It’s schizophrenia awareness
week this week and I’m going to contribute by writing about something that may
seem like a subtle, mental health pedant niggle, but is actually a big
contributing factor to the stigma people with the diagnosis face.
So when I was 15 through to,
oh…I guess 17, Donnie Darko was one of my favourite films. I love dark sci-fi,
and it seemed obvious to me that Donnie Darko was a sci-fi, if you watch the
director’s cut especially, this seems abundantly clear. So it didn't bother me
too much in the fledgling years of my study of psychology that the character is
given the diagnosis of Paranoid Schizophrenia, of course the psychologist got
it wrong, she couldn't possibly know he’s actually involved in a time wormhole
thingummy.
The problem is that there are
parts of the story where Donnie is taken over by Frank the rabbit, his
‘hallucination’, and made to do strange and violent things he has no awareness
of.
