Psychological Approach on Black Swan Essays - Psychiatry

Psychological Approach on Black Swan October 19, 2017 For this paper we were asked to watch a movie and look at it from a psychological stand point. The movie Black Swan could be classified as a psychological thriller featuring a ballerina by the name of Nina Sayers. Nina works for a prestigious New York City ballet company, as one of their many young dancers who have the dream of becoming a prima donna. The ballet company decides to open the new season "Swan Lake" by Pyotr Ilyich Teahikovsky. Though Nina is very talented, she is also very reserved. This leaves the other's in the company to call her a "shy, frigid little girl." And when s he gets the leading roll it requires her to be both the black and white swan. While her reserved, child-like personality makes it very easy almost perfect for her to perform the side of the white swan. It also makes it very troubling for her to get into the character of the black swan. The black swan's character was seductive, and this made it very hard for Nina to get into character during this part. The film shows her slow fall into the pressures of the role and how they weigh her down. During the film you see Nina's madness progress. She ends up showing many differ symptoms of schizophrenia. This is a psychotic disorder where the individual suffering loses touch with reality and sometimes has trouble separating the two. The DSM and our books states the criteria for schizophrenia are: having at least two or more of the symptoms of the disorder, hallucinations and delusions, experiencing significant impairment in the ability to work or to perform everyday tasks, and they must show these symptoms for at least six months. Nina's show signs of hallucinations and delusions very often, one seen shows her in the bath tub and while she goes under water and appears to be releasing the stress from the day she opens her eyes under water and a woman is over her in the bathtub and the water showing traces of blood. In reality she was harming herself by scratching her back to the point of bleeding. Nina could be said to have paranoid schizophrenia, this is characteri zed by delusions and hallucinations according to our books and the DSM. There is no known cause for schizophrenia there are things that factor in that put you at risk of developing it. Stressful circumstances can be a cause of this. As the film shows Nina is under a lot of stress trying to keep and maintain the roll of both the black and white swan. The pressures she faces at work, home, and amongst the others in the company puts her in a more vulnerable state to these symptoms. Though Nina may have shown signs of paranoid schizophrenia, notably having may delusions and hallucinations that seemed to have gotten worse as the film went on. Her first psychotic episode didn't appear until Lily, another girl from the company, showed up at Nina's house to apologize for telling the director that she was crying and upset, and he needed to take it easier on her. While Lily may have had the good intensions on going over to Nina's, it ended up being a night of partying and drugs given by Lily. Nina has hallucinations in which she sleeps with Lily, but the next day when Nina confronts Lily thinking they has slept together she was shocked to find out that she did not sleep with Lily but with a man that Lily had left her with. This only furthered the delusions involving Lily, she later states that Lily is out to harm her and wants to steal the lead role from her. Nina then starts to see her face on Lily and others around her. Nina's second major psychotic epi sode happens during opening night when she finds Lily in her dressing room, after the first act of the white swan did not go as planned. Lily is dressed as the black swan and is claiming that she wants to take over performance. This ends up Nina and Lily having a violent show down that resulted