Documentary offers different ways of seeing mental illness
In the West, having a ‘breakdown’ is a medical condition, but in other societies, it can be regarded as a spiritual experience.
A documentary showing in Cork this week wonders which is truer, writes .
In many indigenous cultures, when a young person has what in industrialised countries would be considered a mental breakdown, they are hailed as seers or shamans.
When they start to hear voices or hallucinate, they are taken under the wing of an older healer who has gone through the same thing.
What is happening is explained in terms of spirituality or mysticism; their community may gather around them for ceremonies or they will be brought to a place reserved for such experiences.
In the developed world, young people experiencing the same symptoms will be hospitalised, drugged, told they are incurably sick, isolated, and stigmatised.
People with mental illness are disproportionate among the homeless and in prisons.
US photographer and documentarian Phil Borges is, he says, not the first to have drawn parallels between what anthropologists have dubbed ‘the shamanic sickness’ and the experience of people in Westernised countries undergoing their first encounter with mental illness.
Borges gave up his orthodontic dentistry career and spent over 30 years documenting life in indigenous, tribal communities, everywhere from Tibet to the Amazon.
“I ended up meeting the healers and visionaries in those communities,” he says. “I watched them go into trance states, and I was able to interview many of them.
"Many told me they were chosen essentially by having a crisis as a young person, most often a mental-emotional crisis, where they had personality changes, heard voices, and had visions no-one else could see.”
At home in Seattle, eight years ago, Borges was shooting a documentary on meditation, when he met Adam Gentry, a young man who was attempting to find new ways to live with his bipolar disorder.
Borges connected Gentry’s description of his own first psychological crisis — which began with feelings of elation, connectedness and ego loss, before spiralling into darker and more terrifying territory — and the experiences that shamans and healers had described.
Crazywise, the resulting documentary, follows Gentry’s path, as well as that of a young woman, Ekhaya Esima.
Their stories are interwoven with interviews with controversial addiction expert Gabor Maté, as well as psychologists, Buddhist nuns, shamanic practitioners and others.
Some are ‘conventional’ psychiatrists, who believe there are deep flaws in our medicalised mental healthcare system, while some say there is a spiritual aspect to mental health conditions that’s overlooked in our society.
“Unfortunately, what happens in our culture is that we are very afraid of non-ordinary states,” Borges says.
“I definitely think that our western, industrial, highly technological culture has lost touch with some of the basic human needs, and has lost touch with the variety of human experience that we have.”
Since Crazywise’s release in 2016, Borges has screened the film at festivals and at the American Psychiatric Society’s annual convention.
Although the documentary is careful to highlight that medication can help some people, it also takes aim at the so-called ‘chemical imbalance’ theory of psychiatry. It’s a fractious debate.
“Have I been accused of romanticising mental health issues? Not often, but sometimes,” Borges says.
“At a recent London screening, someone said, ‘You haven’t been around schizophrenics. It’s not a spiritual thing, it’s dangerous and horrible.’
"I tried to explain that individuals that first go into this state do have a spiritual aspect to their first episode, and it’s the fact that we don’t know how to frame it that is harmful.”
What’s certainly not romanticised is Gentry’s life story.
The film charts his heartbreaking course from a happy, sporty teenager to losing his family, his job, and his home.
He spends periods of time living in a car, while suffering intense bouts of hallucinations and hearing increasingly violent voices, and eventually suffers a horrific attack at the hands of other homeless people.
The healing path of community, agency, family and acceptance is not disputed: for the film’s central subjects, salvation comes through connection.
For Gentry, it comes through an alternative café, where he feels accepted, and, ultimately, through being reunited with his father, while for Esima, being taken under the wing of a South African spiritual healer and reuniting with her children are the foundations of recovery.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
