Delving into mental health

Mysteries of Mental Illness, a 4-part series on PBS, is an illustrated recapitulation of two books that I read with great interest – Madness in Civilization and The Mind Fixers –  while working with a friend on a memoir of his thirty years as a psychiatric nurse.  Andrew Scull and Anne Harrington, the respective authors, appear repeatedly as talking heads throughout the series, along with many other practitioners and theorists.  Therefore much of the material is old hat to me, but even with a bit of redundancy and stretching to fill four hours, the visual accompaniment was enough to maintain my interest, though the optimistic prognosis in the final episode struck me as dubious, especially with the lessons learned in the previous episodes, about treatments that were ballyhooed in their time but now strike us as barbaric and counterproductive.
 
That show led me back to other PBS programs that I had bookmarked, but never gotten around to.  That Way Madness Lies… (MC-tbd, PBS) is a personal film by Sandra Luckow, made about (and initially with) her brother, as he descends into insanity, overcome by delusions and obsessions.  This film doesn’t deal much with diagnoses or treatments, but rather with the way a family can be destroyed, physically and financially, as one member loses touch with reality, and winds up in and out of state hospitals, halfway houses, and prisons.  Both siblings began filmmaking as teens, so there is a wealth of archival material to tell the family’s story, which winds up as a 60 Minutes segment, since the sister apparently works for CBS News, which explains the continuing presence of a cameraperson, as the family unravels.  I’d call the result interesting and informative, though hardly revelatory.
 
The Definition of Insanity (PBS) deals with the intersection of mental health and the legal system, not in order to define “insanity,” but to apply the definition “doing the same over and over again and expecting a different result” to the system itself, where state hospitals were emptied only that prisons could be re-filled as treatment-less warehouses for the mentally ill.  It follows a judge in Miami-Dade Country who tired of sending people who were clearly suffering from mental issues to jail rather than to treatment, and started a long-running demonstration project of a Jail Diversion Program, a glimmer of hope in a grim reality.
 
On the same theme in a different vein, Emily Watson is having a nice run in high-quality limited tv-series featuring brainy women in their fifties.  After playing a nuclear scientist in Chernobyl, she has a recent turn as a forensic psychiatrist in Too Close (MC-85, AMC+), which led me back to an earlier series, Apple Tree Yard (IMDB, Hulu), where she begins as a genetics expert testifying in Parliament.  One never has trouble believing that Ms. Watson is a woman who thinks for a living.  Both these series are written and directed by women, and it shows to advantage.  In Too Close, she is recalled from leave after a traumatic incident, to determine the sanity of a mother who drove off a bridge with her young daughter and a friend strapped in the back seat.  The notorious “yummy mummy” is played by Denise Gough (who also has a small role in ATY, from the opposite side of the docket), developing a pas de deux of psychic damage with Watson’s psychiatrist.  Who is getting inside whose head?  It’s a fascinating dance through three episodes, though the conclusion is too tidy in tying up loose ends.  I’m no great fan of British mysteries or police procedurals but both of these series are more psychological than strictly case-oriented, with more emotional than physical violence.  In Apple Tree Yard, the geneticist has an uncharacteristic walk-on-the-wild-side affair with a mysterious Ben Chaplin, with several twists that ensue, leading to a murder trial, which is reasonably well-handled but still less interesting than the human relations depicted.
 
Under this heading, I can report that HBO Max is functional again, after streaming problems, so I watched the rest of the latest season of In Treatment, though I did not feel rewarded for the effort.  Stick with the first three seasons, which are excellent.  In conjunction with In the Heights, however, this series confirms Anthony Ramos as an actor to watch.  In a reversal of the usual hierarchy of value, I much preferred the Showtime series Couples Therapy, reality providing the better script.
 
With the return of HBO service, I was also able to re-watch Madness of King George (1994, MC-89, HBO), a film I couldn’t lay my hands on when I wanted to show it at the Clark a while back, to tie into some Georgian era art exhibit.  Nicholas Hytner directs Alan Bennett’s adaptation of his own earlier play, and everyone makes a fine job of it – what, what!  Nigel Hawthorne is the mad king, Helen Mirren is his queen, Rupert Everett his resentful son, and Ian Holm his mad “doctor.”  I mean it as a complement to say that this film plays as an 18^th century prequel to The Crown, but also as a parody of all “diagnoses” and “treatments” for mental illness up to our very day.