Mental Notes

Exploring the grim realities of the old Mental Health Care systems in New Zealand, this home-grown documentary follows five former patients as they recall their experiences in the residential psychiatric ‘bins’. 

"The bad old, very bad old days of mental health care in New Zealand are recalled with dismay, disbelief and a touch of gallows humour by five survivors in Jim Marbrook’s gently affirmative documentary. All were institutionalised in places that luckier New Zealanders remember just driving past with a contraction of fear and curiosity, scary places that burrowed into national consciousness and individual insecurity for generations. Fear was justified, as these witnesses can testify. Diagnosis could be devastatingly simplistic – ‘We were all schizophrenics in those days’ – and definitive. Tens of thousands were judged incompetent for life and herded, injected, restrained and medicated to fit. Some were admitted as children, considered too unruly for fostering by Child Welfare, and grew up inside." (World Cinema Showcase 2012)

Less