked for him.
- 27:15Wonderful.
- 27:16Okay, so to end, what I'd like to just ask you is kind of what's next?
- 27:21What, you know, sneak peek into what's kind of percolating in your mind.
- 27:27You know, I've always wanted to be a film reviewer, actually, a food critic or a film reviewer.
- 27:32And life didn't take me in that direction.
- 27:35But I am reviewing films for Hogrefe, who publishes the book, "Movies and Mental Illness." It has spun off into other books.
- 27:45One is uh "Positive Psychology at the Movies." This was an early edition.
- 27:51uh More recently,
- 27:52we just came out a couple of months ago with this book with my good friends Lillian Comas-Díaz and Rehman Abdulrehman.
- 28:01It looks at the way that movies can be used to teach people about culture and multiculturalism and social justice and so forth.
- 28:10So that's one direction.
- 28:13I'll probably continue to write about films.
- 28:18Russell Crowe is coming out with a new movie called "Nuremberg" that should be out probably in November and I will critique that and so I'm writing reviews.
- 28:29And if you Google "A Clinical Psychologist Goes to the Movies," you will pull these film reviews up.
- 28:36And recently I reviewed "[The] Substance." I know you've had a chance to look at that review.
- 28:40"The Substance," which I thought was a remarkable movie.
- 28:45And so I will continue this, and about every three months I'll have a new review that's published.
- 28:51We're going to be working on the sixth edition of this book.
- 28:55And one of the things about having a book about movies is new movies come out and you have to keep updating the book.
- 29:01So we're up to well over 500 pages and I've just got to cut it back and make it a little bit smaller.
- 29:08So I'll continue to talk about the
- 29:111500 films we've discussed already, but I'll add new films to the collection in the new edition.
- 29:17And I'm getting old enough now, I'm starting to look for a literary heir to take over this project after I'm dead.
- 29:25out there who loves films as much as Danny does, be in contact with him.
- 29:26it's a few years away.
- 29:32I know that you sound like you take suggestions or if people kind of see a film and said, hey, this would be great for other people to know about and for you to kind of give that
- 29:46mental health perspective on it.
- 29:49How could they reach you?
- 29:50You know, I've got a robust online presence, so it's not hard to get information about how to get a hold of me.
- 29:57And the people can Google my name and relevant information pops up, or they can just drop me a note and it's first name dot last name, danny.wedding@gmail.com.
- 30:07So I'm easy to find.
- 30:09And many of the films that I write about, many of the recommendations come from my friends and colleagues.
- 30:14And so I welcome people dropping me notes about movies.
- 30:17And...
- 30:18Something that I found especially useful is that sometimes readers will disagree with the points that I make and say, you know, that could have been schizophrenia, but it looks
- 30:29more like bipolar disorder to me.
- 30:31And so I spend a lot of time teaching students about differential diagnosis and films are a wonderful way to do that.
- 30:39And so some of my best classes have been where I have half the class who believes one thing and the other half believes another,
- 30:45and they go at each other and try to make the case for their position.
- 30:49I'll occasionally have students debate diagnoses in films and if everybody's seen the film, the whole class can join in.
- 30:57This type of thing has been a great joy and I would welcome recommendations for films from anybody uh who drops me a note.
- 31:06I'm always grateful when that happens.
- 31:08So, Danny, you know, there are now different ways in which people can watch, you know, series.
- 31:16You know, we have streaming now.
- 31:18Are you looking at those types of things?
- 31:21Like, you know, I'm thinking about on Netflix or Apple or...
- 31:27any of those types of things?
- 31:29Oh, Very much.
- 31:30We deliberately go out of our way to pick films to discuss in the book that are accessible.
- 31:35Sometimes you might have to have a subscription to get to a film, but we look for films that are available online.
- 31:43And there are tens of thousands of films available through Netflix or Prime Video.
- 31:50And I subscribe to just about every service there is.
- 31:54One of the nice things about being an author who writes about movies is that I write all these subscriptions off my taxes every year.
- 32:03And other people have to pay for it.
- 32:04But so far, the IRS hasn't caught up with me.
- 32:06And when they do, I will meet with them and show them this book and say, this is a legitimate business expense.
- 32:14Are you looking at any TV series like I'm thinking "Shrinking" or "In Treatment" or any of those types of things?
- 32:23You know, I love those.
- 32:25Early on, I had to make a decision about what to focus on.
- 32:29There's just so much out there that it's really hard to do everything.
- 32:34So I made a very deliberate decision to only focus on movies.
- 32:39And I love shows like "Shrinking" and thought it was beautifully done and relevant.
- 32:45And there are a couple of...
- 32:47of ethical boundaries that are crossed and so forth.
- 32:50But my students enjoy talking about that.
- 32:52This new book on multiculturalism.
- 32:55Initially, it was "Movies and Multiculturalism." And then my friend Rehman watches a lot of miniseries.
- 33:02And in particular, he is interested in "Star Wars." And so we have a chapter on "Star Wars" in the book.
- 33:08We've expanded it to talk
- 33:10about TV.
- 33:11I don't watch that much television myself.
- 33:13I tend to focus on movies.
- 33:15That's my preference.
- 33:16But I have co-authors who watch a lot of TV and are well-qualified to write about it.
- 33:21And so we see that in the new book.
- 33:24The movies book gets larger and larger.
- 33:27And so I really can't incorporate television programs there, although sometimes in passing, I will mention "In Treatment" or "Shrinking" or a show like that,
- 33:37but only tangentially.
- 33:39So you heard it right from the...
- 33:42I shouldn't say "horse's mouth," but you heard it from the movie aficionado's mouth that he is focused on movies, but he has co-authors that look at other structures or formats in
- 33:55terms of that.
- 33:56So I guess Danny, as, you know, as we end,
- 34:00any...
- 34:01anything that, you know, last thoughts that you would like to leave with our listeners today?
- 34:07This book started off with a dream I had about giving a mental status exam to Norman Bates, the protagonist in "Psycho," Alfred Hitchcock's classic film.
- 34:20I woke up the next morning, and that was interesting.
- 34:22And so I wrote up the mental status exam, and that was the beginning.
- 34:26I found it really useful to have my students
- 34:30write up fictitious mental status exams on film characters.
- 34:35And so they'd do a complete clinical report that I'd critique and sometimes suggest alternative hypotheses and alternative diagnoses and so forth.
- 34:45But I found it a tremendously useful pedagogical exercise.
- 34:51And you know, I was never that dynamic or great a teacher,
- 34:56but I always got these great student evaluations because I brought movies into my classroom and my students absolutely loved it.
- 35:04And there's some work involved.
- 35:05It takes a bit of time to watch a movie, decide it's worthwhile, to watch it again, to pick out relevant clips, and then to go capture that clip.
- 35:15So I find that it really has been helpful as a teacher for me to
- 35:22incorporate cinema into my courses.
- 35:24And I'm hoping that other uh fellow psychologists can do this and use the book or not use the book, but at least consider using films as a tool for teaching about psychology and in
- 35:38particular for teaching about psychopathology.
- 35:40Well, thank you for joining us, Danny, today.
- 35:44I mean, I just think all the work that you've done over the years and being able to share your knowledge of both cinema as well as psychology and mental health has been so
- 36:00valuable.
- 36:01And so I just want to thank you for being here today.
- 36:04With that I want to say to our listeners, thank you for being with us and remember: Wellness is a journey not a destination and to please take good care and we'll see you the
- 36:17next time.
- 36:17Terrific.
- 36:18Well done, Debra.