Today I watched this film (with others!) at a mental health community film festival and it was interesting, beautiful, and kind of infuriating. Crooked Beauty is a short film about the life/thoughts of Icarus Project co-founder Jacks McNamara. For those not familiar, their mission statement:
We are a network of people living with and/or affected by experiences that are often diagnosed and labeled as psychiatric conditions. We believe these experiences are mad gifts needing cultivation and care, rather than diseases or disorders. By joining together as individuals and as a community, the intertwined threads of madness, creativity, and collaboration can inspire hope and transformation in an oppressive and damaged world.
Yeah.
Again, the film was better than I was expecting, since it was less about the Icarus Project and more about MacNamara’s personal journey etc, so while I took issue with parts of it, the majority of the film felt too personal to really argue with? Also, the cinematography was gorgeous, ngl.
What really bothered me was the attitude of the director, Ken Paul Rosenthal, who had come to present the film and talk about his vision etc. This was a community mental health forum, the community being us, us being the people who live here and are mentally ill, but he didn’t seem interested in discussion. Instead, he spent most of the discussion time after the film talking about the Icarus Project and espousing their beliefs, basically. He said he was interested in hearing back (and considering how much he talked about community building, you’d think he believed it) but also added as a preface that he wasn’t interested in discussing degrees of mental illness - sorry, quote unquote “mental illness” or how real it was, and that there was at least as much literature about the myth of mental illness as there was supporting it’s reality, etc.
I appreciate the local organizers’ effort in bringing him here and in setting up the festival, but damn, I’m still pissed he showed up and had the arrogance to basically tell us we weren’t allowed to respond to his work (effectively shutting down community discussion) and to shill for the Icarus Project on top of that. No wonder he only got three questions.
tbh, this all-or-nothing approach to mental illness activism i find really frustrating, and even though it’s often masked behind a progressive sheen it seems to me to be just another way of ignoring the fundamental problems we have as a society with mental illness. claiming it’s “just another way to be” while literally true, ignores the long and complex history of the ableism in our society.
building communities is a worthwhile goal, but abandoning the dsm/psychiatry/psychology altogether also abandons the people who depend on them: people who can’t afford or don’t recover with other treatment options, people who are isolated, or people who, like me, who find some use in their diagnoses and the medication/therapy they receive based on that. there are huge, glaring problems with these institutions and i am not denying that! i would like those problems to be faced, and i would like change, but again i can’t help but think initiatives like the icarus project and other like-minded segments of the mad pride movement leave behind a huge portion of the population they aim to represent.
claiming that mental illness is a myth, or that “these experiences are mad gifts needing cultivation and care, rather than diseases or disorders” and that personal responsibility (stressed in both the film and by the director) and community building are the answer strikes me as just another way of putting the responsibility back on the mentally ill person to cure themselves and to be able to cope without intervention. this may be coached in radical sounding terminology as it was tonight, but it’s just a re-framing of a very typical way, harmful way of looking at mental illness, and one that’s pre-dominant already in our society.
finally, i reject the idea that my mental illness isn’t a disease or a disorder. it is just another way of being, but it’s one that i need and deserve treatment for. mental illness has caused pain and disruption and trauma in my life, and i’m not going to pretend that it isn’t harmful.
sorry for the long ramble, this is just some halfway coherant responses to the film tonight?
