Certifiable? Analysing the mental health of Quint from Jaws

“You're certifiable, Quint!” Chief Brody says as Quint smashes up the radio he was using to contact the Coast Guard. Quint's reasoning for doing this is up in the air. Did he not trust anyone else to help them? Did he want Brody to focus on the task at hand? Did he want to kill the shark himself? Did he not want to share the reward money? Whether it was money or pride motivating him, Quint did make a rather rash decision.

What “Certifiable" Means

The word “certifiable” is an interesting one. It can mean “real, genuine” or, as Brody no doubt meant, “mentally ill, of unsound mind.” The two definitions likely come from someone needing to be certified as insane in order to be placed in a mental institution. Legally, a person can be detained by mental health providers for evaluation for 72 hours if they are a danger to themselves or others or are unable to care for themselves due to a mental disorder.

Is Quint “Certifiable”?

Quint does not quite count as “certifiable.” When he's just another fisherman in Amity, he's content to pull up bluegills and Tommy cod, do a little chartering on the weekends and engage in a bit of moonshining. He was harmless and capable of caring for himself, even if he did occasionally “get high on his own supply” as they said in Scarface. 

When a monster shark comes to Amity, Quint says he'll take the shark down, for a price. The price is a bit too steep, so he is ignored while everyone in Amity with a motorboat and a bucket of chum goes shark hunting. The results are less than stellar. As for Quint, while he does not fit the criteria to be institutionalized against his will, he is not exactly mentally healthy either.

Quint's Trauma

Quint's hatred for sharks nearly matches Ahab's obsession with the White Whale in Melville's Moby Dick. It was never really explored in the Peter Benchley novel the film Jaws was based on. Screenwriter Howard Sackler insisted that there was a need to “explain why this man has a biblical vengeance against sharks.” He and Robert Shaw, the actor who portrayed Quint, put their heads together and came up with the monologue about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in the waning days of World War II.

While there really was a USS Indianapolis – it delivered the nuclear bomb that eventually was dropped over Hiroshima, but the U.S. Navy heavy cruiser was downed by a Japanese torpedo not long after it made that delivery – the film takes a few creative liberties about the details of the sinking. One being that while shark attack was a cause of death for those who survived the torpedo impact, there were more who died of dehydration, hypothermia, starvation and a few suicides and homicides stemming from a sanity threatening incident. A few men swam out to their deaths under the delusion that rescue was just over the horizon.

PTSD and Survivor's Guilt

Survivor's guilt is closely aligned with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when a person survives a disaster when others didn't. The experience can cause a person to feel like they didn't deserve to survive something that killed another person, perhaps a good friend that they spoke to every day. Like Quint’s Herbie Robinson from Cleveland who played baseball. It can make someone question the fairness of the world or ponder what they could've done differently. 

Quint has to live with the fact that many good men were picked off one by one after the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. This may be why he's so reluctant to take anyone on the expedition with him.

A common strategy for coping with survivor's guilt is to remind oneself who was really responsible for what happened. 

It's possible Quint found out what happened at Hiroshima and felt that the Japanese sailors were justified in firing the torpedo, due to misplaced patriotism and being fed false information. (In reality, the mission wasn't really that top secret. The radio commander who was supposed to take their SOS was drunk.) 

Quint couldn't blame anything connected to the U. S. Navy. That left the sharks. 

While Quint did describe a shark's eyes as “lifeless,” he does see the sharks' action as something only a living thing could do. His line about how a shark “looks right into you, right into your eyes” feels like a bit of anthropomorphism. While a shark could be seen as a thing of nature, only capable of acting on impulse (as Hooper describes them) Quint takes the attacks from sharks personally. Not personally enough to exterminate them for free, of course.

How Quint Could've Handled Things Better

Quint should've found a way to mourn in a healthy way. Getting involved with the creation of a memorial (in real life, such a thing was dedicated in 1995) or meeting with family of the deceased may have helped. Perhaps it would be better if he had adopted Hooper's view that the sharks were just eating machines, a simple force of nature no one had control over. What he should not have done was become dependent on his homemade apricot wine and Narragansett beer. Jumping into a shark's maw armed with only a knife was not the best idea either.

Words by Heidi Bitsoli

Heidi Bitsoli has been a content writer with Sunshine Behavioral Health since 2019, where she researches and writes articles, guides, and blog posts on mental health and addiction. Prior to that, she wrote extensively on health, medicine, business, and human interest topics for a variety of clients. Her writings have appeared in numerous university publications, magazines, newspapers, and websites. She has a degree in English from Lake Superior State University in northern Michigan. A lifelong lover of learning, she enjoys researching and writing about the complexities of mental health.

Sources

moviecultists.com - Why did Quint Destroy the Radio?

screenrant.com - Jaws: Why Quint Smashed The Orca's Radio

jaws.fandom.com - Quint

denofgeek.com - Jaws: Why the USS Indianapolis Speech is Steven Spielberg’s Favorite Scene

screenrant.com- Jaws: How Accurate Quint's USS Indianapolis Story Is (What Really Happened)

medicalnewstoday.com - What is survivor's guilt?

indianawarmemorials.org - USS Indianapolis CA 35 Memorial

sunshinebehavioralhealth.com - Alcohol Rehab in Austin, Texas