Media representations of mental illness are highly stigmatized, which adds to the stigma we witness in everyday life, since media shapes the public’s attitude towards social phenomena. Schizophrenic individuals are often portrayed in films as genius and violent. Their symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions, are mostly exaggerated. With formal and semiotic analysis, we examine some sections of the films The Beautiful Mind (Grazer and Howard, 2001) and The Soloist (Foster, Krasnoff and Wright, 2009), which portray talented individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia. The sections analysed refer to the symptoms of schizophrenia, genius and violence in relation to this mental disorder. In the diploma thesis, representations of schizophrenic people, their symptoms and the links between mental disorder and genius or violence are explored through formal and semiotic analysis and film codes.
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