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Anxiety In The Movie Amelie

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Anxiety and Phobias Media can play a powerful role in increasing awareness about mental illness. The movie, Amelie, tells a sweet love story of a young woman with social anxiety. A person with social anxiety has an extreme and persistent fear of social situations or social performances in which they may experience embarrassment (Comer, 2014). Not only do social situations cause a person fear, but it may also cause them to avoid those situations all together. The character Amelie has some irrational beliefs and attitudes that she displays, stress plays a role in her anxiety, and there are helpful approaches to address this anxiety. Amelie is portrayed as an introverted and socially awkward person with an active imagination. She was overly sheltered as a child, not allowed to attend school or play with other children because her father feared she had a serious heart defect. At six …show more content…

Cognitive therapies allow a person to identify possible faulty thinking patterns and empower them to replace these thoughts with rational ones. Exposure therapy is a behavioral approach in which an individual faces their stressors while using the new cognitive thinking patterns. Helping people build resilience is imperative to their progress by helping them believe that they have the resources and ability to respond well to stressors and anxious reactions (Comer, 2014). Mindfulness-based stress reduction practices can help repair parts of the brain that may have been affected by trauma or long-term anxieties by greatly reducing the fear response and helping to regulate an individual’s stress response (Bremner, Mishra, Campanella, Shah, Kasher, Evans, Fani, Shah, Reiff, Davis, Vaccarino & Carmody, 2017). Practicing just minutes of mindfulness-based stress reduction each week has been shown to greatly reduce anxiety symptoms (Kelly & Garland,

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