[Partless]

Hi, one of my siblings has schizophrenia and I got traumatized when she was undergoing treatment and one way it's been helpful for me to try to deal with this (aside from therapy and pills) is to try to desensitize myself to some of the symptoms (in particular body language during psychotic episode which still frightens me to death, like the chaos, the paranoid looks, difficulty of communicating with her, etc) through watching accurate documentaries or movies/TV shows about schizophrenia. I've seen several, some included here:

Julien Donkey-Boy
A beautiful Mind
Clean, Shaven
Canvas
Shine (though apparently that's schizo-affective)

No documentaries yet.

I don't know how accurate these movies are, and I think some argue that A Beautiful Mind is not very accurate and that it's more the Hollywood version (or perhaps not representative enough, given that not every person with schizophrenia is a math genius). I found Shine to be accurate, especially the early parts I really got a sense of a psychotic illness in Rush's body language, the way he was talking and mumbling, etc. Julien Donkey-Boy was also good in terms of body language, though the movie was very disjointed and the person with Sz was not the only focus on the film. Clean, Shaven was good, but Canvas was like Lifetime version of the real thing, subdued and weak.

I appreciate any guidance or help you can provide me, to help me get out of this PTSD hell-hole.

[Travelinglady]

Hello, Partless, and welcome to Psych Central! Thanks for this post. I'm sure there are more movies or documentaries that are accurate. At least I hope so, but I can't think of any off hand.

The only thing I know that was "wrong" about "The Beautiful Mind" was that the man didn't really have visual hallucinations. A therapist told me that, anyway.

[pachyderm]

A Beautiful Mind is a book too, and you can compare it to the movie.