Shutter Island Psychological Diagnosis

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Shutter Island Shutter Island is a movie about a Doctor’s life ambition to change the methods of psychologists in their treatment of mental health patients. My reactions at first to Doctor Cawley were negative but then I realized his motives and I was very impressed. I thought that Doctor Cawley was just another wealthy man exploiting on the less fortunate to gain more wealth and status in the medical community. I thought that Doctor Cawley was covering up not only a missing patient but also the secret experiments, such as lobotomy, on patients. He presented himself so that I empathized with the main character and his struggle to find the truth, answers, help the other patients, and escape off the island. In the beginning, I was just as suspicious as the main character, which was convinced that he was being drugged to be experimented on. It was not until the very end of the movie through the explanation of Doctor Cawley that the audience and I realized the main character was actually a patient there because of his severe case of PTSD, which is also known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, this is a serious condition that can develop after a person has experienced or witnessed a traumatic or terrifying event in which serious physical harm occurred or was threatened. The PTSD is what triggered his Dissociative Identity Disorder, which is the existence in one individual of two or more distinct personality states that each have its own patterns of perceiving, relating and thinking of environment. Andrew Latus (Leonardo DiCaprio) was in the army during the time of World War 11 during which time he had to endure millions of deaths and traumas. Another huge factor that played in his Dissociative Identity Disorder was that his wife killed his two children because she had a severe case of bipolar disorder and when he realized what she had done he killed her too.

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