Friday, August 30, 2013

X-Men and psychiatry (3)

X-Men and psychiatry (1)
X-Men and psychiatry (2)

In X-Men: The Last Stand, the story begins with an episode of young Jean Grey. Charles Xavier (Professor X) and his friend, Erik Magnus Lehnsherr (Magneto) attempt to encourage her to enter the school for gifted youngsters. Her parents seem to wonder whether the explanation of Xavier is trustworthy. In my opinion, However, their hesitation is only mimicking. They must want to send Jean into an isolated facility. Maybe the parents have been damaged a lot because of Jean's strange behaviors.
This situation is as if the parents accept to hospitalize their child involuntarily. So, I cannot avoid being filled with tears whenever watching this scene.

Then, "the cure" is invented, which can suppress the ability of the mutants. The members of X-Men are shaken. Is the mutation to be cured? They have controlled the power to contribute to the society. If the power is to be eliminated by a medicine, what is their dream?
We sometimes meet a patient who has a kind of delusions. Some of them are afraid to lose the psychotic symptoms. If the delusion disappears, he has to notice that he is only a person, not a superhuman. Treating such patients, we should be cautious.

The heroine, Jean Grey has two personalities: one is polite and superficial, and the other "Phoenix" is wild, aggressive, and quite destructive.
Using the term of psychiatry, she is suffering from dissociative identity disorder.
The main personality Jean cannot recognize the entity of Phoenix, but Phoenix knows Jean and hates her weakness. Thus, her fury and envy killed Cyclops, the lover of Jean.

It seems that Jean has also borderline personality. She always feels alone. She behaves politely but she is not satisfied at all. So, she wants Wolverine besides Cyclops.
Professor X tries to seal her real ability. He hypnotizes her to control her destructive instinct. But Wolverine opposed to Professor to let her free.
It is a metaphor of controlling one's psychotic symptoms by coercive means such as seclusion.
On the other hand, Magneto accepts the power of Jean as itself. He resembles "Anti-psychiatry". Both approaches of the two giants results in the ruin. Professor is killed by Jean, and Magneto abandons her. It looks like the patterns of failures to deal with offenders with mental disorders, even too stereotyped.

This film told me a lot of things about the difficulty of psychiatry. I recommend to watch it to whoever is willing to engage in this region.

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