Girl Interrupted Film Analysis

In American history, mental illness has been one of the mysterious parts of human behavior. For decades, people have mystified, feared, and experimented on mental illness patients. From the 1940s to the 1960s acknowledgment and knowledge of mental illness among the general population increased. The movies The Snake Pit and Girl Interrupted showed the stigma behind mental illness, patient to doctor relationships, and the treatment in the mental illness institutions of their particular decade. The Snake Pit displayed the little education on mental illness in the 40s, Twenty years later, in the 60s, the film Girl Interrupted portrayed a better understanding and acceptance towards mentally ill people in the 60s. In the 1940s, few doctors were sufficiently educated to treat a …show more content…
The Snake Pit exposed the passive care that many patients received in the 1940s because the doctors did not understand how to be compassionate and respectful of mental illness patients. The little education on the needs for mental illness patients resulted in understaffed and overcrowded hospitals, often cruel and unhelpful treatment, and very little effective communication and therapy between the patients and society. Girl Interrupted exhibited an improving awareness on how to treat mental illness. Most patients received specific treatment that was catered to their needs. The doctors treated the patients with compassion and respect and they had begun to understand that a mental illness is more complex that a physical injury. Also, because of the recognition from the government, the hospitals became less crowded. Both movies are important today because they unmasked a shameful part of American history and they also displayed how far treatment toward mental illnesses has come today. Today, we continue to strive to understand what it means to have a mental illness and why and how the chemicals in the brain