History Main / HollywoodPsych

* ''Anime/NeonGenesisEvangelion'' has Shinji constantly navel-gazing, whining and angsting about his problems instead of actually doing anything about them. Eventually, he gets a revelation that only what he thinks about himself matters. That is not how psychology works in the slightest.

[[folder:Anime and Manga]]

[[folder:Film -- Live Action]]

* HollywoodTourettes: Tourrette's syndrome is stereotyped as a condition that makes people constantly swear for no reason.

* RollbackAmnesia: A character is reset mentally to a younger age

** For that matter, many BPD villains in thriller films are often stigmatized as violent psychos who are a threat and need to be killed off. However, unlike this example and "Film/FatalAttraction" , which popularized this concept, most villains in the genre are simply portrayed and acknowledged as largely antisocial out for personal gain rather than their emotional instability and obsessive behaviors being a basis for their harmful behavior towards others.

** For that matter, many BPD villains in thriller films are often stigmatized as violent psychos who are a threat and need to be killed off. However, unlike this example and "Film/FatalAttraction", which popularized this concept, most villains in the genre are simply portrayed as largely antisocial out for personal gain rather than their emotional instability being a basis for their harmful behavior towards others.

* ''Series/MoonKnight'' does a brilliant job of averting this when it comes to Steven's Dissociative Identity Disorder...until [[WhamEpisode Episode 5.]] [[spoiler: Alters can't die. They are a part of the brain. They can go dormant, they can fuse with other alters, but they can't die unless the body dies, in which case all the other alters in the system also go. Possibly [[JustifiedTrope justified]] by the fact that Marc and Steven's body has already died and it's Steven's soul that gets turned into a statue in the Duat.]]

* ''Everything'' about ''WebOriginal/JeffTheKiller'' and other creepypastas about teenage killers. Insanity is never portrayed as a hindrance - in fact, it's the [[PowerBornOfMadness polar opposite]]: insanity makes you charismatic, confident, immune to pain, and more effective in battle (since you're "not holding back"). Psychotic episodes serve as a SuperMode of sorts, instead of making you helpless and vulnerable. Delusions like voices in your head or hallucinations are cool and funny and never stop you from functionally interacting with reality. And of course, you never ''actually'' lose control over your very thoughts and actions. Needless to say, stories like this are written by actual children/teenagers as self-insert fantasies, and psychology is far from the only thing they fail to get right.

* It probably was Hollywood that actually created the public idea of 'psychos' as AcceptableTargets, flanderized the most antisocial elements of psychopathy and psychosis and fuses them both into AxCrazy-ness.

** FreudianExcuseIsNoExcuse: The bad person's victims and the people who wish to punish the bad person address that the bad person's suffering does not make their misdeeds okay.

* Fiona from ''Series/{{Elementary}}'' avoids most HollywoodAutism elements however her intro episode makes the error of stating autistic people can't lie. However, in the same episode, Fiona lampshades Sherlock's AmbiguousDisorder, and Sherlock is very good at lying.

* StockholmSyndrome: Developing feelings for someone abusing you.
** LimaSyndrome

** Another episode had a girl with DID that came as a result of a car accident she was in when she was a year or two old, which killed her father; she blamed it on herself because she had been crying. [[Administrivia/RuleOfCautiousEditingJudgement Forgetting for a moment the debate that exists around the validity of multiple personalities]], two things are wrong with this: one, she was ''a baby'' when it happened, an age when she wouldn't have been able to even remember the incident, and certainly would not have been able to put together that her crying caused the crash -- basically, the entire cause of her illness wouldn't have caused it at all. Two, the accident would have been more likely to cause PTSD than DID.

