The Psychiatrist as the Repressor of the Extraordinary in Glass, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, 2019
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The Psychiatrist as the Repressor of the Extraordinary in Glass, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, 2019 Anna Sheen 1
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& Katherine Chung & Nashali Ferrara & Douglas Opler
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# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
While the field of psychiatry is often villainized in popular media, the 2019 film Glass directed by M. Night Shyamalan, is notable in that it explicitly echoes the views of the anti-psychiatry movement. The film portrays psychiatrists as knowingly suppressing extraordinary aspects of patients by means of false rational explanations. The origins of the anti-psychiatry movement were in response to errors within the field of psychiatry, and while challenges still exist in the field, both the movement and the overwhelmingly negative media portrayals of psychiatry in films such as Glass fail to recognize and represent the humanistic and ethical care that is now actively practiced. In fact, we argue that the field of psychiatry actually promotes the coexistence of both rational and extraordinary conceptualization Glass is the final film in a trilogy about a fictional world where people with extraordinary abilities exist. Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson), David Dunn (Bruce Willis), and Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy) all have superhuman abilities and all are hospitalized by Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), a psychiatrist who specializes in treating patients with grandiose delusions. She explains that their superhuman abilities are delusions and attempts to treat them with therapy, pharmacotherapy, and prefrontal lobotomy. In the end, her efforts are revealed to be motivated by a secret society whose goal is to suppress the existence of individuals with extraordinary abilities. Two earlier films explored a similar theme: in KPAX (2001), a psychiatrist denies a patient’s true alien identity, and in Shutter Island (2010), a psychiatrist refutes his patient’s fantastical delusions of conspiracy with rational explanations. The representation of a suppressive psychiatric establishment operating conspiratorially to reduce the extraordinary complexity of patients through disingenuous rational explanations or cruel treatments aligns with the views of the anti-psychiatry movement. This movement originated from public outrage against outmoded harmful paternalistic modalities of psychiatric care. Psychiatric approaches in the 19th and early 20th centuries were rife with problematic treatment paradigms, including “therapeutic nihilism” in which genuine cure was believed to be impossible. Treatment could be outright exploitative and inhumane with lobotomy as a particularly damaging example of knowingly “reducing the complexity of… life” (Partridge 1950) and making patients “easier to care * Anna Sheen [email protected]
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Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, Newark, NJ, USA
Journal of Medical Humanities
for” (Westmore and Pressman 1998). Such damaging practices should not only not be denied but should also be acknowledged and actively discussed to guide ethical, evidence-based progr
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