The Power of Cinema to Advance Our Understanding of Mental Health
Years ago, I saw a film at TIFF that I’ll never forget. It was an Argentinian production, entitled Man Facing Southeast, and it was the first time that I appreciated how sensitively and subtly mental illness could be explored on film.
Illuminating mental health through cinema
The story was simple. A new patient, Rantes, mysteriously shows up at a mental hospital. He’s almost devoid of emotion and he spends hours each day facing in the same direction. He has unusual talents and he’s very kind.
Soon after he arrives, strange things start to happen. The other patients begin to flock toward Rantes, treating him like he’s a messiah figure. He periodically escapes from the asylum and tends to the local poor. A beautiful woman comes to visit him and sings his praises.
Rantes tells the depressed, disillusioned psychiatrist that he’s a hologram, sent to earth from another planet to save the world.
The doctor chooses not to believe him or support him, and Rantes dies of a heart attack when he is medicated against his will and then forced to receive electroshock treatment.
Although the film hints that Rantes might be an alien messiah, it wasn’t clear to me. What was clear was that Rantes needed a lot more compassion and understanding than he received.
The film also suggested that Rantes could have helped the broken psychiatrist if the doctor had just been willing to meet him where he was. They could have saved each other if the psychiatrist had only been more humane.
Cinema and the psyche
I walked away from the film deeply moved and lost in thought. The film did what the best of cinema should do: it made me think, it made me feel, and it brought me into a heretofore unfamiliar world.
It made me wonder about the concepts of psychosis, and got me questioning the way we view people with supposed mental illness. It opened me up to the possibility that perhaps some “mentally ill” people might simply be different; not “sick.” It also showed me that the line between a “doctor” and a “patient” might be fairly thin.
It was after seeing Man Facing Southeast that I understood how powerfully film can contribute to our understanding of the psyche and how effective this medium is in offering nuanced, yet profound depictions of individuals who think and behave differently than some of us.
Cinema shines a light on the mind
Eventually, I became a psychiatrist. During my residency, I volunteered to run the psychoanalytic film forum where local psychoanalysts took turns each month discussing a film that we screened. That was the most fun I had over the four years of my training program.
Since then, I’ve continued to be interested in how films portray mental health. Sometimes, a film will come along that does a fantastic job, expanding our understanding of the subject and enabling us to grow in our compassion. Leaving Las Vegas, another film I saw at TIFF, is one such film. More recently, Turning Red looked at female rage and the way we try to suppress these qualities.
Mental health on and off screen
I’ve been presenting a podcast for several years now about mental health and wellness, and a short while ago, I started a new podcast, Reel Mental, to pick up where my old film forum left off. In each episode, I talk to a film critic about a recent film and we look at how mental health is portrayed and how it contributes to the narrative.
Mental health and mental illness carry so much stigma and are still shrouded in mystery. When movies tell stories that touch on these themes, they can demystify and sometimes help us to open our minds and our hearts.
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