Most of the psychological concepts are on the brain and how it affects the behavior of a person. According to psychology, mental processes greatly affects the behavior of a person and this includes his learning process, emotions, and cognitive behavior. The physical and mental processes in the brain lead to different behaviors (Miller, 2002). In the movie, ‘Brain on Fire’, there are a number of psychological concepts that have been incorporated including how the mental state of the characters affected their physical being and behavior.
One of the main characters in the movie is Susannah Cahalan. At the onset of the movie, the character is on her right state of mind. Everything seemed well. She had just graduated and was working in her dream job as a reporter. She was also in a stable relationship with a man who was aspiring to be a musician and living away from her parents who had divorced. One day everything changed when she started feeling ill (Cahalan, 2013).
She began by having hazy perception episodes occasionally after which she started experiencing paranoia, insomnia, mood swings, and seizures (Cahalan, 2013). As much as people around her showed her care and love, her ordeal reached its extreme when the doctor failed to diagnose the disease she was suffering from. This condition affected the state of mind of Susannah to the point that she became paranoid. Her mind was affected to the point that she started behaving abnormally.
A good example is in the scene a few weeks before she was admitted to the hospital. She woke up to find that she had been bitten by a bed bug. She was convinced that she had bedbugs in her apartment and went ahead to hire an exterminator to look for the bed bugs which he did not find (Cahalan, 2013).
The following morning, Susannah faced difficulties at work and she was unable to come up with the ideas she needed for her pitch meeting. The idea of having bed bugs in her apartment obsessed her to the point that she settled on throwing out things from her apartment. Susannah state of mind continued to worsen and she became more paranoid and anxious. She was convinced that her boyfriend was cheating on her and went ahead to check his email (Cahalan, 2013).
At some point, doctors thought that she was having a psychiatric illness like schizophrenia when her behavior became more unpredictable like the point when she tried to jump out of a car that was moving. When she was taken to the hospital, she experienced her second seizure and this worsened her state of mind. She received treatment for months while being given other medications to control her anxiety and psychosis. After fully recovering, the scary experience remained stuck in her mind and she could be easily terrified by small things. For example, the time when her hand was numb, she was sacred and got emotional about it. But when she went to the doctor, she was told that the numbness was because she was typing too much (Cahalan, 2013).
The plot development of the movie ‘Brain on Fire” has integrated the psychological ideas as to how the state of mind of a person affects his behavior (Miller, 2002). The movie also employs the idea of individual differences that states that individuals vary in their personality. In the movie, the main character is seen to be in a sound mind when the movie begins and that correlated to her behaving normally. However, this changed when she became mentally ill and consequently her behavior changed for the worse
References
Cahalan, S., (2013). Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness. New York: Simon " Schuster
Miller, P. (2002). Theories of Developmental Psychology. 4th ed. New York: Worth Publishers.
