The Theme
The theme of my project will be based on the psychology of the mind; disorders and mental illnesses to be specific. Your brain is a powerful learning machine that absorbs everything given to it, like a sponge. But what happens when it overflows? Similar to the sponge, the brain is soft and fragile and can be easily damaged and manipulated; be it by or against your will.
Yes, it is a powerful and very useful existence, however the brain is not your friend. Technically speaking, the brain is far more knowledgeable than the being carrying it. In most cases we don’t know as much as our brain does, for example; the brain knows exactly how to make the body walk and there is a procedure, we on the other hand…just somehow do it without knowing. In other words: the body is a tool for the brain rather than the other way around.
There are always harsh psychological consequences to everything that happens, some worse than others and this all goes down to how your brains reacts to situations. Anything and nothing can lead to a mental illness or disorders, which is what I mean by The Dark Mind. How the mind can mess up a persons mental state and to what extent it can go to. Every mental illness is a dark hole caused by the brain doing what it deems right.
By The Dark Mind I mean mental disorders. Venturing into the dark side of the mind where you’re not in control. In most cases these are caused by your brain reacting to situations [this does not include natural born or inherited psychological illness’].
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Judgement of the Title
I began by asking people what they thought the title The Dark Mind meant. This helped me get an insight on the current psychological states of the respondents and their way of thinking, since these answers will vaguely reflect the individuals way of thinking and personal interests.
Answers given:
- The mind of a criminal
- The personality of a person/character
- World war II
- The reason politics exist
- Gore
- Mental state- depression, fear, isolation
- “It sounds like a book title”
- Negative thoughts, the voice in your head “you’re not good enough
When I searched the title on Google images, I was granted with the following page. The search consists of popular images based on the world wide web users interpretation of The Dark Mind.
I found this to be a very interesting bit of research to begin with as it directly relates to my project and is a good starting point for me to go through with this project.
This deemed very interesting to me because of all the variety of answers given by people of different age, profession and interest. For example; a criminal psychology student assumed it meant a killers mind, and a person who’s a fan of horror and graphic films said gore, the answer reflecting their personal interest.
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Theme Research
Examples of mental disorders:
- Schizophrenia
- a psychotic disorder, where the sufferer experiences a break from reality in episodes [non constant, sometimes they’re “normal” sometimes they’re not] different symptoms [feeling they’re more important than others, depression, hearing voices, etc.] it is one of many brain diseases that may include delusions, loss of personality, confusion, agitation, social withdrawal and bizarre behaviour.
- DID [Dissociative Identity Disorder]; formerly know as Multiple Personality disorder
- a dissociative disorder, is where the sufferer is characterized primarily by 2 or more distinct personalities recurrently taking control over them.
- Folie à Deux French
- for “a madness shared my two” or “shared psychotic disorder” a delusional disorder, shared by two or, occasionally, more people with close emotional ties [folie à trois, folie à quatre, folie à famille, and can even involve pets] a delusion develops in an individual in the context of a close relationship with another person who have an already established delusion.
- Hikikomori
- Japanese for "pulling inward" or "being confined." social withdrawal or extreme isolation caused by forms of stress people who refuse to leave their house and, thus, isolate themselves from society in their homes for a period longer than six months, sometimes measured in years.
- Bipolar disorder; formerly know as manic depression
- a mood disorder, is a condition that affects your moods, which can swing from one extreme to another unlike simple mood swings, each extreme episode of bipolar disorder can last for several weeks or longer, and some people may not experience a “normal” mood very often. The list goes on; those are only a small fraction of the numbers of mental disorders. In many cases, a disorder is a coping mechanism. It’s a way of the brain trying to make sense of a traumatic occasion and help you through it by deciding what it thinks is the best option. Therefore, if the brain thinks the best way for you to deal with the death of a loved one is to keep away from everyone else and not get close to anyone to avoid the repetition of pain, it can easily go down the route of developing hikikomori.
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Further Research
Films:
- Perfect Blue
- Norwegian Wood
- Shutter Island
- Othello
- Fight Club
- Psycho
- Wonderland
- Scrubs
- ER
- Huff United States of Tara
- Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
- Othello, by William Shakespeare
- Alice in Wonderland, by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
- Fight Club1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk
- All in the Mind, by Alastair Campbell
- www.mentalhealth.org.uk/
- www.mind.org.uk/
- www.psychcentral.com
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