Depiction of Mental Illness in Film and Association with Financial and Critical Success

Film and cinema are an important part of American culture and discourse. In recent years, there have been increasing discussions around the media portrayal of suicide and psychiatric illness and its subsequent impact on prejudice towards individuals with mental health issues. To date, there is no published work quantifying the depiction of mental illness in film. In this work we use movie plot descriptions to identify movies that depict mental illness and compare their financial and critical success to all movies released during the same time period.