I NEED TO RAISE MONEY TO MAKE A FILM ABOUT PSYCHOSIS - PLEASE HELP

PSYCHOSIS DOCUMENTARY – Trapped Birds

A synopsis of the idea

It is a self-reflexive documentary about the experience of psychosis, focusing on the sensory aspect of it but also touching upon delusion. The film will be partly experiential in that through the film the viewer will hear voices and see visual hallucinations, but also how it affects people who have psychosis, their sense of identity, perception, and communication. It is a documentary that has no claims to objectivity which absorbs drama and art because by its very nature psychosis is not a reality shared.

Why you want to make this film?

I have personal experience of psychosis, and want to show what it is like as accurately as I can, and make the viewer experience it in is some small way, so as to gain a better understanding of it. There is the scientific element to the experience and want to use this documentary why so many people who go through it do not see it as an illness, and are resistant to scientific intervention. Because it isn’t necessary a negative experience. After the 1000th ride of this burning mental carnival, you start to see something else. You see, as the train rides upward, you get closer to the stars than everyone else. You hear music that no-one else hears, your soul makes its own symphonies when everyone else has to buy their song. You see psychosis can be magic at times, but it is a precocious and precarious magic. You have to be careful, you have to make sure you can put yourself back together when you saw yourself in half. Houdini did on the physical plane what mad people do mentally every single day – to very little applause. Some people see weakness, I see immense strength in those who are still standing. This is rarely touched upon in films on psychosis. I want to humanize what is seen as unfairly pathological. When the ‘real’ world is full of bills, unkindness, wars and stigma, staying in psychosis is very seductive. I would also like to highlight why so many people in psychotic crisis slip through the net and commit suicide; crisis care in this country asks you to pick up the phone when you are also hearing voices, and wait for hours in A&E whilst you are experiencing an emotional and mental apocalypse being actually surrounded by bleeding, crying, broken-boned people. Mental health services ask people in distress to swim the Channel when they are already drowning. I want the film to provide a challenging argument to those who want to maintain things as it is.

I want this film to stand as a work of art but I know from my work in mental health this kind of film would be invaluable for mental health professionals to understand better the people who they are trying to help, and in their training. But also to dispel ignorance about this aspect of mental health generally.

Style of film

 It will be a self-reflexive, experimental, experiential, unsettling but beautiful too. It will also be poetic, passionate, and even a little humorous in part. It will show how psychosis interacts with the world around it. A trip to the shop, a conversation with another human being, using the phone can either be an ordeal or transcendental or both. We also want to show psychosis through the filter of dance, art, sound and animation.

What the film offers A better understanding of mental health issues, and learning how to work with vulnerable people sensitively, and also tackle a subject that has been underrepresented, and of a human experience rarely looked at without being demonized. It is rare to be involved in a film about psychosis made by a person who lives with that experience.  This is a rare experience, in that psychosis is a strange land where few people come back able to talk about it and articulate it. I am one of those people.

If you would rather send me a cheque or offer inkind support, please email me on dollysen70@hotmail.com