Unsane: We Asked A Psychologist To Explain The Terrifying Themes In The New Film About Gaslighting

Not being able to trust your own mind is a terrifying concept. We’ve all come close at one point or another; be it questioning our perception of something, doubting our decisions or feeling unable to follow an instinct that once upon a time would have made total sense. It’s this fear (and actuality) that is at the core of the new Steven Soderbergh film, Unsane. It stars The Crown’s Clare Foy and, we’re not going to lie to you, it makes for a pretty uncomfortable watch.

Filmed entirely on an iPhone, we watch as Foy’s character Sawyer Valentino is involuntarily incarcerated in a mental institution after seeking some help – she had recently moved to Pennsylvania to try and escape her stalker, a man called David Shrine, in Boston, but finds herself still suffering the psychological side effects of what she had been through in the two years prior to when we meet her.

Instead of signing up to a support group as she thought, Sawyer finds herself to have ‘agreed’ to a psych evaluation that results in a twenty-four-hour stint on a psychiatric ward where she is then kept against her will for even longer as part of the hospitals elaborate scam to profit from patients' insurance pay outs. In the days that follow we watch Sawyer do everything in her very little power to fight back and convince the hospital that she neither needs to nor signed up to be there, only to repeatedly fail, become increasingly aggressive and then be frequently physically restrained and drugged.

As Sawyer starts to lose her mind at the hands of those around her, we get a little lost along the way with her too. She's repeatedly told that she is mentally unwell until she eventually starts to question her sanity. Between the conviction of the nursing staff's manner towards her and Sawyer's own increasingly doubtful assurance that a new nurse is in fact her stalker David, we spend much of the film not knowing what to believe or which way is up.

Thus is the effect of gaslighting, the phenonenom that filtered its way into our vernacular via the 1944 Ingrid Bergaman film called, yep, Gaslight. In short, she plays a woman in an abusive marriage to someone who systematically tries to convince her that she's psychologically unwell. The phrase, psychologist Honey Langcaster-James tells *The Debrief, *comes from this idea of deliberately manipulating reality and then making someone question their own mind.

'As with any form of psychological abuse, it’s all about power and control.' Honey explains. 'So, if you can convince somebody that they can’t trust their own mind, if you can convince them that your perception of reality is more valid than theirs, then you would hold all the power. They start to defer to your perception of reality, rather than their own.'

This is essentially what happens in Unsane, except it presents itself at varying scales of manipulation. There's the entire structure of the medical institution that makes money from gaslighting Sawyer, and then you've got the equally sinister but differently motivated actions of the nurse, who feeds Sawyer pills she doesn't need and reinforces the hospital's manipulation of reality. 'It is an intricate system,' Honey explains, 'but one of the things that’s interesting about the movie is that it does make us question whether we can trust our own minds or to what extent can we trust the systems that are in place to protect us? I think that’s an interesting issue that gets brought up. It’s something that people do worry about. People to get concerned about whether they are actually seeing things as they are or whether a system is making them think things are a certain way, or even whether another person is making them think things are a certain way.'

The gloom isn't certain in real life, though, and there are of course things you can do to try and avoid falling down that rabbit hole. Honey says the key is 'knowing who to turn to for an honest answer. Who we can trust to give us an answer to validate or tell us that we are worrying unnecessarily.'

'The first thing to think about is that actually, the fact [you're] questioning [your] own mind shows relative clarity. It’s a good sign that you’ve got a good handle on events. People who are psychologically unwell, are much less likely to question their perceptions of reality, so that’s the first thing to be assured by. The second thing, is to reach out to people who have no agenda, or no invested interest in you believing things a certain way or another, ask them about their perceptions, or even multiple people.'

Gaslighting has a special way of planting an inception type seed in our minds and developing it slowly and subtly, 'to such an extent that you start to accept things that are way beyond what you would have accepted in the beginning', Honey says. 'So, by checking it out with other people, checking out what’s happening to you, other people will generally give you their honest reactions. Any sort of alarmed response from your nearest and dearest would give you an indication that you might be being manipulated.'

And what of professionals? The ones who *Unsane *manages to create a firghteningly deep mistrust of over the course of a 90 minute cinema stint? 'Obviously, that’s one of the things that the movie hinges on that gives it that kind of "edge of your seat" tension, but in reality you can be safe in the knowledge that if you went to a professional for help and advice you can trust that they will give you a good reflection of what you’re experiencing', Honey reassures me.

The whole concept is terrifying and between stalking and institutionalised gaslighting, if there's one thing that the film really manages to do it force issues like these into the forefront of reality. If it didn't feel like an issue that could affect you before, after watching this, gaslighting will feel like a very real, tangible that could happen to any of us. Honey explained that one of the things that struck her with *Unsane, *was that Sawyer shows classic signs of doubting her own mind that we can all relate to. 'When can we be sure of our own mind, when can we be sure that we can trust our own perceptions and when should we be questioning ourselves?', Honey muses. But of course, In Sawyer's case - having been a victim of a stalker, the effects and this habit of questioning is understandably all the more intensified.

'The trauma that she’d been subjected to led to her being quite hyper-vigilant, which is quite common. When anybody has been subjected to a type of trauma, particularly one that involved psychological abuse and emotional abuse, it does lead to a state of hyper-vigilance where you’re really on the lookout for any signs of threats, where/when you see threats in lots of relatively benign situations and you begin to doubt what is true. Am I safe? Should I be worried?', Honey explains. 'It’s something that we can all relate to, to different degrees. But obviously, when somebody has been a victim of a form of psychological abuse, it does lead to you really questioning yourself.'

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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.