A sensitive look at mental illness

Press, 17 March 1987, Page 13

A sensitive look at mental illness

"A Matter of the Mind” — tonight’s documentary on One at 9.00 — is a sensitive look at mental illness from the point of view of those who suffer from it.

A portrait of a group of patients at Central Manor — a halfway house in St Paul — “A Matter of the Mind” examines the illness which is the number one cause of hospital admissions in the United States. Mental illness affects 30 million Americans, which is one in five adults.

“Being all alone and not having any direction or purpose, just being out of control, is so scary you

can’t explain it,” say Mike, whose - two marriages collapsed because of his chronic mental illness. “I’ve had breakdowns for 15 years. Sometimes I don’t know what’s happening. It feels like water rushing through my body and I can’t gather it up.”

This undercuts the stereotype that mental patients are dangerous. “We wanted to hurpanise mental illness. We wanted to put a face on it,” says producer Robert Thurber. All human beings need to feel that someone cares if they live or die. “I thought I could transport myself to another

century to escape everybody,” says Rick, “and this method does not work. When I have to go out in the world and get a job, I can’t be fantasising. When I get a girlfriend, I have to talk to her like me, Rick. I can’t be John Wayne or Elvis Presley. People might accept me being myself, but that’s a really hard thing for me to do.”

Nancy, who spent six years in a state institution and who collects dolls because they “look pretty,” says: “When I was little and did something wrong, my mother would say, ‘l’m going to tell your

father.’ So I waited for him to come, home and spank me. That’s probably why I want to hurt others or myself.”

The film shifts from Central Manor to Town Square, a shopping and office complex in downtown St Paul, where Janet walks around on her free time. She is asked to leave a shop for creating a disturbance. “Sometimes I scream or swear,” says Janet, who has Tourette’s Syndrome, a nervous disorder that causes her to make uncontrollable movements and sounds. "Kids laugh at me. They just look at me funny and turn their heads. That hurts. I want strangers to know I can’t help what I do.”

“We’ve seen so many programmes that are merely reports about the mentally ill,” says David Fanning, the executive producer of “A Matter of the Mind.” “But in our broadcast we actually hear first-hand about what one participant calls ‘The psychological storms.’ You may never again feel the same about the mentally ill after viewing this sensitive portrait.”