Psychiatry and the Subjective: art’s role in challenging current clinical practice

Science’s alignment with objectivity has traditionally been posited in counterpoint to art’s potential to represent a subjective perspective. In this context psychiatric discourse could be envisaged as objectifying the patient in the classic doctor-patient relationship whereby a ‘case history’ is constructed within a set of predetermined categories or symptoms. This asymmetry is challenged in proposing that the arts have a responsibility to question the ‘labelling’ and medicalising of human behaviour and emotions, and that film may be the ideal interdisciplinary tool for investigating ‘the inner’, the subjective experience, of a medical condition. Examples are draw from films that deal with the representation of neurological and psychiatric conditions. These film case studies, directed and or produced by the author, are analysed in relation to the filmmaking process and the use of cinematic language to convey the subjective.