The Professor and the Madman

A 2019 film by Farad Safinia (pen name P.B. Shemran). Screenplay by Safinia and Todd Komarnicki. Starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn. By Florence Rosiello, PhD

This movie focuses on the real lives of two men. It is based on a true story.

The film begins when British Professor James Murray (Mel Gibson), a self-taught multi-linguist, is hired in 1879 to create a comprehensive English dictionary, eventually published by Oxford University Press. The Professor’s task is to define each and every word in the English language. The project goes well for a while until the work becomes stymied from lack of help. This leads the Professor to petition people in English-speaking countries for assistance. His plea elicits many submissions, but none compare to the enormous amount (10,000) of exquisitely descriptive detail sent by Dr W.C. Minor, the ‘madman.’ Dr Minor (Sean Penn), an American medical doctor, has been imprisoned at Boadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum for murder derived from paranoid delusions that a soldier from his civil war past is trying to kill him. Dr Minor’s visual and auditory hallucinations mislead him to kill an innocent man he passed on the street. I wonder if Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) played a part in Dr Minor’s classical literary education, therefore, maybe, a delusional influence.

I loved this movie. Shockingly, it was totally maligned by many film critics who took it to task for being a narcissistically ostentatious film complete with Sean Penn/Dr. Minor’s ‘prima-donna’ exaggerated schizophrenic behaviours. Seriously? How do you overact paranoid schizophrenic delusional behaviours? Dr Minor/Sean Penn’s interpretation and enactment of schizophrenia were totally right on to me. Honestly, this is the rare movie where I haven’t bolted from my chair, angry at yet another misrepresentation of mental illness on the silver screen.

Getting back to floridly psychotic behaviour: Dr Minor/Sean Penn’s portrayal of schizophrenia was the most realistic presentation of auditory and visual hallucination I’ve ever seen on film, and I have seen schizophrenia at its worst. Way back in the very early 1980s, my clinical internship was at Coney Island Hospital in New York. It was around the time California Governors Reagan and Brown led the trend to deinstitutionalize inpatient psychiatric hospitals, which was also around the time very few antipsychotic meds were available. My internship was in the out-patient unit, which was, in reality, just triage from inpatient to the community. At the time, patients were typically medicated for three to five days, depending on their insurance allowance, therefore leaving them barely affected by the antipsychotic drugs available. To my way of thinking, it was the unusual psychotic patient who could be successfully stabilized with these early psychotropic drugs in just three days.

All this to say, my internship was to psychotherapeutically treat floridly hallucinating individuals. I remember one patient asked if I could see the bars in front of his eyes, another obsessively powdered her nose as she looked into a mirror. Perhaps her image assured she was alive, or perhaps the mirror blocked my image from view. A few patients feared being contaminated by germs/bad people to the point of psychotic agoraphobia. One young man kept looking up during our session. So, I asked, ‘What’s up?’ He responded, saying he is talking to the man standing next to him. At one point, this patient offered his chair so the imagined man could sit a little bit. Yet another patient, a woman, asked why I let so many white mice run around my office.

In addition, and unfortunately, quite a few patients self-mutilated to such an extreme they were hospitalized for longer than three to five days. I remember a patient who spoke about voices in his head constantly instructing him to hurt himself and/or exterminate certain individuals. This man’s homicidal thoughts quickly returned him to inpatient. I was told his struggle against hospitalization was violent. He thrashed and screamed at his imaginary aggressors as well as the very real hospital staff until restrained. Now, here’s the rub, this behaviour is almost exactly how Sean Penn portrayed Dr Minor’s screaming and kicking in his asylum-cell, trying to escape his imagined aggressor. Minor’s auditory and visual hallucinations were extreme, extensive, and violent.

One last comparison between my experience working with schizophrenic individuals and what I saw in this film: One day, my colleague’s patient, diagnosed schizophrenic, presented her with a jar containing his severed penis. An action of his own device. In the movie and real-life, Dr Minor severs his own testicles because he doesn’t deserve a woman’s kindness.

The film critics of The Professor and the Madman, specifically the very many who wrote negative reviews of Sean Penn’s portrayal of Dr Minor’s psychotic episodes, state it was overdramatized, just a show of artistic grandiosity, and therefore not like the real behaviours of a severe psychotic episode. Well, I guess some film critics live in blissful denial that such extreme emotional and physical self-tortures exist. Now, here’s what galls me: How many people/readers did the critic convince or bias regarding what is and isn’t mental illness. This might just be one of many reasons why people misunderstand or don’t want to believe psychological symptoms are real. For example, sometimes people think an accomplished, sophisticated individual can’t be mentally ill. The real Dr Minor was intellectually brilliant, well-educated, and served as a doctor during the civil war. He was smart and schizophrenic.

