The film industry is often accused of exaggerating, downplaying, or perpetuating stereotypes about mental illness. But this is far from the whole story; there have been many great, delicately nuanced portrayals of mental illness in cinema and, as a result, a vast panoply of films—with budgets big and small—have been used by academics looking to educate people about issues of the mind. For example, a psychiatrist might use Silver Linings Playbook to illustrate what bipolar disorder looks like, Virginia Woolf drama The Hours for a compelling presentation of depression, or Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine to poignantly display the effects of histrionic personality disorder, a condition that is difficult to convey to students using words and a computer screen alone. He Loves Me… He Loves Me Not, meanwhile, offers a pretty authentic depiction of a delusional disorder courtesy of Audrey Tautou, while Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind shines a light on the severe schizophrenia of late mathematician John Nash.

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