“Oh, why am so mindless? I forgot the sweet princess.
The lovely little white one. End of story, tale’s done.”
(quotation from the film)
Whom or what is the film “Stories” about? In the first few frames we can see a smiling girl in front of a piano. Then a boy starts to tell us about his childhood, about the traumas he had to live through: the early death of his father and siblings, the number of consecutive partners his mother had, the regular beatings he had to bear and finally his own request to be placed under state custody. Another man also talks about his childhood, about the closed tenement house he lived in, the iron bars around the circular gangway, the demons that accompanied him already then. Is this film about how to cope with all that, the difficulties of life? Now someone else tells us how he met aliens when he was a child, how he had been the subject of a microchip implant and how he communicates with embryos. Are we about to catch a glimpse of some wonderland? The girl with the piano says the disease came during the university years. Is it about psychiatric diseases? A man dreamt that a gigantic airplane flew over Óbuda (a historical part of Budapest). Someone else felt she arrived to heaven during a plane trip, but she damned everyone else around her. Another man tells us that he believes that schizophrenia is not a state of mind, rather a gate opening to another world, and that schizophrenic people are some kind of feeling and seeing eyes, perceptive of the suffering of the world. Somebody else talks to nature, to the sun – for example about what he is going to be in another life: a back, a bomb, a ball… maybe a great football player, although for the present he doesn’t really like football.
Watching this film do we really reflect upon what these people tell us about – the suffering, the wonderland, their condition, their life – or do we simply consider all those things manifestations of a disease that should concern only psychiatrists?
Very rarely does it happen that information about the psychotic state comes from people who have actually experienced it. Typically it is the psychiatrists who declare about the topic, it is them who dominate the discourse – madness is only their territory. According to Foucault (1998) while in the old days it was the religious discourse that possessed the authority to create valid and acceptable social narratives, today this power is given to scientific discourses. These discourses tend to decide on who is mad in a society or how abnormality is represented in the world of normality (Fehér 2010). The dominant narrative in this process is in the hands of the psychiatrists, they define the notional frame of common talk and decide who is normal and who is a mental case, while the narratives of those diagnosed psychotic and other alternative sources are pronounced invisible, invalid or meaningless. Since Jaspers, madness and the mad person itself is incomprehensible for “normal people”, psychotic experience differs qualitatively from “normal experience” (Jaspers 1963). Imagination comes to rule when there is a lack of concrete knowledge. People not having immediate experience about madness create their own representation based on the dominant discourse – acting upon what is believed to be common and universal knowledge. This is how – in a cultural sense – psychiatry imperialises the archetype of madness (Young 1990).
Shutting out insane people, their invisibility (both physically and in the media) and the one-sided representation transmitted by mass communication could all have promoted the simplistic picture of the phenomenon present in society today. Those diagnosed with psychosis live outcast from the healthy world, on the periphery of society. We hardly know anything about them and many a time we are also scared of them. Nunually, already in 1961, described in his study that public opinion, due to scarce information, associates fear, distrust and antipathy with psychiatric disorders. His findings were later confirmed by a number of other surveys. According to Gerbner (2002) psychotic people appear in the news and in fiction mostly in a deviant role. In the mass media the most common attributes connected to people with mental illnesses are evilness and dangerousness. It seems that mass communication, by sanctifying the myth of the madman who is dangerous to self and others, consolidates in the society the existing stereotype of psychiatric people and the mistrustful behaviour towards them.
However, only people who have actually been through psychosis appear in “Stories”. Can a film be authentic which leaves out all kinds of medical opinion and presents only the so far numb and invisible people from the periphery?
“Stories” confronts us with the fact that psychosis is not necessarily a dangerous state, those diagnosed psychotic are not by definition frantic, inhuman madmen but people who can also have sharable, understandable, lovable stories. These stories go against typical stereotypes of madmen in which they are defined as dangerous people who are incapable of becoming a member of “normal” society. After watching this film it becomes somewhat difficult to label these people with the usual attributes. Is it possible that the people presented in the film are exceptional and differ from the vast majority of psychotic cases who can’t even behave like humans, can’t speak properly, can’t make appearance in front of normal people, in public or on the movie screen? Or do they only show us the understandable and liveable half of their lives and their ordinary days are not at all like that? How far is it possible to give an extensive representation of insanity? These questions remain unanswered, yet it is incontrovertible that the film offers authentic reports from the lives of flesh and blood people. For an hour we may enter their world - wonderland at times, then the world of tragedies, sad and funny and exciting, with suffering, pain and tragedy but also with goodness and beauty – just like our own life.
