In the movie she would have crazy spells here and there, she wasn't sizophrenic (spell check) and she wasn't mentally ill to the point where she can't do anything for herself.
shareAccording to the ever reliable Wikipedia (sarcasm) it was meant to be implied she has schizophrenia, with the hearing of voices Benny briefly mentions and the episode on the bus. All they say in the movie is "mentally ill". Hope this helps.
shareA good share of mentally ill people are capable of taking care of themselves with or without medication. Moreover, many live forever without ever getting any kind of help. As far as the more severely mentally ill, i.e. schizophrenics, they usually need, at the very least, to be medicated, and then can live on their own. This movie insinuates that Joon has some kind of schizo-affective disorder, I believe. It gives us something to ponder on...
We who hear not the music, think the dancer mad...
She does take meds, Benny is shown giving her the medicine (it is not shown what meidine, though), and others has stated she might be affected by PTSD too.
Please excuse my terrible redaction, english is not my native language.
She could be bipolar. People with this disorder can have hallucinations and hear voices.
What did you do, Ray?
Not everyone reacts the same to mental illness; I think she is supposed to be Schizophrenic.
shareShe had undifferentiated schizophrenia of the paranoid and catatonic type.
shareWhen I watched it years ago I thought she had bipolar.
shareI don't think so. A lot of people think Bi-polar means you're sometimes crazy and sometimes not because it's ''up and down'' but that isn't true. Maybe she was supposed to have bi-polar but I always thought she had schizophrenia but was on medication for it.
shareYeah, never thought Joon was supposed to be bipolar... and like you said, it's not like bipolar means you're crazy sometimes and sometimes not. People with bipolar have periods of depression and periods of "hyper/happy" mood and sometimes they're "normal" - hence the former name manic depression. I always thought Joon was schizophrenic, and later I realized her symptoms were very similar to my friend with that disease.
shareI'd guess schizoaffective disorder.
"Perhaps we can learn a lesson from this tragedy like don't steal and don't be disturbed."
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In the '90s it was a lot more common for movies about "mental illness" to just cherry pick different symptoms, depending on what seemed the most whimsical/entertaining. The director on the commentary track noted that when he was developing the movie with the screenwriter, they interviewed a lot of schizophrenics and family members of schizophrenics, but in the end decided to keep Joon's illness vague so that the focus could be the romance, not the disorder.
I will also note that my friend, who has been diagnosed bipolar and schizo-affective, seems to think Joon shares symptoms of both. From what I recall, Joon was pretty lucid throughout the movie, with the exception of the attempt to direct traffic in her snorkel mask.
I see a lot of Autism here in her character but that's not a mental illness
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