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Dr Dippy, Dr Wonderful and Dr Evil will see you now - the casual sexism of film shrinks

17 July 2006

The stereotyping of doctors in the movies - both for good and bad - is set to continue, a psychiatrist has warned.

Dr Peter Byrne [UCL Mental Health Sciences] looked deep into Hollywood's back catalogue to examine how medics are portrayed on the big screen. He found doctors appeared in a total of 4,056 films. But Byrne was most interested in the portrayal of psychiatrists. They appear in 404 films, only slightly fewer than cowboys, who appear in 491. …

Byrne found that, far from being portrayed as complex characters, women psychiatrists are cast as stereotypes. These stereotypes usually fell into three main types - Dr Dippy, Dr Wonderful and Dr Evil. …

In only five films are women psychiatrists portrayed as Dr Wonderful. The most recent example is the well-received film Transamerica, released earlier this year. In the movie a psychiatrist is shown guiding transsexual Bree Osborne, played by Felicity Huffman, through the process of becoming a woman, by helping and preparing her to make sure she is ready to face the final step to surgery. …

Byrne says: "These female psychiatrists are victims, passive players in the plot. In all the films I looked at, 29 women psychiatrists fall in love with their male patients, while only 17 male psychiatrists fall for their female patients. …

"Boundary violations are never far away from the female psychiatrist in films. All these films depict intimate relationships between a female therapist and her male patient."

Byrne says the stereotypes will continue to persist in films. "All successful films need a love interest, all Hollywood's women are poorly drawn and one film begets another - there is a culture of copying," he says. …

Lyndsay Moss, 'The Scotsman'