Since Dr. Packer signed her contract for a book about “neuroscience fiction” film in 2011, trends in psychiatric practice have become more convoluted and complex. Psychiatric theory seems to be traveling down a winding country road, with twists and turns. It seems that psychiatry is no longer speeding down an express superhighway, where a single lane leads to one destination only (the brain). A new brand of anti-psychiatry activism has surfaced, but this time around, it has “establishment” origins, and arrived in full force via Dr. Marcia Angell’s articles in New York Review of Books (summer, 2011). Dr. Angell was the editor of the esteemed New England Journal of Medicine, and one of the most visible and admired women in American academic medicine. Vitriolic debates followed Angell’s comments. Fortunately for film fans, such controversies can beget even more intense cinematic depictions of minds and brains, as we shall see below.
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