Last night I attended the Rendezvous with Madness film festival. I was invited by a friend in the final year of her psychiatry residency that was on the panel following the film screening. It is the second time in a couple of weeks that I was at an event that had a focus on mental health. The other was at the Excellence Canada Performance Summit that I attended on behalf of a colleague. It had a session on mental health at work. These types of events and discussions are part of a longer-term trend of better understanding mental health and how to integrate dialogue about it into our community rather than hiding it away, sometimes literally (see this great Active History paper on how the stories of those in Toronto’s insane asylums, who used to be hidden behind walls they help build).
The session at Excellence Canada offered examples of how workplaces across the country are taking steps to better address metal health as part of their workplace health and wellness programs that have more traditionally focused on physical health. The activities and topics covered were broad reaching during the discussion, including identifying risk factors in organizations, employee access to benefits when experiencing mental illness, and approaches for how organizations can help their employees cope with challenges and stress in the workplace. The Bell Mental Health Initiatives was one of the projects covered. It is a $50 million commitment to enhancing the lives of Canadians by increasing awareness, understanding and treatment of mental illness across the country by focusing on anti-stigma, care and access, workplace and research. When large corporations like Bell are undergoing a paradigm shift with mental illness (or at least want to brand themselves as having done so), it is a good indicator of how far we’ve come.
The Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival is another indicator. The festival has been around for 19 years. The film I saw was “People in White” and told the stories of psychiatric patients through reenactment with other patients (and a handful of actors representing the stories of real patients. It showed the complexity of the doctor-patient relationship and raised questions about power dynamics and treatment method. It opened a discussion about how realistic these relationships were depicted and how dramatically things have changed in the couple of decades since the festival started, including that such a film that focuses on the stories of patients never would have been told until recently. The venue for the film screening was Workman Arts, an organization dedicated to working with artists with mental illness and promoting art that creates greater understanding of mental illness. It was inspiring to hear how far this project has come and how they have observed and reflected the changing perceptions of mental illness.
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Masthead photo courtesy of floodllama