Considered one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films, his 1960 movie Psycho centres around the Bates Motel in which Norman Bates describes his mother’s mental illness and how he isn’t allowed to have a life of his own. It leads you to believe that his mother controls him and to feel sympathy for the character. After many horrifying murders it turns out Bates murdered his mother and born of his own mental illness, he took on this additional personality (his mother) and murdered anyone he got close to. Arguably this film set new levels of acceptability for violence and deviant behaviour in the movies and became one of the first now named “slasher movies”, some might say the best of all time.
The immense popularity and brutality of this movie gave the word psycho a very specific meaning for me. There was a recent song “Sweet but Psycho” by Ava Max. You may have also seen the recent series “Killing Eve”, which depicts a female psychopathic assassin. What does all this do for mental health perception and stigma?
It made me think that actually, there’s lots of words which include the word psycho; psychology, psychotherapy, psychosis, psychopath. It can be confusing what they all mean.
A psychopath suffers from a chronic mental disorder with abnormal or violent social behaviour. Observations and tests over decades have established that psychopaths have around 20 behavioural patterns including: superficial charm, grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, lack of remorse, lack of control and impulsivity. If you’ve read Jon Ronson’s “The Psychopath Test” you’ll know that in theory, psychopaths do live and take part in normal society without anyone knowing.
Someone with psychosis on the other hand is described as having a mental disorder where emotions are so impaired that contact with reality can be lost. In other words, the disorder causes the individual to have abnormal thoughts about reality including delusions and hallucinations which leads to changes in behaviour.
Psychology is the study of the mind and behaviour and psychotherapy is simply the treatment of mental disorders by psychological, rather than medical means.
If you have seen the movie, what did it do to your perception of mental illness?
