About Us

Shrink the Script is created and curated by a single psychiatrist who works at the intersection of clinical practice, teaching, and film.

This project grew out of years of using movies informally in supervision and teaching. Over time it became clear that films could do more than “illustrate” diagnoses. They could train attention, deepen empathy, and help learners practice the skills they need in real encounters: noticing, listening, tolerating ambiguity, and thinking in formulations instead of labels.

On Shrink the Script, the core “curriculum” lives in scenes, characters, and stories. Each film guide focuses on psychiatric themes such as:

  • Diagnostic thinking and differential diagnosis

  • Interviewing and communication

  • Trauma, grief, and adaptation

  • Personality, coping, and defense

  • Ethics, power, and systems of care

  • Stigma, representation, and the lived experience of mental illness

Films and scenes are chosen deliberately, with an eye toward what is genuinely educational for psychiatry trainees and clinicians, not just what is popular or “psychiatry-adjacent.” As the project grows, content is revised, expanded, or retired based on experience using it in teaching and feedback from learners.

Our Mission

My mission with Shrink the Script is to treat film as a serious teaching tool for psychiatry, not an afterthought.

I want to help:

  • Psychiatry residents and fellows

  • Attending psychiatrists and other mental health professionals

  • Medical students and other trainees

  • Curious members of the public who want a more nuanced view of mental health

use cinema to:

  • Sharpen observation and listening

  • Deepen empathy without losing clinical clarity

  • Practice building and revising formulations

  • Connect diagnostic frameworks to actual human experiences

If a learner walks away from a film not just knowing “what diagnosis the character has,” but thinking differently about how they would sit with that person in a real room, then [Site Name] is doing its job.

Our Story

Shrink the Script did not begin as a website. It began as a teaching problem.

In clinical education, we have good tools for facts and guidelines: textbooks, review articles, question banks, lectures. What we have less of are tools that help learners practice the felt parts of psychiatry: the emotional responses to patients, the complexity of families and systems, the way culture and history shape a single encounter.

Film kept showing up as an answer. Certain movies reliably sparked rich discussions with residents and students: about grief, psychosis, addiction, moral injury, personality, or the ethics of care. Over and over, the same questions surfaced:

  • “How would you actually talk to this character?”

  • “Where do you feel pulled in this scene, and what does that tell you?”

  • “What’s accurate here, and what’s cinematic shorthand?”

What started as a few handouts and informal discussion prompts grew into more structured guides: learning objectives, key themes, suggested questions, and links back to diagnostic and therapeutic frameworks.

Shrink the Script is my attempt to gather that work in one place, refine it, and make it usable for others who want to teach or learn psychiatry through film. It remains a living project. As I use these materials in real teaching and encounter new films that belong in the conversation, I revise, add, and sometimes retire content.

If you have suggestions, disagreements, or films you think belong here, I welcome that dialogue. The project is authored by one psychiatrist, but it is meant to be in conversation with many.

Our Philosophy

At the heart of Shrink the Script is a simple belief: psychiatry is learned not only through reading and testing, but through repeated, thoughtful engagement with stories.

Film is uniquely suited to this:

  • It shows behavior, affect, and nonverbal cues over time.

  • It places characters inside families, cultures, and systems.

  • It evokes real emotional responses in the viewer, which can be worked with rather than ignored.

  • It allows learners to pause, rewind, and rethink, something we can’t do in live clinical encounters.

Because of this, Shrink the Script aims to do more than say “watch this movie.” For each film, I work to provide:

  • Clear learning objectives and psychiatric themes

  • Guided questions for teaching, supervision, or self-study

  • Attention to where portrayals are accurate, distorted, stigmatizing, or ethically complex

  • Links back to diagnostic frameworks, treatment considerations, and core competencies

Film is not a replacement for patients, supervision, reading, or formal curricula. It is an adjunct that can make all of those richer. My philosophy is that when you watch with a clinician’s eye and a learner’s curiosity, cinema becomes a training ground for attention, empathy, and clinical thinking.

I hope Shrink the Script helps you use film to become not just more knowledgeable, but more observant, reflective, and humane in your work.