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Popular films are used to help educators teach the fundamentals of addiction psychiatry to medical students, residents, fellows, and other health professionals. During lectures, seminars, and other presentations, scenes from mainstream movies can be shown that demonstrate a variety of addiction related topics, including intoxication, withdrawal, long-term effects, family dynamics, psychosocial and pharmacological treatments, spirituality, self-medication, dual diagnosis, and cultural determinants of addictions.
Hollywood is often ahead of didactic curricula, textbooks, and academic productions when it comes to the substance use disorders. In the rapidly changing drug world, many popular movies offer a glimpse of new substances of abuse, cutting-edge methods of using, latest trends in rehabilitation and recovery, and cultural shifts before the scientific community acquires and digests this information. Therefore, students can be offered the unique opportunity to learn from the film images but at the same time scrutinize them in an academic setting. This exercise in discerning among what we know, what we don’t know, and what we may know in a few years is invaluable in the current healthcare environment.
The following list of popular movies is organized by primary drug of abuse represented in the film and by year of release. While this tool may be most appropriate for education and training in the field of addiction psychiatry, other behavioral health sciences can easily adopt its principles and apply it to their work. |