This film gives us the opportunity to look at a stereotyped picture from a new, intrinsic perspective. It shows us that by paying attention to others, even if they are diagnosed psychotic, we can come to a much deeper understanding of their stories. Undoubtedly, this journey can be frightening in that entering a special world we cannot escape from realizing how much a madman’s story, feelings and fears resemble those of our own. Is there really such a big gap between normal and abnormal? And on what basis do we draw the line between us and them?
According to Foucault (1998) the attitude of a given society towards its ill members - for instance where the line between normal and abnormal is drawn, what living spaces psychotic people are ensured – says a lot about the functioning and human relationships of that society. People appearing in “Stories” see schizophrenia in many ways, and for them medical explanation is only one of the possible interpretations. What is common in their stories is the negative reaction they encounter from the outside world.
We all tend to filter the impressions coming from the world around us so as to maintain a picture we had previously created and thus preserve our emotional security. Moreover, the selective way we handle information about mentally ill people is confirmed by medical psychiatry (Gombos and Dhanda 2009). Undoubtedly, this film can be watched through such a filter that the conclusion drawn in the end is that madness is a disease, mad people live outside reality, they speak mindlessly, they hallucinate. The very first step towards exclusion is probably turning away and not giving empathy to others – although to understand somebody or something better it is essential that we come closer, see for ourselves and pay real attention. In “Stories” we enter an unknown world and we hear a strange or maybe even scary language that we don’t really understand. A group of people so far forced into a numb, senseless role (see Foucault 2004) gets a word now and tells us their unbelievable, yet at the same time so familiar stories. If we pay active attention (Rothwell 2010) to what they want to tell us then the culturally uncommon phrasing, the strange experience and the different language all start to become comprehensible.
Although the interviews were taken at separate occasions the film forms an organic whole, offering insight into a so far almost invisible world. We can follow up the main stages of life: childhood, school years (which most of them had to give up because of their illness), work (some of them don’t work at all, some have part time jobs and somebody tells us how he had to face exclusion from the working world) then family and relationships (some have families, some got used to being alone). However these stages for them often differ from that of “the others”. Is this an effect of their state or the dismissive attitude of society? What causes their isolation? What causes the fact that apart from the closest family members and fellow sufferers, they don’t have fulfilling human relationships? Do they lack ability or willingness to become a member of a wider community? Is it the result of their psychiatric disorder or simply because they are stigmatised? Is it the society that shuts them out or is it them who shut out the society? None of them seems to have a choice, they are not given the freedom and joy to decide whether they want to be part of society or not. It is more likely that the people living around them keep aloof. Yet, at the same time it seems that they, too, are afraid to venture out of their safe world. Although in the film one of the speakers is married with kids and thus has a place she can feel at home, the outside world for her is as much frightening and obscure as to the others.
For an outsider, the characters in the film are primarily lunatics, this is their main trait, and this results in the society’s need to isolate and protect its members from them. However, in their stories, madness is not at all their only and most important characteristic. They try to live their life like anybody else, even though the distinctive mark of their illness often makes the simplest everyday actions impossible to perform. Still, it seems, they are sometimes capable of breaking loose of the very narrow sphere of action they are forced into by the society, and their life is not merely focused on their illness.
One of the central themes of their stories is artistic creation. Some of them write poems, some play the piano, some paint, and this artistic activity seems to be just as important an element of their identity as madness. And can it be that it is psychosis itself that endows them with a new type of perspective and expression that can be valuable in art but intolerable in society?
It seems that for them artistic creation is some sort of support, an opportunity to express themselves, to face their own issues, to share some of what is inside – even if the others cannot entirely comprehend them or their art. Still, psychosis and its social judgement remain a reoccurring motive of their life.
