Project Background

Political Art & The Aesthetic Dimension

Psychiatric Hollywood uses audio clips from mainstream western film to engage learners in critical thinking regarding dominant ideologies of mental health. The use of various artistic components, including volume and sound, to evoke strong feelings helps initiate conversations around psychiatric issues but also force us to engage with our ‘self’, our own beliefs and how these beliefs are rooted in dominant values. 

Psychiatric Hollywood was created under the principles of collage-making, a prominent tool to support meaning-making processes because it takes different parts and forms to make a new whole. By taking different parts of fictional and non-fictional TV shows and films, I string together one collective aural journey through processes of labelling and diagnosis. Although it is extremely important to challenge depictions and false representations found within film and other media, I also saw an opportunity to piece together scenes and quotes that would reflect the reality and experiences of oppressed and marginalized groups who have been psychiatrized throughout history, and still are today.

My project was inspired by the use of political theatre at a book launch event hosted by The Coalition Against Psychiatric Assault (CAPA). Both dramatic readings signified, for me, the importance of the dialogical process and the dialectical method of education- i.e. they not only initiated conversations around the issue of psychiatric institutionalization, but also forced engagements with our ‘Self’ and our own beliefs by making us critically challenge them. This is aligned with Marcuse’s belief about the political potential of art - that is that it can “subvert the dominant consciousness, the ordinary experience” (Marcuse as cited by Brookfield & Holst, p.146) and induce in us “an awareness of other ways of being in the world” (Brookfield & Holst, p.146). Milbrandt (2010) provides that the arts “often challenge dominant ideas, values, and tactics of a society and also social movements” (p.13), while exploring societal tensions and boundaries. Psychiatric Hollywood is aimed at challenging the dominant ideologies of Hegemonic notions of mental health, and its potential as a creative product lies not only within its literal content but the aesthetic dimension of auditory mediums, where the message can speak volumes in both the literal and metaphorical sense.

Audio as an Educational Tool

There is a kind of sensational value inherent in audio alone that differs from film, or written work. For example, Anthony Bates (2017) provided a list of benefits for using audio in teaching. One obvious benefit is that it is ideal for auditory learners, however perhaps not as evident, is its capacity to change learners’ attitudes by presenting information in a novel way or from an unfamiliar perspective - a benefit ideal for counter-hegemonic work. Bates provided results of a study conducted by Nicol Durbirdge that revealed audio to be an intimate medium because it provided feelings of ‘personal closeness’, which may better connect the listener to the product and its content. McLuhan (1964) famously coined the phrase “the medium is the message”, forcing us to question the media we choose to use and its impact on its user and society. Audio is used for this project to lure the listener into an experience that feels intimately close and familiar, while at the same time slightly uncomfortable. because, according to Markova & Ryan (2006) that is where the learning happens - in the uncomfortable stretch zone.

Art in Context: A History of Violence and Oppression

It’s important to provide historical context for why and how Psychiatric Hollywood participates in storytelling and bearing witness, whether the films used are fiction or non-fiction. The history of madness and psychiatry within the western context is feathered with oppression, violence and inhumane treatment. By tracing some of the historical lineages of current diagnoses and treatments, we can recognize how power has been and still continues to be executed over people, especially black folks, indigenous folks, queer folks, women and the poor. This has been demonstrated by Burstow (2015) in her published works, Psychiatry and the Business of Madness:

Like many components of westernized culture, psychiatry can be traced back to Greek theorists who medicalized behaviours by viewing psychic issues as ‘medical’ problems. Hippocrates (460 BC- 370 BC), for example, created the prototype for biological psychiatry by attributing affections and behaviours to an imbalance of bodily fluids or ‘humours’. Various conditions (such as mania, paranoia and melancholia) and treatments (such as bloodletting, purging, and application of hot and cold water) have been and continue to be built under this tradition of disorder. 

The permeation of a bio-medical model of mental health has made it easier for oppressed groups to be controlled, by weaponizing diagnosis to establish dominance and uphold traditional ideologies such as white supremacy, colonialism, and patriarchy. For example, doctors have often associated special types of ‘madness’ with women’s sexual or reproductive anatomy, such as hysteria - which was originally conceived to be caused by the movement of the uterus wandering about and bumping other organs and causing a rise in ‘tumultuous passion’. Such psychiatric stereotyping of the female transcends history. Today, Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a diagnosis more frequently ascribed to women than men, often stigmatizing their affections as ‘wild’ and/or ‘extreme’, and without consideration of social inequalities and routine traumas disproportionately affecting them, such as domestic abuse and sexual violence.

The oppression of individuals and communities by ‘medical doctors’ has taken many forms of management throughout history. Black folks, indigenous folks and queer folks have also been, and still are, victim to ‘diagnosis’ and treatment that deny their identities, experiences and histories. For example, Drapetomania, coined in 1851, was a mental illness attributed to those enslaved who attempted to run away (their desire to escape being the ‘symptom’), where it’s corresponding prescribed ‘treatment’ was physical abuse such as whipping. This diagnosis and treatment was used as a way to justifiably control black folks and their narratives about themselves, including their human need to live freely. Even conversion therapy (that still exists across North America today) pathologizes the experiences of the LGBTQ2+ community, as it seeks to “repair” or change one’s sexual or gender identity/expression through drugs, re-parenting techniques, and negative stimuli. One of the more overtly violent contemporary procedures has been the pre-frontal lobotomy/leucotomy (first performed in the United States by Walter Freeman in 1936), which is a surgical procedure severing the connections in the brain’s frontal lobe that works to make the patients more manageable by altering their personality or incapacitating them. These examples illustrate the swooping power of institutions to oppress marginalized groups and maintain their practices as humane and liberatory.