Shutter_Island

Running head: Shutter Island 1 Issues in Shutter Island Andrew Casey Introduction to therapeutic skills Fort Hays State University 2 The movie Shutter Island deals with a time period in the 1950s where a character by the name of Edward “teddy” Daniels, in his thirties, deals with some extreme situations. The movie starts off with Daniels on a boat heading towards Ashville hospital of the criminally insane on Shutter Island near the Boston Harbor. He is accompanied by his partner by the name of Chuck Aule throughout most of the movie. They end up getting stuck on the island and try to find a missing patient by the name of Rachel Solando. Daniel is denied many times in getting classified documents and even entering a part of the hospital. Daniels starts to get headaches and when he sleeps he has visions of Rachel Solando drowning her three kids. Towards the end he feels like the doctors are doing questionable experiments and treatments on patients. He also feels like they are giving him something that is causing him to get the headaches and that everyone is playing games with him. At the end of the movie he realizes that he’s not actually Edward Daniels but he is actually Andrew Laeddis. The doctor finally tells him He is the one that actually killed his wife and drowned his three kids and he can now remember what he had done and that he is actually a patient at the hospital. There seems to be a couple disorders that Andrew Laeddis can have. Some of the disorders that he seems to have are Delusional disorder, dissociative disorder, dissociative amnesia and even one that’s been talked about most, schizophrenia. The reasons I believe that Laeddis has a delusional disorder is because he seems to hallucinate about being in a war and fighting in combat. He then also hallucinates about Rachel Solando drowning the three kids. The headaches he was getting was because they had taken him off the medication and he was feeling the withdrawals of getting off of them. Therefore, since the 3 only way a person can be diagnosed with delusional disorder is if they are not having hallucinations from drugs or medication, so it’s plausible that he could have the disorder. The reason that I believe that he could have dissociative disorder, also known as multiple personality disorder, is because he believes that he is a U.S. Marshall by the name of Edward Daniels. A reason why he might have this disorder is because the trauma that he had endured by killing his family. He tried to block that out by making up this other character and living a different life. He may also have dissociative amnesia. I believe this because he has lost the memory of killing his family. He is unable to remember the real personal information about himself. He is unable to remember the traumatic events that he had caused. The last one is schizophrenia. The symptoms that he has that goes along with schizophrenia is the experiencing of hallucinations. He seems to have visions of other people. You find out at the end of the movie that his partner was never really there. He finds a woman near a cave at the end of the cliff that is not actually there at all either. When he as the headaches he believes that the people are trying to make him sick on person. He seems to have a blurred since of reality of what is right and what is just imaginary. You can easily see the cause of why he is the way he is because of what he had done to his family. He seems to do whatever he can to block out his past. He even asks at the end if it’s better to know what happened and feel like a monster or live under medication and treatment and not know what’s going on at all. I believe that he would have to get medication and go through treatment for a long period of time. Something that he did he wouldn’t be able to function well in public without medication. 4 He might be able to do family therapy with his parents but probably wouldn’t be the best. He might have to take atypical antipsychotics to help with the positive symptoms like the hallucinations, delusions or even the paranoia that he is experiencing. He probably would have to do cognitive-behavioral therapy to help understand his thoughts and thinking patterns. Considering studies have shown that doing both psychotherapy along with medication, it would probably be best to do them both at the same time. In the movie the doctor actually takes him off the medication to see if he can improve on his memory of the past. It doesn’t help because he begins to think he is someone else and doesn’t realize who he is until he gets help from the doctor at the end telling him his true identity. This may mean that he will have to be on the medication for the rest of his life if he wants to be able to function in a society at all. Even with both treatments at once I don’t believe that he can ever get better to the point he can function like a normal person in society. I believe what he has done has been to horrific for anyone to get complete help for. The medication may help him reduce or stop the symptoms of schizophrenia but he would probably not stop having the horrific feeling of killing his family and he would probably continue to block those thoughts. At the end of the movie he once again believes he is the detective Edward Daniels and I believe that is what really would happen.