History Main / HollywoodPsych

* StevenMoffat has a tendency to write characters who are impulsive and oftentimes violent (eg, [[Series/Jekyll Mr. Hyde,]] [[DoctorWho River Song,]] [[Series/Sherlock Sherlock Holmes and [[spoiler: Mary Morstan]] ]]) and repeatedly referred to as psychopaths - yet ''all'' these characters are able to empathise with at least one other character, something a real psychopath would find impossible.

* StevenMoffat has a tendency to write characters who are impulsive and oftentimes violent (eg, [[Series/Jekyll Mr. Hyde,]] [[DoctorWho River Song,]] [[Series/Sherlock Sherlock Holmes and [[spoiler: Mary Morstan]]]]) and repeatedly referred to as psychopaths - yet ''all'' these characters are able to empathise with at least one other character, something a real psychopath would find impossible.

* ''DoctorWho:'' River Song's impulsive and oftentimes violent behaviour is often attributed to her being a psychopath - even though she constantly shows concern for the Doctor's wellbeing, which is something a real psychopath would find impossible.

* The arc in ''Comicbook/{{X-Men}}'' where Emma Frost seduced Scott Summers, is a clear case of bad psychiatry (probably an intentional one). Not only was she treating him when she made advances, when Jean brought up that her husband was being taken advantage of, to Xavier, who has [[InformedAbility been an actual psychiatrist]] for years, he tells Jean she is overreacting, and doesn't even consider Emma just might be violating ethics. And as a double blow to actual psychiatry, Scott is now portrayed in a happy relationship with Emma.

** To elaborate, this "Super-Sanity" is that 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 [[NoFourthWall aware of the fact he's a comicbook character]]. Which could, possibly, turn his earlier diagnosis into major FridgeBrilliance. If the Joker knows he's a comicbook supervillain, his behaviour 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 fact, successful CEO's and wealthy businessmen (not to mention dictators) can be clinical psychopaths - the traits described above make for an excellent way to shaft innocent people for personal gain without feeling a hint of remorse.

* ''ArkhamAsylumASeriousHouseOnSeriousEarth''

** ''All'' OCD will have behaviors in common with GAD; they're both forms of anxiety disorder (OCD's compulsions can be seen as a maladaptive coping mechanism for the underlying anxiety). And most people with anxiety disorders do actually find the crap their illness puts them through funny, at least in hindsight.

* [[ExtremeDoormat Fluttershy]] gets some questionable assertiveness training in [[MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic]], 'Putting Your Hoof Down'. Then again, other episodes have shown her justifying a spot on BewareTheQuietOnes, and she gets all her 'training' from a MotivationalSpeaker and his well-meaning, for-profit courses.

* Happened with Kylie in ''Webcomic/MenageA3'' from the moment she says that she is a psychology major. Undergraduate psychology majors don't have the experience or knowledge to do therapy or "fix brains," let alone have licensure, and no one with any body of knowledge about psychology would use the terms [[http://www.menagea3.net/d/20100619.html "fix your brain!"]] or nearly [[http://www.menagea3.net/d/20101102.html call someone crazy]] to their face. Not to mention "[[AllPsychologyIsFreudian Phallophobe?]]" Someone is trying too hard on a subject they're clueless about.
** Oddly enough, her attitudes and tendencies to act like she knows what she's talking about does approximate how a lot of first-year psychology students do act, so this may be an example of TruthInTelevision, especially since her attempts to "fix" people have only resulted in a slight, and mostly superficial, change of the neurosis.

*** Actually, the dominant psychological school at the time was Behaviorism. It wasn't until the Cognitive Revolution in the Sixties that it even became acceptable to even discuss Freudian ideas, and even then, most Cognitivist psychologist view Freud as being ultimately flawed. [[AllPsychologyIsFreudian But that is a completely different trope.]]

* Almost everything psychological in ''Series/{{Mash}}'' ever, especially the later seasons, especially the finale.
** This could be considered more accurate than a currently correct treatment. ''MASH'' was ''supposed'' to be set in the early 1950's, remember. PTSD and Survivor's Guilt were still "shell shock", and the usual treatment was to send the guy home and expect that he'd get over it, and Freudian psychology was still pretty much the king of the hill.

* There was a ''Series/{{House}}'' episode where having synesthesia was depicted as being like the conclusion of ''[[Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey 2001]]''. They wish it were that cool. In reality is really lame stuff like 7 having an intrinsic redness to it. And while there are slightly less lame versions (musical pitches having intrinsic colors is a version that many world renowned musicians have put to good use) none of them are anywhere as cool as that.

