5 Psychopharmacology Movies

What to watch on the intricacies of chemical organization of the brain, mental health problems and psychopharmacological interventions in the brain.

Psychopharmacology for most people is a very mysterious area. Understanding the intricacies of chemical organization of the brain and use the knowledge gained for the correction of its functions really is not easy - both for the individual as well as on the scale of humanity. It is not easy and to make a film on this subject. Simply show itself neurological or psychiatric problems, and medication to bring the plot frames (too hard, too boring). And the more valuable examples of how writers and directors still make a drug molecule or an active participant in the plot, explicitly influencing the behavior of the reaction, the emotional state of the characters. And then all possible options - from the sudden healing to use dubious and questionable use of to outright harm. Improper use of many psychopharmacological drugs can be dangerous. They are able to block the higher brain functions (neuroleptics) dependence and addictive form (opioids) and so on. But those same compounds help to remove severe pain, to treat depression and seizures, facilitating schizophrenia and neurodegeneration. Another option: the drug may show a person "light at the end of the tunnel" to make clear that from a painful disease may get rid of the disease really overcome. Of course, it will have to work hard, but there is a way out, and the game is worth the candle.

Awakenings, 1990 (Director: Penny Marshall)

The main character in the film - a molecule called L-dopa. This drug returns to real life heroes, pulling out long-term semi-comatose stupor. Patients clinic again move, think, have emotions. But very soon there is an effect of habituation and dependence, which can not be ignored. This biographical history, and Robin Williams starred in her outstanding neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, whose wonderful book after watching the tape you just can not not read.

Love and Other Drugs, 2010 (Director: Edward Zwick)

The film begins as a story of sex with explicit erotic elements. But very soon it turns out that it is not in bed, and beautiful heroine played by Anne Hathaway is looking for love just saved from oblivion and congenital neurological disease. How could she live with that? And how to live with it to someone who really loved? How is it there and feel the people on the doomed genes will over time lose its health and the very identity? History poignant and exciting.

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Shutter Island, 2010 (Director: Martin Scorses)

Leonardo DiCaprio in 2010, again not received "Oscar" for the film, confusing, exciting and frightening the audience with unusual associations, surreal visions of the characters, their inconsistent and emotionally intense monologues. Time of action - the 1950s, when American psychiatry to make hard choices between lobotomy and chlorpromazine. Tablet or a surgeon's scalpel - what awaits the protagonist? Does he have a choice? And who he did: the police or the patient, the victim or the cause of all that is happening?

A Beautiful Mind, 2001 (Director: Ron Howard)

I urge once again see the famous film from the pharmacological point of view. The main character, is drawn into the black funnel of schizophrenia, creating around himself an illusory and dangerous world in which there is no joy, light, trust. Antipsychotics like to help, but it takes talent of the great mathematician John Nash. Fighting, great mental stress, unbending determination - and a very happy ending. Oh, if all cases of schizophrenia retreated to an effort of will and if all the hallucinations could "negotiate"!

Morphine, 2008 (Director: Alexey Balabanov)

And another story from a doctor - not a neurologist, and a district doctor Mikhail Bulgakov. Not Hollywood - realities and domestic surroundings, and yet at the next turn of the eras. The drug carrying relief from pain - is both an enemy, a terrible evil. And even a professional, ready, apparently, to the cunning of morphine, can fatally underestimated his ability to break the cord, turn the body into a shaking from withdrawal syndrome protoplasm, drag into the darkness and hell - with family, friends, the whole country.