I Am Sam Disorder

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"I am Sam" is a heart-warming movie showing how a mentally challenged father with an IQ level of a seven-year-old raises a child with love and patience despite his mental illness. I have chosen to write a review of the movie “I am Sam” because it is a powerful, emotional film about love, family bonds, and parenting challenges. The main character, Sam, lived in Los Angeles, CA in the 1990s. Sam has the mental capacity of a seven-year-old, he works at Starbucks and has a daughter with a homeless woman who abandoned them after she gave birth. Sam is an avid Beatles fan and named his daughter Lucy Diamond after the Beatles song. Sam’s mental impairments are autistic tendencies and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Sam’s moderate obsessive-compulsive …show more content…

It was fascinating watching how Lucy downplayed her intellectual abilities so not to hurt her father’s feelings. She pretended that she does not know how to read the word “different” when they were reading one of Lucy’s schoolbooks. Sam’s mental age of a seven-year-old raised concerns regarding Lucy's development with the school teacher. At the same time, Lucy had to deal with her friend’s attitudes and judgments toward her father. Lucy does not want a different father; she understands that the power of unconditional love, the most powerful force on earth. Lucy was removed from her home by state authorities and placed with a foster mother due to Sam’s intellectual disability. Sam knows that he needs a lawyer to fight the legal system and regain custody of his daughter. On the advice of his friends, Sam chose his attorney out of the Yellow Pages; he stated “She is a big-time lawyer, and she talks fast. That seems important” (2001). Sam and his attorney, Rita, who took the case pro-bono, struggle to convince the system that Sam deserves to get his daughter …show more content…

Treatment options may include behavior and communication therapy, family therapy, and medication therapy to treat severe behavioral problems (mayoclinic.org, 2018). Since obsessive-compulsive behavior is a comorbid disorder to autism, the optimal treatment is a combination of behavior therapy and drugs like Zoloft, Effexor, Risperdal, Seroquel, or Zyprexa. Behavioral therapies focused on confronting a stimulus that is usually avoided and delayed in preventing the performance of rituals (Videbeck, p.255,

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