The Death of a Swan From start to finish, the movie Black swan is a roller coaster of emotions, mental illness and intense topics. The main character, Nina Sayers, is a beautiful ballerina who is preparing for the role of Queen swan in her ballet company, a role in which she must play both the good White Swan and the evil black swan. Once she is able to achieve this role, her director, Thomas, tells her she must become the role; she has to “loose herself to become the black swan since she has nailed the white swan part. With this huge pressure from her director, her insane mother, and an outsider, her mind starts to slip away from her and drag her from reality. The pressures to be perfect consumer her entire well being and force her to
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The DSM explains the criteria for a person having schizophrenia as: having at least two of the symptoms of the disorder which include hallucinations and delusions, which Nina suffers from, experiencing momentous destruction in the ability to preform everyday tasks and to work, and having these symptoms for at least six months. Nina has a slightly different from which is characterized as paranoid schizophrenia, given her insane delusions and hallucinations. Although there are some known direct causes of schizophrenia, there were certain factors that put her at risk for developing this disorder. She suffered from psychosis throughout the movie which “Like a fever, psychosis is a symptom rather than a disease, and can be caused by a variety of triggers..”(James, …show more content…
Nina experiences her first major psychotic episode when Lily pulls her away from her mother for a night that involved partying and drugs. One of Nina’s most intense hallucination’s is when she sleeps with lily, but it is later known that it is a hallucination because the next day Lily claims that she went home with another man after that night. Another major hallucination is the night before the opening show when she has a sees Lily having sex with Thomas in the theater. Her second horrible psychotic episode occurs during opening night when she feels as though her skin is growing feathers and her body begins to morph, creating a somatic hallucinations which are when there are “feelings of pain or deterioration of parts of ones body or feeling that things are crawling on or in the skin or the body”(Beidil, Bulik & Stanley 2014). As she needs to transition into the black swan, Nina finds Lily in her dressing room saying “its my turn to be the black swan, while dressed in Nina Costume, this goes back to the idea of her thinking lily wants to take her part. There ends up being a violent struggle where Nina ends up stabbing the Black Swan with a shard of broken glass. In reality, the black swan was just an illusion and the person Nina ends up stabbing is herself. As she goes back on stage, she envisions herself physically becoming the black swan, “loosing herself” in the part when in reality, Nina ended up stabbing is
The DSM explains the criteria for a person having schizophrenia as: having at least two of the symptoms of the disorder which include hallucinations and delusions, which Nina suffers from, experiencing momentous destruction in the ability to preform everyday tasks and to work, and having these symptoms for at least six months. Nina has a slightly different from which is characterized as paranoid schizophrenia, given her insane delusions and hallucinations. Although there are some known direct causes of schizophrenia, there were certain factors that put her at risk for developing this disorder. She suffered from psychosis throughout the movie which “Like a fever, psychosis is a symptom rather than a disease, and can be caused by a variety of triggers..”(James, …show more content…
Nina experiences her first major psychotic episode when Lily pulls her away from her mother for a night that involved partying and drugs. One of Nina’s most intense hallucination’s is when she sleeps with lily, but it is later known that it is a hallucination because the next day Lily claims that she went home with another man after that night. Another major hallucination is the night before the opening show when she has a sees Lily having sex with Thomas in the theater. Her second horrible psychotic episode occurs during opening night when she feels as though her skin is growing feathers and her body begins to morph, creating a somatic hallucinations which are when there are “feelings of pain or deterioration of parts of ones body or feeling that things are crawling on or in the skin or the body”(Beidil, Bulik & Stanley 2014). As she needs to transition into the black swan, Nina finds Lily in her dressing room saying “its my turn to be the black swan, while dressed in Nina Costume, this goes back to the idea of her thinking lily wants to take her part. There ends up being a violent struggle where Nina ends up stabbing the Black Swan with a shard of broken glass. In reality, the black swan was just an illusion and the person Nina ends up stabbing is herself. As she goes back on stage, she envisions herself physically becoming the black swan, “loosing herself” in the part when in reality, Nina ended up stabbing is