In his new documentary 'Bedlam,' psychiatrist and filmmaker Ken Rosenberg looks at how the U.S. criminalizes mental illness
But what effect did injecting his own story into Bedlam have on Rosenberg himself?
Right now, the three largest mental institutions in the United States are three largest jails. The jail in Los Angeles [County] is the largest mental institution in the country. If you have a mental illness here, you’re 10 times more likely to be in jail than you are to be in a hospital. If you’re a person of color, the statistics are even greater. Twenty to 50% of all fatal police shootings involve someone who has a mental illness. So, our response to mental illness is really harmful.
And I think that you’ll see in other developed countries, they have a much more informed approach. In the book, we talk about a small community, Trieste, in Italy. It has 220,000 inhabitants, but they’re a world health exemplar for community mental health. It actually doesn’t even need hospitals. They have a few hospital beds, but hardly have a need for them, along with putting people in jail. So there are better ways to do it.
To me, it seemed like the civil rights movement that ought to be happening that isn’t. That has been the struggle for people with serious mental illness; the discrimination against them, both in terms of how we treat them as disabled people, but also how we fail them completely from a medical standpoint. To me, it’s just mind-boggling, where, you know, because we have the sickest people, [who] the psychiatrists don’t treat [in their private practices]. Nowhere in medicine does that happen.
Were there things that weren’t included in the film? Things that, perhaps, were too difficult to show?Drinking Apart: Families Under the Influence
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