* The ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'''s Altogether Andrews probably suffers from DID, or something like it. He has eight different personalities, and none of them answer to "Andrews". He seems to get along with his beggar compatriots okay, except for the personality answering to "Burke"; he's not described in detail, but it's not pretty. Aside from the fact that Burke is said to be "kept buried by the other personalities", there's no indication that the different personalities are aware of one another.
** One other character puts forward the theory that he was just a meek individual with psychic inclinations who was overwhelmed by other personalities squatting in his head.
*** Supported by the one piece of evidence (aside from the other seven personalities "keeping Burke buried") that they actually are aware of one another; when the Canting Crew puts in a vote for something, Andrews hesitates for a moment, then raises "five democratic fingers", and the Duck Man declares that "the ayes have it".

* Christopher Boone of ''[[Literature/TheCuriousIncidentOfTheDogInTheNightTime The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time]]'' fame has either AspergerSyndrome or high-functioning Kanner's autism (it's never totally clear), but either way, it's stereotype city. Christopher has no emotions, no personal insight, no empathy, virtually no social skills at all, and is obsessed with- you guessed it, maths and science, which he understands to crazy savant levels. Despite his intelligence, however, he doesn't seem to know what commas are for as he writes in big long 'and then' lists, stating things that are happening around him but never elaborating on them.
** [[http://iautistic.com/autism-myths-the-curious-incident-of-the-dog-in-the-night-time.php This article]] goes into it more fully.

** ''Film/BatmanForever'' doesn't do much better with NicoleKidman.

*** "He's a wacko, and that's my professional opinion" is probably the Official Joke of the psych professions—that and the lightbulb one, on this very page.

* ''Film/ABeautifulMind''. Schizophrenic hallucinations aren't that vivid or focused, though naturally they had to be portrayed that way in order to keep the audience from catching on in the beginning and keep them from getting confused toward the end.

** To elaborate, this "Super-Sanity" is that 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 ones 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).

* According to the "[[InformedAbility doctors]]" in ''ArkhamAsylumASeriousHouseOnSeriousEarth'', SelfDemonstrating/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! GrantMorrison might as well have a physicist claiming that black holes happen because people fart while sleeping because of String Theory. To be fair most interpret this 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; this hasn't stopped a sizable part of the fanbase to adopt it as [[ComicallyMissingThePoint an accurate interpretation of the Joker's psyche]] though.

*** 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 [[NoFourthWall aware of the fact he's a comicbook character]].
**** Which could, possibly, turn his earlier diagnosis into major FridgeBrilliance. If the Joker knows he's a comicbook supervillain, his behaviour 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".
**** All this discussion could be Moot, considering this IS the Joker we are talking about. It's an equally valid idea that he simply managed to convince his doctors of something and is laughing his ass off about it.

* According to the "[[InformedAbility Doctors]]" in ''ArkhamAsylumASeriousHouseOnSeriousEarth'', SelfDemonstrating/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! GrantMorrison might as well have a physicist claiming that Black Holes happen because people fart while sleeping and is similar to the String Theory. To be fair most interpret this 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; this hasn't stopped a sizable part of the fanbase to adopt it as [[ComicallyMissingThePoint an accurate interpretation of the Joker's Psyche]] though.

** But neither L nor the other kids are ever referred to as autistic, and most of the kids are not morally deficient as they are pretty upset when L details his {{family unfriendly|Aesop}} approach to crimefighting. Near and Mello are the only ones who are intrigued and Near explains his own moral philosophy later. So this trope is either inverted or averted. The only explicit psychology in the entire series seems to be L's profile of Kira, which is brief but spot-on.

* 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.

* According to much print media and the internet, any previously healthy and contented young person can very quickly develop an eating disorder of potentially lethal severity if she (usually girls) see enough pictures of HollywoodThin people of their own gender. This is improbable, to say the least- the HollywoodPudgy trope may upset and confuse young people, but genuine life-threatening eating disorders are still very rare, are OlderThanCelluloid, and usually have no single cause, rather most specialists see them as an expression of complex psychological and emotional problems- most people are not susceptible to such extreme behavior patterns for any significant length of time.

** One Brazilian official nearly refused to allow a simple fire drill to occur because he was worried people would bite off their own tongues in panic. [[PotHole It went no differently than if it were held in Great Britain.]]
*** This was remarkably common in North America before the Our Lady of Angels school fire.

** For many years D.I.D. was referred to on TV as "schizophrenia." Anything even remotely resembling actual schizophrenia had another word for it - "crazy."
** Actually, the popular culture symptoms of 'split personality' tend to actually mesh better with bipolar disorder- the two 'personalities' being the same person in depressed and hypermanic states (and possibly a third when they're neither.)
*** This misunderstanding is likely due to the fact that schizophrenia literally translates into English as "Split Mind", though it's meant in the sense of broken rather than bifurcated.

* ArmchairPsychology

** Oddly enough, her attitudes and tendencies to act like she knows what she's talking about does approximate how a lot of first-year psychology students do act, so this may be an example of TruthinTelevision, especially since her attempts to "fix" people have only resulted in a slight, and mostly superficial, change of the neurosis.