The stories they tell us about their coping strategies reveal how they had to find out for themselves what is best for them. It seems that they lack the kind of supporting milieu that could be really helpful and often they have to turn against the institutional system to be able to get better. The main role of a well-functioning support system should be to help individuals to find methods to get better, to find their place in society. But today’s support system typically doesn’t even make them realise they have a chance to recover and they have the opportunity to get on in life outside the institutionalized system. Although there are some recovery-oriented approaches (Slade 2009), the institutionalized support system does exactly the opposite of what would be advisable: after the diagnosis of mental disease people are put into a traditional, hospital centric system, where their life is narrowed down to that of a hospital patient. In Hungary, it seems, the diagnosis of a psychosis and the forced disease consciousness inevitably lead to the exclusion from society - it is a stigma with which it is impossible to live in a community. Most of the stories in the film don’t deny the painful aspects of the psychosis, but the real suffering does not originate from the state itself but rather from the rejection of society. All this seems to validate the idea that psychosis should be defined as a handicap instead of a disease – since being a member of a community is not a medical state but rather an environmental reaction (Jakab 2011). Why is it that for most people such states, such stories are unacceptable? Do we lose interest in other people’s stories if they turn out to be mentally ill or simply weird? Or are we scared of others if they are different from us?
Maybe if this kind of seclusion is noticed (like in this film) and for a little while the wall between normal and abnormal becomes thinner we can realize how difficult it is for them to live in that closed world allocated to them and how they, too, are human beings who love, suffer, laugh and cry. But what is that dreaded madness really? Why are psychotic people so different from us? Those are human stories, human faces, human voices on the screen. They are people who sometimes seem a bit strange, sometimes happy, sometimes sad. At times they seem to live in a dream world, at other times in a prison – built by the others. Could this be madness?
One of the speakers in the film believes that there is no such thing as a deformed state of mind, as all states of mind are just part of a whole. He says he had arrived to this world with an already existing knowledge, and gained only the tools here to use that knowledge. This sounds rather bizarre from the mouth of a schizophrenic person – although one of the basic questions of philosophy is exactly whether we are born with tabula rasa, or not. Human consciousness can still not be explained. But the speaker this time is not a philosopher or a scientist, but a person with schizophrenia.
He thinks that schizophrenia is a gift with which he is able to perceive a part of the world that others cannot. Why is it that a positive interpretation of schizophrenia does never appear in public forums? Why do we tend to define madness exceptionally as a negative, frightful phenomenon? There is nothing scary in the film although this is what we would expect on the basis of our stereotypes. It seems that there is a completely different, but still authentic picture of mentally ill people - a picture which does not show raving, narcotized, locked away lunatics who are tied down in order to be harmless. Naturally, this does not mean that such things don’t exist, yet it does indicate that the negative picture we know of madness is considerably simplistic and it keeps alive the system that excludes people who are diagnosed psychotic. It seems that our interpretation of madness is too narrow, although artwork has for a long time proved the existence of another, much more positive approach (Rothenberg 1990). “Maybe if we could understand these people better, if we weren’t scared to let them be part of our community we could get closer to ourselves and to others and it would be easier for us to cope with our own distress and fear that often lead to the rejection, exclusion and dehumanization of others.” (Légmán 2011.245.)
Irodalom:
Fehér, B. (2010): Hajléktalan emberek traumás élményei és azok feldolgozása narratív eszközökkel (Doktori disszertáció, Kézirat)
Foucault, M. (1998): Az igazság és az igazságszolgáltatási formák Latin Betűk Kiadó
Foucault, M. (2004): A bolondság története a klasszicizmus korában Atlantisz Kiadó
Gerbner, G. (2002) A média rejtett üzenete. Osiris Kiadó, MTA-ELTE Kommunikációelméleti Kutatócsoport
Gombos, G. and Dhanda, A. (2009) Catalyzing Self Advocacy; an Experiment in India, Bapu Trust, Pune
Jakab, N. (2011) A támogatott döntéshozatal elméleti és gyakorlati kérdései Kanadában, in Sectio Juruduca et Politica, Thomus XXIX/2, pp 435-450, Miskolc
Jaspers, K. (1963) General Psychopathology (trans. from German by J. Hoenig & M.W. Hamilton). Manchester University Press, Manchester
Légmán, A. (2011) Az őrület és az őrültek helye a társadalomban (Doktori disszertáció, Kézirat)
Nunnally, J. (1961): Popular Conceptions of Mental Health. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York
Rothenberg, A. (1990) Creativity & madness: New findings and old stereotypes John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore
Rothwell, J. D. (2010) In the company of others: an introduction to communication, Oxford University Press , New York
Slade, M. (2009) Personal Recovery and Mental Illness, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Young, I. M. (1990): Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton University Press, Princeton
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