Another Movie Guide

The Soloist – A Hollywood Movie That Raises Our Consciousness About Schizophrenia?

I watched the 2009 movie The Soloist with my friends Lisa and Frank on their boat the other week. One of Lisa’s friends had recommended it.

The movie, based on the book by Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, stars Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Ayers, a cello prodigy who dropped out of the Juilliard School of music and became homeless in the streets of Los Angeles because of a schizophrenic condition with which he somehow mysteriously became afflicted. Robert Downey Jr. plays Steve Lopez, the sensitive reporter who, always on the lookout for an interesting story, befriends Ayers after hearing him play the violin. The Soloist reminded me of the movie A Beautiful Mind, where brilliant mathematician and economist John Forbes Nash also suffers a similar mental breakdown. (I wonder what he would think of our country’s economic situation now.)

While I enjoyed The Soloist’s music and cinematography, I do not think we can make sense from the movie what made Nathaniel suffer a break in his consciousness and drop out of school. While it was shown that Nathaniel heard voices in his head, the voices were random, senseless, poltergeist-like ramblings that seemed to have little correlation to his reality. I am not a professional psychiatrist, but from what I know, this film does not seem to portray schizophrenia accurately. And if this is indeed so, the film does a disservice to schizophrenics and those who are trying to help them.

Although I do not work in the field of psychology, I hope to offer in this article another way to view schizophrenia: a condition where there exists a marked disconnect between what one instinctively knows to be true, what is touted as the truth in the outer world, and the inability of the personality to deal with the disconnect.

The understanding above seems to concur with a dictionary definition of schizophrenia: “A psychotic disorder characterized by loss of contact with the environment and by disintegration of personality expressed as disorder of feeling, thought, and conduct.”

After the movie I was reminded of the story of Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician who lived from 1818 to 1865. Semmelweis practiced medicine in two clinics in Vienna and came to be known as the “savior of mothers” when he discovered how to drastically cut mortality rates of women giving birth. Perhaps Semmelweis’s story can help illuminate at least some cases of schizophrenia. (Note: I am not saying this story describes all cases of schizophrenia.)

Before his discovery, Semmelweis was (quite understandably) severely troubled that the incidence of puerperal fever and the high subsequent mortality rates of birth mothers in his two clinics (10-15% in the First Clinic, and around 4% in the Second Clinic) were significantly higher than the mortality rates of women who gave birth in the streets. This fact was known outside the hospitals, causing women to beg to be admitted to the Second Clinic (where midwives worked) rather than the more prestigious First Clinic (where medical students practiced their education by examining cadavers in between births). Some women even preferred to give birth in the streets.

After much study and contemplation, Semmelweis discovered that the incidence of puerperal fever could be reduced ten-fold (from 18% in April 1847 down to 1.2% in July 1847 in the First Clinic) by the practice of hand-washing. But Semmelweis’s hypothesis about the importance of cleanliness was considered by the experts at that time to be extreme, so it was largely ignored and ridiculed. In fact, Semmelweis was dismissed by the hospital and harassed by the medical community.

Though Semmelweis was outraged by the ignorance and outright arrogance of the medical community and wrote open letters to prominent European obstetricians, his colleagues (and even his wife) suspected that Semmelweis was losing his mind. In 1865, he was admitted to a mental asylum where he died only fourteen days later.

I suspect that while Semmelweis was “losing his mind” the voices in his head were not random, poltergeist-like mutterings but the accusations and indictments of his colleagues, including his own unsettling thoughts and feelings of failure and inadequacy in protecting women from whom he termed “irresponsible murderers.” But… years later…voila! Semmelweis became known as a pioneer of antiseptic procedures!

I feel the Semmelweis story can be used as a classic case study. If Semmelweis did not die so suddenly, would he have later been diagnosed with schizophrenia? Would he have been drugged with “medicine” that claimed to control it? At which point in an individual’s life challenges does the personality begin to “break down?” What makes one individual successfully cope with apparent “splits in consciousness” when another breaks? These are interesting questions to ponder and explore–especially in these interesting times when so much in our society is breaking down. However, this Hollywood movie prefers to attend to silly stereotypes instead.

By the way, my friend Lisa did not care for the movie either because it did not give a realistic portrayal of the homeless. But that’s another issue.

Are you ready to make more sense of life? Subscribe at http://www.WhatEveryoneBelieved.com/ and receive a 7-page report (gratis) on reconnecting to your higher consciousness–which will help transform your life experience at the most powerful level. Christine Hoeflich is the author of What Everyone Believed: A Memoir of Intuition and Awakening, a 2008 USA Book News award-winning finalist that helps reconnect you to your higher consciousness so that you can make more sense of life.