It is essential to recognise the power films have to educate and broaden our perspectives. Movies provide a door unravelling various mental health journeys and address the importance of mental health awareness.
Here are five films that address mental health in thought-provoking ways and can be watched by people of all ages.
One of Pixar’s best movies Inside Out is riddled with imagination, is clever, creative, and beautifully animated. A light-hearted, engaging, and insightful watch, Inside Out is a great movie to watch to gain an understanding of the importance of general mental health.
Frances Ha can be viewed as a polarizing film — you either love it or you hate it. Regardless of which side you fall on, the film provides an undeniably fresh perspective on codependency and the anxieties of navigating adulthood.
Inspired by the life of John Forbes Nash Jr. and the biography A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar, the film highlights the journey of a mathematical savant living with Schizophrenia. It’s a powerful film that captures the challenges faced by a Schizophrenic person, including moments of paranoia and delusions that slowly succumb his career, and his life.
Anomalisa’s main character, Michael Stone, is an author and motivational speaker coping with depression. While Stone is attending a conference to deliver the keynote speech, he meets a unique woman, and a mild love story ensues.
The deliberate construction of this world provides a beautifully multi-dimensional view of the experience of depression, but it also introduces the rare but real neuropsychiatric condition known as Fregoli syndrome.
Rain Man is a 1988 movie in which a selfish and greedy sports-car salesman discovers, in the wake of his father’s death, that he has a brother he never knew he had, a brother who is an autistic savant.