In the film, there are many evolving psychological twists and turns that create unconventional relationships, such as what develops between the widow (of the man Dr Minor murdered) and Dr Minor. During one of these twists, the widow’s heart softens toward him. This tortures Dr Minor as he fears ‘now he’s killed her husband from her heart.’ Dr Minor’s psychotic level of guilt throws him into a catatonic stupor. One film critic wrote it was just unbelievable such a small act of kindness could lead Dr Minor into a deeper psychosis. Really? I wish the critic had come to my office in Coney Island Hospital in 1981. One person never knows what another person feels, and this not-schizophrenic-film-critic’s grandiosity allowed him to psychologically assess what degree such a small incident could create an even deeper psychosis in an already paranoid schizophrenic. Really? A film critic’s psychological evaluation of what can and cannot set off a severe, even deeper pathological episode in a schizophrenic individual, well, to my mind, it demeans our professional training and the sensitivities we develop to diagnose mental illness/health. When movie critics negatively critique a story, they are also critiquing humanity. Film has a wide-reaching audience, and as a result, movies can alter attitudes, values, judgements and prejudices. Some of my patients who came from dysfunctional families swear they were raised by watching familial dynamics on the Brady Bunch. Unfortunately, the media reaches more people than we do.

No patient has the same emotional origin or the same symptomatology as another. Psychotic or neurotic symptoms are specifically designed by the specific personality. Some mental afflictions are small, some enormous, some meek, and some unpredictably violent even if the stimuli/trigger is minute. It all depends on the level of pathology. To my mind, Sean Penn’s presentation of Dr Minor’s schizophrenic actions in The Professor and the Madman is brilliant and true to life. Penn portrays the multifaceted and painful aspects of severe pathology with accuracy.

I live and practice in a small town of 17,000 people. The exotic beauty of this area draws many types of people, and they tend to gravitate toward like-minded individuals and become communities within communities. One like-minded group has a rather unusual reputation due to their philosophy on being in the world. An example of this philosophy: “People over 6 feet are creatures from outer space who are sent to infiltrate our population.” Explanation: The rationale or purpose for this infiltration is to kidnap earth people for sex/reproduction, then return the half-alien/half-earthling offspring back to our planet to bring us harm. I have no idea why the 6 feet tall people are considered a sign of having spaceship origins. Another example, “The exhaust gases (white trails) left by jet engine aeroplanes are called ‘Chemtrails.’” Explanation: The theory is aeroplanes leave white trails in the sky because they are full of deadly chemicals meant to poison us, meant to exterminate people in their/our community. I heard this from one of my patients, and so I asked, ‘Who/what group of people are behind this endeavour? Who are the pilots of these aeroplanes? Where are the factories that manufacture such chemicals? Who works in the factories, how did they know to apply for these jobs, and how did they get the chemicals into the aeroplane exhaust?” My patient had ready-made answers. So my final question was, ‘Why do they want to kill us? We pay taxes.’ According to her, taxes won’t keep us alive. She knows Chem trail manufacturers want people annihilated. “It’s in the newspapers. It’s a fact,” she said. Also, in these newspapers are articles about birthing a strange-looking short being/thing/not-child because, on any given day, she could be raped by some outer space sex-craved alien. This intercourse can happen either in the spaceship or someplace in the forest. My patient said she knows someone who went through the ordeal. This abducted person was eventually returned to our town of 17,000 people.

My patient, as do many people, live each and every day in a world of fear. They are tortured by their thoughts, by what they hear, what they see and read in their newspapers. If a film were made based on the life of these individuals, people like my patient, would the movie critic think they’re overacting? If so, what impact would the critics’ published reviews have on people watching the film? How might the review influence the general public’s opinion on mental illness in my town?

One last comment about the presentation of mental illness in The Professor and the Madman. I loved that whenever characters in the film said Dr Minor was crazy, the Professor reacted with something like, ‘Who isn’t?’ On that note and to paraphrase Psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, “We all more human than otherwise.” How often is mental illness dismissed because it’s not identified as such? How often is mental illness explained away as eccentricity? How often are individuals left to live a tortured life because their pain is considered overacting? And how often do people who don’t have experience in the mental health profession, well, how do they know behaviours and symptomology of a paranoid schizophrenic in a full-blown psychosis?

Kudos to The Professor and the Madman and to Sean Penn for a very real portrayal of severe mental illness. As Oliver Twist said, “More please.”

by Florence Rosiello, PhD.

Film Reviews of The Professor and the Madman

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_professor_and_the_madman

https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/the-professor-and-the-madman-review-mel-gibson-1203187563/

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-professor-and-the-madman-2019

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/professor-madman-review-1213724/

References and Links about Deinstitutionalization

https://calmatters.org/commentary/2019/03/hard-truths-about-deinstitutionalization-then-and-now/

https://sites.psu.edu/psy533wheeler/2017/02/08/u01-ronald-reagan-and-the-federal-deinstitutionalization-of-mentally-ill-patients/comment-page-1/

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-mental-patients-began.html

Sullivan, H.S. (1940)“Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry.” The First William Alanson White Memorial Lectures.