In the 1980s, Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) suddenly became the talk of the town. Tens of thousands of Americans were diagnosed with an illness that was previously unheard of. A trigger for this sudden epidemic was the release of a film, "Sybil". Telling the dramatic story of a woman diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder, the film was shown across America making Sybil a household name
In early times, evil spirits were thought to possess people and make them act in strange and frightening ways. By the 1800’s, the study of this hysteria led some doctors to believe one person could have separately functioning personalities.In this rare research film from the 1920’s, a woman has different personalities who believes they are separate people. One is a male that is not comfortable i
Psychopaths… we usually only know them from Hollywood movies. We never expect them to enter our real life. But, the psychopath is closer than you think. Experts believe their number to be as high as one in a hundred. Most of them function incognito in high-powered professions…all the way to the very top.But… it takes one to truly know one. In this intriguing documentary, Sam Vaknin, a self-procl
The question that really comes out of this is ‘why are boys behaving in this way?’ ‘Why is 90% of violence committed by boys and men?’ It’s not just in these few places (like video games or movies) but it’s in what passes for normal culture. It is part of the normal training and conditioning and socializing of boys and men. That’s a point that a lot of people don’t want to hear, but if you look at
A brilliant young man, he was appointed professor at the University of Basel aged 24 having not even finished his degree. His evanescent philosophical life ended 20 years later when he went insane and died shortly afterwards. Nietzsche’s argued that the Christian system of faith and worship was not only incorrect, but harmful to society because it allowed the weak to rule the strong – it suppresse
We are bad at making decisions. According to science, our decisions are based on oversimplification, laziness and prejudice. And that's assuming that we haven't already been hijacked by our surroundings or led astray by our subconscious!Featuring exclusive footage of experiments that show how our choices can be confounded by temperature, warped by post-rationalisation and even manipulated by the
Take ten volunteers, half have psychiatric disorders, the other half don't - but who is who?Over five days the group are put through a series of challenges - from performing stand-up comedy to mucking out cows. The events are designed to explore the character traits of mental illness and ask whether the symptoms might be within all of us.Three leading experts in mental health attempt to spot w
Jean Kilbourne continues her groundbreaking analysis of advertising's depiction of women in this most recent update of her pioneering Killing Us Softly series. In fascinating detail, Kilbourne decodes an array of print and television advertisements to reveal a pattern of disturbing and destructive gender stereotypes. Her analysis challenges us to consider the relationship between advertising and b
A Brilliant Madness is the story of a mathematical genius whose career was cut short by a descent into madness. At the age of 30, John Nash, a stunningly original and famously eccentric MIT mathematician, suddenly began claiming that aliens were communicating with him and that he was a special messenger. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Nash spent the next three decades in and out of mental