Nathan Conrad example essay topic

Don't Say A Word was what Nathan Conrad heard from his daughters' kidnappers. This movie was intense and heart stopping. It all started out in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in November of 1991. Five men commit a bank robbery to steal one prize jewel.

After the robbery, the five men split into two groups and took two different get-away vehicles. One vehicle had three men and the other had two men. The vehicle with two men contained "Jon Doe" (name never mentioned) and another anonymous man. These two men planned on stealing the jewel from their partners throughout the entire crime; they were successful in doing so. It showed the two men laughing and having a drink as they split open Jon Doe's daughter; Elizabeth Burrows, doll to conceal the jewel inside of the doll, named Nilempha. Ten years later the movie continues on with a well-known psychiatrist named Nathan Conrad on the day before Thanksgiving.

One of Nathan's previous co-workers paged him and said it was an emergency to come directly to the Bridgeview Psychiatric Hospital to see a patient named Elizabeth Burrows who has just sliced a man with a razor numerous times. Elizabeth had been institutionalized for the past ten years in twenty different institutes; this showed she was extremely disturbed. When Nathan arrived at the Hospital, he met Elizabeth and found she had not eaten, had anything to drink, or spoken since her arrival. He also noticed she had numerous bruises and scars in areas known for suicide attempts. When she was a young girl she watched her father, Jon Doe, from the previous robbery brutally murdered in a subway.

The other men, who helped him commit the crime found him, beat him and threw him in front of a subway train. The men who did this were arrested and tried, but were now out of prison and looking for her. This is why she stayed in the hospitals because she felt safe. He tried to speak to her and with no replies he began to walk out when she said, "You want what they want", he turned and asked her what she meant.

She repeated herself and then sang, "I'll never tell". With this Nathan grew curious as to who "they" were. He stayed at the hospital until close to ten o'clock PM before returning home to his wife and eight-year-old daughter, Jessie. The next morning, Thanksgiving, Nathan woke up early and fixed his wife and daughter breakfast. As he was looking for his daughter, who is notorious for hiding in hard-to-find places, he noticed the chain lock on the front door had been cut open. It was then that he realized his daughter was missing from their home.

Just as he was trying to call the police a man answered his call and told him he had Jessie and Nathan had to do something for him to get her back unharmed. Dr. Conrad was given directions to get a six-digit number from Elizabeth by five o'clock that day. The kidnapper did not give any other information on the number, he just simply stated she knew what it was and he was the only person that could get it from her. Nathan was not to contact any police or tell anyone else of this situation or else his daughter would be killed. Nathan set out on his journey to save his daughters life and went to the Bridgeview Psychiatric Hospital.

Elizabeth was very scared and hesitant to go into any of her past memories for Nathan. He tried to bring her back to the day her father was murdered but she began crying and screaming for him to get out of her room and began banging on the walls with her fists. Nathan respected her wishes and removed himself from her room. He later returned to her room for more questions where she went on to tell him how scared she was and then went on telling him the entire story of her fathers terrible murder. He then pushed her further by asking her what it was that they wanted. Nathan took Elizabeth on an unauthorized leave to rein act the scene of her fathers murder in the subway where she led him to the island of the mysterious six-digit number.

She then told him that she had put her doll with the jewel in her fathers casket on a ferry ride to the island where she had stuck on. Nathan called the kidnappers / robbers back and told them to meet him at the spot they both knew where the number was, Hart Island, where Elizabeth's father was buried with countless other Jon Doe / Jane Doe bodies. They arrived at the island and continued in-depth conversation with Elizabeth where she wrote the six-digit number on a dirty piece of glass. The robbers took Nathan to dig the grave up only to find it was the wrong number, which is when Nathan realized she had a cognitive distortion and wrote the number backwards, similar to a mirror reflection.

So the robbers once again went to dig the grave up where they found the doll with the jewel in "Jon Does" grave. The head robber, Patrick was about o shoot Nathan when a police officer came and distracted him to where Nathan could get his gun and get him into a nearby hole of future grave sites. The movie ends happily, all of the robbers were killed or arrested and the entire Conrad family was reunited along with a new "family" member, Elizabeth Burrows. Elizabeth had severe depression disorders from seeing her father brutally murdered. She was diagnosed with many things including manic depression, schizophrenia, post-dramatic stress, and towards the end of the movie, a cognitive distortion. Characteristics of Schizophrenia are delusions, disorganized, disorganized speech, disorganized thoughts, eye movements, paranoia, and suicide.

(Text, 423-440) Treatment for the disorder used to be leather strapped to the bed of an institution but now we have Antipsychotic drugs for patients to take to try to lead a normal lifestyle. Two scenes in the movie where there is clear depiction of mental illness are: in the early middle of the movie, Nathan was searching through Elizabeth's files to find she had been diagnosed close to twenty different times and none of those twenty diagnoses seemed correct. He then grasped that Elizabeth was not as sick as everyone perceived her because she was faking most of it to stay institutionalized out of fear. So he diagnosed her with counterfeit schizophrenia, which meant she was lying to doctors about her symptoms and tried to make them believe she needed extensive mental treatment. Treatment for this would be counseling to put oneself back into the world. Another scene in the movie where I saw a direct diagnose was towards the end where he found she had a cognitive distortion, which makes a person see things in a mirror reflection, or backwards to what we see it.

People with this disorder write left to right; whereas we write right to left. Treatment for this would be education and hard work to make things right. This movie did not show much for treatment, it showed the disorders and did show medication for the schizophrenia, which Elizabeth did not have. For the cognitive distortion there was no explanation or any treatment for this in the movie. The movie focused more on the kidnapping / jewel plot more than her treatment for her illness. The ending was your typical happy ending to a great movie.

Elizabeth looks as though she is going to join this family and must be cured now that the "bad guys" are no longer going to hurt her.