Requiem For A Dream Psychology

In the movie Requiem for a Dream (2000), the character Sara Goldfarb played by Ellen Burstyn can be assumed to be afflicted with stimulant-use disorder and stimulant-induced psychosis, unfortunately, she was unable to be correctly treated for these two diagnoses and was instead treated for psychosis due to schizophrenia. Due to this, the paper will be aiming to show the reasoning as to why the two diagnoses better fit what she is going through and to show a difference in stimulant-induced psychosis and schizophrenia to explore what could have been done to treat her better and put her in a situation where she would be more likely to get back on her feet.

Diagnoses

Substance Use Disorder

In the movie directed by Aronofsky (2000), Sara Goldfarb

In this hallucination, she saw her refrigerator moving to attack her. In this hallucination, she could both hear and see the refrigerator moving toward her. This caused Goldfarb to run out of her house and go to the TV station to see when she will go onto TV, on the way to and at the station she showed social impairment.

In the text written by the APA (2022), they wrote about the criteria that needed to be met for substance-induced psychosis. One criterion for this diagnosis is that a person has delusions and/or hallucinations. This is supported because she hallucinated about her fridge attacking her and delusions about going onto the show. Three criteria for this diagnosis are that the hallucinations happened around the time the person took the drug, that the substance they took can cause hallucinations, and that the hallucinations cannot be explained by anything else. These all have been supported because this hallucination only started after she took a large number of diet pills; these diet pills are known to have amphetamines and can cause hallucinations when taken in the same way that Goldfarb