When public television executives were considering funding Katie Cadigan’s film about schizophrenia, they asked how big an audience it might draw. Cadigan told them to think about how many people they knew whose lives were affected by Alzheimer’s disease. Then she said: “You know twice as many people with schizophrenia, but for some reason, they’re not letting you know.”
Her comment illustrates one of the reasons why the documentary, When Medicine Got It Wrong, had to be made: The shame and stigma surrounding schizophrenia have made it difficult for society to move beyond other, more serious challenges with mental illness.
Cadigan and her director, Laura Murray, won critical acclaim for their
most recent feature documentary, HBO/Cinemax’s People Say I’m Crazy.
It was filmed by Cadigan’s brother and chronicled his first 10 years of living with schizophrenia. This next project, she says, holds exciting possibilities.
When Medicine Got It Wrong tells the story of a small group of parents in San Mateo County, California, who, in the 1970s, rebelled against the then-widespread belief that schizophrenia was caused by bad parenting. When they started going public, others added their voices to the cause. Through their publicity and outreach, these eventual founders of Parents of Adult Schizophrenics would contribute to a lasting change in how medical science understands and treats mental illness and conducts brain research.
No services, dire consequences
When Medicine Got It Wrong began as a short, inspirational piece that grew far more involved as Cadigan dug further into what these parents were dealing with. The real problem started with a well-intentioned social experiment gone terribly wrong.
California’s Lanterman-Petris-Short Act (LPS) set out to close down psychiatric hospitals in favor of community care and a more holistic approach to treating mental illness. The Act went into full effect on July 1, 1972, and set the precedent for modern mental health commitment
procedures in the United States.
“It was a fabulous dream,” says Cadigan. “The problem is, when they shut down the hospitals, there was the promise that community care would be set up. That care was never set up. So the sickest of the sick—young men and women with schizophrenia and severe bipolar disorder—ended up being flushed out of the system with no care, no medication, no doctors available, no treatment programs that would take them.”
For decades leading up to that time, psychiatry operated on the idea that schizophrenia was caused by alternating loving and withholding mothers, absent fathers, or other tensions in the home. The practice had been to sever those family ties and treat patients with therapy in a “safe” hospital, away from home. This paved the way for what Cadigan describes as the parents’ ultimate frustration.
“Imagine in the ‘70s, hospitals are shutting down, the kids are being sent home, yet they’ve been taught in therapy that their parents are the cause of their illness. Parents are now the only resource these kids have. Add to that the fact that a primary symptom for a lot of people with schizophrenia is paranoia, and you’ve got an absolute recipe for disaster.”
Deinstitutionalization and a lack of community-based services across the country—further complicated by the psychiatric practice of blaming parents—pushed many people with severe mental illness directly into jails or onto the street.
The film describes the families’ achievements in the context of today. As parents, they helped build an awareness from which we continue to benefit, but government and society have never caught up with that medical knowledge. Deinstitutionalization, rampant homelessness, and incarceration of people with severe mental illness are ongoing even in this new millennium.
Spreading the word
Public television has agreed to a four-year contract to broadcast the film. It will premiere on KQED in San Francisco, California, then air on PBS stations in every state.
Cadigan says she wants her film to improve awareness among the public at large. She also hopes a smaller, more specific audience will see it—the 60-plus crowd who’ve had that experience of being told, point blank, they were the cause of their child’s illness.
“It’s still an issue,” Cadigan says. “The medical world can’t believe it’s still an issue, but at every screening of People Say I’m Crazy, I hear comments from the audience…A father saying, ‘I guess I’d better get my son treatment. I thought he was just lazy,’ or a mother saying, ‘The hospital told me to get out—that I was making my son worse.’”
The new film evokes equally stunning responses. At an early stage of production, the crew showed some of their footage to a small test group. One viewer, a mother, commented: “Why is it kids with cancer get flowers when they go to the hospital, but when my son goes to the hospital because he’s had a psychotic break, nobody sends him anything, and nobody cares for me?”
Besides interviews with the parents who spoke out in the ’70s, and with mental health experts, politicians, and psychiatrists, When Medicine Got It Wrong highlights medical advances that have vastly improved the prognosis for people with schizophrenia who receive timely treatment and support.
The film will be completed in September 2008 and will air in 2009. It will be released for international broadcast once it is delivered to public television in the United States, then will go out on DVD worldwide.
“My activist brain really likes that this is going out on public TV because they tend to have an older audience,” Cadigan laughs. “If we can reach an older audience, that’s an audience in positions of power, who can make change.”
She’s also very interested in collaborating with communities, and eager to help public TV do as much outreach as it can. “So if people and organizations out there would like to work with them, we’d be happy to hook them up.”
To date, the film has received funding from the public television’s Independent Television Service, KQED in San Francisco, the California Council for the Humanities and other organizations, as well as families. The television grant, however, is on the condition that Cadigan raise matching funds of $100,000. The film’s Web site,
www.whenmedicine.com provides details on how to become an underwriter or make a donation.
Cadigan sees that small group of parents as pioneers, and an example of what any individual can do when faced with an enormous societal problem. She wants to make sure their efforts were not in vain.
“They made huge strides and it’s up to our generation to pick up that torch and move forward,” she says. “There’s still a long way to go.”
Michelle Morra is a freelance journalist, corporate writer, and aspiring novelist living and working in Toronto, Ontario.
# # #