Final Paper Proposal

For my final paper, I've been going through a battle with myself about what interests me, and what I'm passionate about when it comes to choosing a topic to research. My heart keeps telling me to go with what I'm passionate about, but I'm afraid that it will be impossible. But I'm going for it. So I finally found a topic that I really am passionate abAout, that does have to do with technology, at least a bit. My topic is movie portrayals of mental illness. I thought long and hard about this topic, and I came to this conclusion because of a little story I'd like to share with you.

When I was about 10, my brother who was about 15 at the time, started to hang out with the wrong crowd, get into trouble at school, partied a lot and his grades started to drop dramatically. When he got to high school, this all increased by a lot. By his senior year, my parents took him out of the high school and transferred him to another high school, away from the group of friends he hung out with. When he finished high school, he went off to college in Indiana. Not even a semester into school, my parents got a call from him. He was frantic and I knew it wasn't good news. My brother is now 26 years old, and has schizophrenia. He's been incarcerated several times, on several occasions for many different reasons. He has never been able to keep a job, and without his medicine, he wouldn't survive. So the jist of my story is that my mom and my brother were watching a movie called, "A Beautiful Mind." I was not here for this, but my mom told me that she saw my brother tearing up because he felt so connected to this movie because the main character also has schizophrenia. I think the portrayal of the characters disease touched my brother because it was like looking at himself from the outside. But on the other hand, I've read people's responses to movies that have mentally ill people in them, and they've said how unrealistic these portrayals of mental health are in movies.  So for my final paper, I would like to delve into this idea a bit more, and find out if movie portrayals of mental health are accurate, and maybe see if there are racial and/or gender discrepancies between portrayals of mental health.

For my final paper I would like to research movie portrayals of mental health. I would like to research if movies depict mental health differently across race and gender as well. My thesis for this paper will be, Movie and Television portrayals of mental health show inaccurate depictions of mental illnesses and create a negative perceptions of people with mental health illnesses. I plan on reading reviews of movies, watching a few movies myself, and doing research on mental health symptoms and behaviors, and one thing I would really like to do is interview/talk to my brother to see his feelings on this concept. I want to know if when he watched "A Beautiful Mind" if it was an actual accurate depiction of schizophrenia. Hopefully I'll find all of this out throughout my research, because I would love to know if my thesis is correct.