Mysteries of Mental Illness

For many of the million-plus people with mental illness in the U.S., access to treatment and insurance is limited. Psychiatrist Sidney Hankerson is working to combat this by bringing healthcare to culturally relevant settings. In the black community, this might mean forming partnerships with trusted community establishments, like barbershops and churches, and developing interventions from there.

When Lorina Gutierrez came down with a terrifying illness, her family thought might be possessed. Psychiatric doctors could find no medications that alleviated the symptoms, and it wasn’t until they looked for a medical explanation that it was discovered she was suffering from a virtually unknown auto-immune disease, given the name 'Brain on Fire'.

As asylums were deemed inhumane and closed down, the social commitment to community care disappeared, and monies were allocated elsewhere. So began the mass incarceration of the mentally ill as, with nowhere to go, they wound up homeless, or in nursing homes or jails. The irony is that they have not been deinstitutionalized, and their treatment resembles the punitive systems of the past.

Ginny Fuchs discovered boxing in college. She is now an Olympic boxer and rates in the top three in the world. Though she has the self-control to spar eight rounds, hit the bag for six rounds, and do a 30-minute run, she can't clean a countertop and wash her hands in less than two hours, due to her OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). She is working to understand why.

What is mental illness and who is normal? Definitions of these have been defined differently over the centuries, but the boundary between illness and sickness remains very fluid. There are no biological tests to diagnose mental illness, so societies decide what constitutes behavioral and social norms, and where the lines of deviance exist.

Some 30,000 patients came through the Mississippi State Hospital for the Insane, and many never left. The asylum cemetery was recently discovered by construction workers, and approximately 7,000 burials were discovered. Not a single one has been identified, but records in the State archives reveal why many were admitted and how they died.

Treating Schizophrenia early in a person's illness can increase the chances of success. Like many suffering from hallucinations, however, Cecilia McGough found that the stigma around her illness made it very difficult to talk about. After an incident put her in a psych ward for ten days, Cecilia gathered up the courage to open up about her illness using social media as a platform.

By the early 20th century, mental asylums had become extremely overcrowded, and very little was known about how to treat these patients. Out of view from the public eye, desperate doctors experimented with new treatments. When treatments failed, patients were labeled biologically defective, fueling the Eugenics program, and the involuntary sterilization of thousands of patients.

Mysteries of Mental Illness, airing on PBS in June 2021, explores the story of mental illness in science and society. The four-part series traces the evolution of this complex topic from its earliest days to present times. It explores dramatic attempts across generations to unravel the mysteries of mental illness and gives voice to contemporary Americans across a spectrum of experiences.

Michael Walrond began to experience bouts of depression in his twenties. He didn't seek help because mental illness wasn't something people talked readily about in his community and, as a black man, he didn't want another label. After becoming a preacher he felt that admitting his illness would show a lack of trust in God, and so for years, Michael suffered in silence.

For 8 years, Matthew Rosenberg has dealt with a debilitating form of OCD. He hyperventilates throughout the day and is in near-constant pain. having tried numerous therapies and medicines with no results, his last hope is the high-tech surgery he’s waiting for, where electrodes will be transplanted into his brain.

A preview of DECOLONIZING MENTAL HEALTH, an original digital series that dismantles the racism underscoring the mental healthcare industry. By focusing its gaze on the transformative work of therapists and individuals of color, it calls for redressal of the ways in which we define psychiatric illness and health.