This article has a strong focus on madness and discusses how film is uniquely able to reflect the flux of mental and emotional experience. The article also discusses conditions from a filmmaking and psychologist perspectives respectively. In this article, films that have interesting changes as well as similarities among reoccurring themes such as “society and madness; war and madness; paranoia and madness; and madness as sanity.” Movies can capture institutional problems faced by hospitals, specifically, psychiatric hospitals—overcrowding, cruel attitudes of staff, and the effectiveness of psychotherapy. The article also encapsulates the changes in film and psychiatric focus over time. The article shifts from the forties, to the sixties, and when it reaches the seventies, it addresses the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It states that the film version of Kesey’s book “fits the view of psychiatry dominant in the mid 1970s, which though it realize that institutions needed humanization, considered patients to be mentally ill, not visionary.” Later, the article addresses the “conception of paranoia as a disease; a state, a condition, or a syndrome of symptoms. The comparison of the changing of the psyche with the changing of events in history in the U.S. is constantly changing—as the times change, as does the mentality of Americans, so concurrently the film process changes as well. As the depression came, mindsets rapidly changed and peoples’ mentalities shifted. Simultaneously, the artistic experiments in cinema were nearly cut off. This compares to the decade of tremendous mental and social changes, or the 1960s, which was a decade of fun and optimism, but also a decade that lacked unification and hope and ultimately struggled with the production of feature films. The article suggests that through the changes in world status and the progression of events that occurred in America, film and psyche moved with society—through the ups and the downs.