“We have to talk about something which has been kept in the shadows and is kept hidden,” says Peter. “The courage to speak out, the courage that Ken had to tell his own family's story and the courage that the people who he filmed had to reveal their lives is all part of the necessary process of bringing serious mental illness out into the open. Because until we tell these stories, we can't build the national movement that's necessary to solve this problem.”
Ken and Peter emphasize that this failure has come from several different places, including the psychiatric community itself. “I think where psychiatry has been faulty is we have not advocated for [the seriously mentally ill]. We've kind of stood on the sidelines and said, ‘Sure, if you're not going to pay for this, we'll just do something else.’ That is wrong of my profession. That is wrong.”
The film doesn’t let the government off the hook either, pointing out the problems with our over-crowded prisons, and the lack of funding for the kinds of institutions that could truly treat the seriously mentally ill on a long-term basis. But Ken and Peter stress that we shouldn’t wait for any one administration to step up and solve the problem.
“It won't depend on who's in office,” says Ken. “Just like people with breast cancer or HIV do. They don't say, ‘We're going to be dependent on President Obama or President Trump.’ They say, ‘We're going to be relentless in asking for research and care in the way that we deserve.’”
Bedlam is partly Ken’s own story, but it’s also his plea: to admit that our current solutions aren’t good enough, to give mental health workers more money and resources, to reach back out to the millions of people whom we so often abandon.
Beldam premieres at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday, January 28th in the Egyptian Theatre.