* ''Comicbook/ArkhamAsylumASeriousHouseOnSeriousEarth'': According to the "[[InformedAbility doctors]]" in this work, ComicBook/TheJoker is not insane (a legal term, that one won't find a mental health professional saying in that context) but Supersane! Yes, it's a condition similar to [[HollywoodTourettes Tourette's]]! You know what else? It's a load of bullshit! Creator/GrantMorrison might as well have a physicist claiming that black holes happen because people fart while sleeping because of String Theory. Most interpret this [[Administrivia/TropesAreTools as a way to show that the doctors in Arkham are a bunch of quacks and that they are the reason no one ever gets better in Arkham]]. To elaborate, this "Super-Sanity" is that the Joker remakes himself every day because he finds the flow of modern life too stressful and overpowering. Now, firstly, there is no universally agreed definition of sanity, but generally speaking, it is understood by psychologists to be one's ability to function normally in everyday life, and how "normal" you are. So the idea that being ''Super'' sane means that the world is crazy is a contradiction in terms. The second thing is that what the psychologists are describing is actually more like an extreme form of Dissociation, a psychotic break from reality caused by trauma and/or an inability to deal with life's stresses. So Morrison and his shrinks are wrong twice over (assuming, again, that Morrison didn't just intend the doctors to be talking out of their asses). Subsequent writers have occasionally made use of the term "Super-Sanity", as well, though the meaning seems to have shifted somewhat. Usually it just means he's at least slightly [[FourthWallObserver aware of the fact he's a comic book character]]. Which could, possibly, turn his earlier diagnosis into major FridgeBrilliance. If the Joker knows he's a comic book supervillain, his behavior actually is perfectly sane. His purpose is to entertain his fans, thus his violent acts and his constant reinventing of his own personality (to keep up with readers' changing tastes) are completely justified. As long as people keep buying and enjoying the comics he appears in, the Joker is, from a sufficiently meta point of view, a perfectly functional member of "society".
* In ''ComicBook/GrantMorrisonsBatman'', the Flamingo was previously a law-abiding family man until TheCartel turned him into a [[AgentPeacock flamboyant]], [[ImAHumanitarian face-eating]] ProfessionalKiller by lobotomizing him. Real lobotomies ''do not work that way''. In fact, that's just about the polar opposite of what an actual lobotomy would do to a subject's personality and capacity for violence.

* ''Series/{{House}}'' managed this, with a kid who was totally non-verbal but who House managed to prove was very aware of the world around him.

** Mostly {{Averted}} in the two episode premier of the sixth season, where House is sent to a mental hospital, and it first looks like a mental ward out of the 70's like ''Literature/OneFlewOverTheCuckoosNest''. While House's [[HollywoodHealing detoxing in solitude without any medical assistancd is inaccurate]] (and unethical), the actual low security mental ward that House stays in afterwards is fairly accurate to how modern day mental hospitals are run. The head nurse is the polar opposite of Nurse Ratchet, being a very kind but assertive person who genuinely cares about all of the patients and wants them to become healthy enough to ''leave''. When House tries to cause chaos in the mental ward, the people in charge react by either non-violently putting him in a quiet room as a time-out, or trying to talk with him to understand why he's acting out. As well, House's attempt to help the delusional Freedom Master by enabling his delusions (which would usually be seen as a PetTheDog moment) ends ''horribly'', [[MyGodWhatHaveIDone much to his horror.]]

** Mostly {{Averted}} in the two episode premier of the sixth season, where House is sent to a mental hospital, and it first looks like a mental ward out of the 70's like ''Literature/OneFlewOverTheCuckoosNest''. While House's detoxing in solitude without any medical assostancd is inaccurate (and unethical), the actual low security mental ward that House stays in is fairly accurate to how modern day mental hospitals are run. The head nurse is the polar opposite of Nurse Ratchet, being a very kind but assertive person who genuinely cares about all of the patients and wants them to become healthy enough to ''leave''. When House tries to cause chaos in the mental ward, the people in charge react by either non-violently putting him in a quiet room as a time-out, or trying to talk with him to understand why he's acting out. As well, House's attempt to help the delusional Freedom Master by enabling his delusions (which would usually be seen as a PetTheDog moment) ends ''horribly'', [[MyGodWhatHaveIDone much to his horror.]]

** Then, of course, there's the first episode of the sixth season where psychiatry in House's universe apparently never left the 70's. Admittedly, the creators stated that some of the mistakes were intentional to make allusions to ''Literature/OneFlewOverTheCuckoosNest''.

In ''Film/MeMyselfAndIrene'', the protagonist clearly has Disassociative Personality Disorder (commonly known as Multiple Personality Disorder), but he's described as having schizophrenia in-universe, [[ValuesDissonance with several characters calling him "schizo" (which is now considered an offensive slur towards people with mental illness, but especially schizophrenics).]]

In ''MeMyselfAndIrene'', the protagonist clearly has Disassociative Personality Disorder (commonly known as Multiple Personality Disorder), but he's described as having schizophrenia in-universe, [[ValuesDissonance with several characters calling him "schizo" (which is now considered an offensive slur towards people with mental illness, but especially schizophrenics).]]