What! Me Crazy? Mental Illness and the Cinema

'The release of 'A Beautiful Mind' (Howard, 2001) has focused attention on the issue of schizophrenia and its representation in the cinema...John Nash's story was adapted by Akiva Goldsmith in such a way that schizophrenia could be easily, yet sensitively, perceived by the audience, and for the large part manages to sympathetically portray the illness without resorting to cliche. Yet the cinema is littered with reasonable, appalling and everywhere in between representations of mental illness.'