The couple's odyssey: Hollywood's take on love relationships

Abstract

Psychiatrists need to be aware of how their individual clients are impacted by issues they may be having in their intimate relationships and how couples issues, in turn, impact and are impacted by emotional and mental disorders. In addition, psychiatrists need to be able to offer sound advice to individuals in troubled relationships, know how to make referrals to trained marriage therapists and know how medications they prescribe may impact couples. Over the past twenty years, there have been significant advances in couple research to assist health professionals in offering insight to couples struggling with communication, conflict resolution, affairs, addictions and many other aspects of the couple's odyssey. Movie clips offer an effective way of teaching psychiatrists about common issues in coupling and couple therapy. The use of movies for teaching health professionals is well documented in previous articles and books on cinemeducation. This paper highlights movies and movie clips which are useful for educating psychiatrists about common clinical issues in couple therapy.