Shutter Island And Post-traumatic Stress

Shutter Island is a 2010 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, which also stars other famous actors, such as Ben Kingsley and Mark Ruffalo.

The main ingredients of this psychological thriller consist of an island, a mental hospital and an inexplicable disappearance. It is also a film that will amaze many people. The film takes place in 1954, which was a time when more and more mental hospitals were opened, where lobotomy was performed many times.

Federal agents Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule travel to Ashecliffe Hospital to investigate a bizarre disappearance. Is it possible that someone can disappear from a safe mental hospital on an island, without any shoes and in the rain? The plot of the film begins to change little by little until the film finally ends with a disturbing situation.

The treatment of mental illness has been very diverse throughout history. Michel Foucault writes about this in his book “Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason” . He takes Nietzsche’s idea of ​​”revaluation of the whole world” and applies it to the term “madness”. Something that is considered “good” at one time may be the exact opposite at another, or it may take on a new meaning. He also mentions that something similar happens with madness. Foucault does not defend it but only tries to explain the change that occurs over time.

During the Middle Ages, “lunatics” were rejected but not locked up, because people thought they had access to different types of knowledge. It was not until the Renaissance that society locked them in and isolated them from the rest of the population. The reason for this was that rationalism arose during this time, and if a person could be rational, he could also be irrational, ie crazy.

During the modern era, madness became something that aroused increasing interest among some researchers who began to look for a cure. At first, however, they used methods that had shocked us nowadays.

On Shutter Island we see a really horrible mental hospital: Ashecliffe. It’s a hospital on an island that no one can escape from. It is a totally claustrophobic and isolated place and the film’s music means that you do not expect to be greeted by anything pleasant. The exact opposite: it creates a dark and dark atmosphere full of excitement.

The film also shows us the psychiatric “war” that took place at this time. It was a time of change where new trends clashed with old ones. The old psychiatric model believed that the best thing to do was to send mentally ill people away and use methods such as electroshock therapy and lobotomy.

However, there were others who wanted to make therapy more humane and normalize patients’ lives. This meant that they were not locked up, but instead given medicine. The main problem, however, was that a large proportion of these drugs were not yet fully developed and were still in the experimental phase.

Dr. Cawley is the director of the mental hospital. He is a man who never wants to treat patients as criminals, believes that medication should be used and tries to “normalize” patients’ lives. However, all this is in contrast to the fact that he runs a mental hospital that is completely isolated from the rest of the world – a place where people are locked up and, in the worst case, performed lobotomy.

But the patients on Shutter Island are not just any patients. They are all people who have committed deplorable acts: they have murdered, injured, etc. But instead of putting them in prison, they are sent to this institution where there are different departments depending on how dangerous the patients are.

It is impossible to talk about Shutter Island without talking about what has happened in the film, but it is basically where you occasionally get new information about the plot and some clues as to how it will end. But if you do not want to know what happens in the end, stop reading now!

At first it seems like a detective film, but Scorsese begins to leave some clues that show that everything on Shutter Island is not what it seems at first. There are minor details, such as that Chuck can not pull out his gun as fast as a police officer could have done.

Then there are other things, such as how Teddy starts hallucinating, how he starts dreaming about his dead wife, the medications that Cawley gives Teddy for his migraines, etc. All of this will make you start to suspect that not everything is okay with the main character.

During the film, we begin to see how Teddy Daniels begins to have migraines and how he remembers things from World War II, where he went through some really traumatic experiences that affected him mentally. He had a hard time getting over what he saw in Dachau’s concentration camp and that is something that affects him at the moment.

When he returned after the war, Daniels lived with his wife Dolores and their three children, but he devoted much time to his work and very little time to his family. However, he did not succeed in overcoming these “ghosts of the past” and he had serious problems with alcohol.

Daniels is beginning to relive his previous experiences through dreams and hallucinations and you can see that he is probably suffering from post-traumatic stress due to the horrific things he has experienced in the past. As the film progresses, we see that it was not only World War II that had an impact on our main character. It had also left deep wounds that his family had left him.

His wife told him that something was talking in her head, like a form of snake inside her. However, Daniels was so preoccupied with his work and his own mental problems that he did not pay attention to what his wife was going through. As a result, his wife became worse and worse and ended up murdering their children. When Daniels finds out what happened, he kills his wife.

This makes his stress worse and he goes into a state of denial and gets a split personality. He invents characters such as Andrew Laedis (who is Daniels himself) and Rachel Solando (his wife). He invents a fantasy where his wife has died in a tragic fire, and in this fantasy he is a federal agent who comes to Shutter Island to investigate a mysterious disappearance.

Our main character creates a new reality and he uses it to forget what has happened in the past. He refuses to accept it and chooses to live a lie. He continues to talk about investigating conspiracies and experiments that occur on the island.

Dr. Cawley and his medical team let him continue his imagination while hoping he will realize that there is no conspiracy. They want him to become more aware of his past, accept it and achieve improvement.

Shutter Island is definitely an interesting film with themes that touch on the history of psychiatry and psychology. It is a masterpiece that plays with our senses and tricks us along the way. Nothing is as it seems on Shutter Island.