Mental Health and Senses

In our piece we have focused on senses and how they are affected by mental health disorders; Below is some research into them.

Schizophrenia interferes with a person’s ability to think clearly, manage emotions, make decisions, and relate to others. Specific abnormalities that can be noted in individuals with schizophrenia include:

• delusions and hallucinations
• alterations of the senses; 
• an inability to sort and interpret incoming sensations, and an inability therefore to respond appropriately; 
• an altered sense of self
• changes in emotions, movements and behavior.

    Symptoms of Schizophrenia
 "More positive symptoms include delusions, hallucinations and disorganized thinking because the patient has lost touch with reality in certain important ways. Delusions can cause the patient to believe that people are reading their minds or plotting against them, that others are secretly monitoring and threatening them, or that they can control other people’s thoughts. Hallucinations cause people to hear or see things that are not there. Approximately three-fourths of individuals with schizophrenia will hear voices at some time during their illness."

Disorganized thinking, speech, and behaviour affect most people with this illness. For example, people with schizophrenia sometimes have trouble communicating in everyday sentences or carrying on conversations with others; move more slowly, repeat rhythmic gestures or make movements such as walking in circles or pacing; and have difficulty making sense of everyday sights, sounds and feelings. - This information here will be key for our performance!
 
Negative symptoms include emotional flatness or lack of expression, an inability to start and follow through with activities, speech that is brief and lacks content, and a lack of pleasure or interest in life. "Negative" does not, therefore, refer to a person’s attitude, but to a lack of certain characteristics that should be there. - This information tell us that within our performance we must convey these feelings, this can happen with use of tone in the voice

     Treatments
Tardive Dyskinesia is the most unpleasant and serious side effect of anti-psychotic drugs causing involuntary facial movements and sometimes jerking or twisting movements of other parts of the body - To reconstruct this we can use body language or physical theatre in our performance, techniques often used by Berkoff

Schizophrenia Documentary (HBO) "Bob" -
This documentary about schizophrenia aired on HBO sometime around 1989

From watching this video I have been able to pick out mannerisms which we can use in our piece so that it is more realistic, it also gives us a sense of context as to how people would have been treated so that we can use some quotes and references in our piece