Mary O’Hagan characterises the five years she spent in and out of psychiatric hospitals as a period of ‘desperate existential struggle’, during which she made sense of her mind by putting pen to paper. By contrast, the words written about her by the psychiatrists down the hall were condemnatory. In Madness Made Me, O’Hagan, who is now an internationally respected mental health professional and a New Zealand mental health commissioner, confronts the dehumanising words written by her doctors, and recalls how her battles with mental illness shaped her sense of meaning.
Have mental health diagnoses lost sight of the human beings they seek to treat?
Director: Nikki Castle
Producer: Alexander Gandar
20 August 2015
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