"The Roommate" Entry 5

I think one challenge that I could encounter as the therapist in treating Rebecca would be her accepting the fact that she needs help.  Rebecca may believe things are okay and be in denial that she has issues that require treatment.   Another challenge that could arise is committing to therapy. Although Rebecca is committed to school and show interest in classes she might not feel there is a need to come to therapy as scheduled. Therapy may not be as important to Rebecca as other things in her life.
Trust would present a problem with the therapeutic relationship. Rebecca being suspicious of others can cause distrust with the therapist.  If there is no trust then Rebecca may not be open with her feelings.  Social skills may also be a challenge. Rebecca is not good with communicating to others or appropriately responding.  If the anger and hostility is not eventually controlled it will challenge the development of a healthy therapeutic relationship.  The third challenge would be the delusions that tend to lead to obsession.  The therapeutic relationship would be in jeopardy if the delusions or obsessions occur toward the therapist.  

"The Roommate" Entry 4

As mentioned in previous entries Rebecca suffers from delusional and suspicious thoughts of others and this not only makes her angry and violent but keeps her from being sociable. Cognitive restructuring is a technique that can be used to help with the short term goal of joining a social club to interact. This will help Rebecca to replace her negative thoughts with more reasonable ones to prevent violent acts and behavior from occurring.

Relaxation can be useful in helping with the short term goal of focusing on something good a few times a day. The deep breathing technique will help Rebecca calm her racing thoughts and angry feelings.

Rational-Emotive Imagery and Exposure techniques can be utilized with the long term goal of minimizing or eliminating delusions. Rational-Emotive will help Rebecca identify, dispute and replace or reduce the irrational thoughts. With Exposure Rebecca will practice coping skills and gradually change false or erroneous perceptions through action.

"The Roommate" Entry 3

Problems that could benefits from intervention is delusions and violent acts.  Help is needed in these areas because Rebecca imagines that the people who has any type of relationship with her roommate is bad news or no good for the roommate and feels she need to perfect her. She has a fixation on her roommate and believes their relationship is more than what it really is, not realizing it is a one way feeling. These delusions lead to violent behavior towards other people who gets involved or close to the roommate.

Rational emotive techniques such as disputing and interpersonal skills training would be short term goals. Disputing will identify the irrational beliefs or delusions and challenge Rebecca to validate these ideas which then can be reduced and or replaced. Interpersonal skills training will help Rebecca learn how to interact and treat others.  A long term goal would be breathing exercises. When feelings of hostility come about deep slow breathing exercise can be calming, relieving the mind of anger and change Rebecca's focus.

Treatment being successful for Rebecca would mean she is able to control her negative reactions towards people by utilizing her interpersonal training using appropriate interaction and communication. She would also have better control of delusions and hostility when refocusing her thoughts through breathing exercises which would reduce or eliminate the violence.

"The Roommate" Entry 2

I believe social learning and social skills training are the psychotherapy that would be helpful for the character Rebecca.  Social skills are used to train new responses and eliminate negative or abnormal behaviors.

With Rebecca not knowing how to communicate with others, social skills training will help her learn how to have social conversations and learn to understand people's feelings without being hostile or judgmental. Social learning will allow Rebecca to observe, imitate and role play with the therapist demonstrating appropriate social behavior.  These techniques will help Rebecca in socially relating to people. I think a behavioral approach therapy such as this is best suited for Rebecca because some of her biggest problems is relating to other, understanding other people's behaviors and controlling her negative behavior.  Rebecca tends to either respond to people with hostility or have an absence of feelings with just a blank stare which later turns violent.  Not understanding others behaviors or queues has an adverse effect on Rebecca so social learning can also help her become more aware of her own behavior. Social learning is more concerned about normal behavior being learned through imitation and less focused on what is the cause of the abnormal behavior as compared to other therapies that may find it more important to focus on the root cause in order to treat the problem.

Movie "The Roommate"

"The Roommate" is about a freshman college student name Rebecca attending the University of Los Angeles, who quickly develops an obsession for her roommate Sara. Rebecca suffers from a psychological disorder but she is not taking her medication which is used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar. Several scenes in the movie show Rebecca is very sweet and pleasant with her roommate Sara but anti-social, hostile and violet around any of her roommate’s friends. Rebecca is very protective of Sara and do not want anyone else around her, particularly anyone Sara cares about or who cares about Sara. In Rebecca’s mind Sara’s friends are not good for her. Rebecca appears to be delusional about the relationship between her and Sara even considering herself to be the sister Sara lost.  She will even hurt herself to gain the attention of Sara and to pull her away from others. Rebecca does not seem close to her parents who actually seem a little afraid of her. They are very pleasant and polite to Rebecca while Rebecca seems to be somewhat distant and uninterested towards them.


 A model of therapy I would use is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help manage unhealthy behaviors and reduce distress that may be encountered in everyday life. Rebecca did not socialize or interact with other people aside from her roommate unless it was in a hostile way.  Her perception is distorted and her behavior is irrational. 


 Beau, M.(Producer), Davison, D.(Producer), Lee, R.(Producer), Mallhi, S.(Producer), & Christiansen, C.(Director). (2011). The Roommate [Motion picture].
United States: Sony Pictures.