Insanity: Doc about Mental Illness Chronicles a Stark Societal Fail

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B

Filmmaker Wendy Hill-Tout has considerable skin in the game with her feature-length documentary, the unambiguously titled Insanity: The Mental Health Crisis. After watching her cherished, highly artistic brother Bruce endure years of ups and downs assumed to be mere depression, Hill-Tout and her family finally learned he had schizophrenia.

The filmmaker with her brother as children.

What followed was periods of relative stability while Bruce was on his meds, then periods of instability when he was off them and finally, a disappearance. But as the film makes clear, even if the Hill-Tout family had managed to locate Bruce, it’s doubtful they would have been able to fully access the help he needed. The system, Insanity makes clear, is busted.

The Hill-Tout family’s experience with mental illness is Insanity’s narrative anchor. As the director tries to find her missing brother — his absent character played by actor Brandon Dewyn in a novel if occasionally startling device — she surveys mental illness’s devastating impact on society, past and present, talking with doctors, researchers, and most potently, other families facing the same problem.

Not surprisingly, what she finds is grim and pretty much what we already know to be the case: that services for the mentally ill are inadequate or come with labyrinthine requirements, and that many of those suffering mental illness end up on the streets where illicit drugs help ease the trauma but exacerbate existing conditions.

Because there is no emergency service such as fire or ambulance tailored to mental distress, police get the call when conflicts arise. This puts mentally ill people in the justice system, which is also wholly inadequate for their needs and obscenely expensive for taxpayers.

There are better ways of managing this, and they’re doable — access to housing, ongoing treatment, de-stigmatization — but political will is lacking. And reform would touch many institutions constitutionally resistant to change.

Hill-Tout’s film casts a wide net, showing just how pervasive and arbitrary mental illness is. Scenes of mass outdoor encampments in cities across North America illustrate the story of the most vulnerable among us. But even the affluent face grinding challenges.

For example, during the making of her drama Marlene, Hill-Tout discovered that her lead, Kristin Booth, also had a brother with mental illness. Hill-Tout follows the actor home, where she meets Tyler Booth, who is coping thanks to strong family support. Yet even with access to elite legal and medical help, the Booths still struggle to get the professional services they need.

Elsewhere, Hill-Tout explores historical handling of the mentally ill, concluding that we haven’t much improved across the ages. Sure, so-called insane asylums no longer exist, but prison populations of mentally ill are surely viewed in the same alarming light.

“I started this film because I got tired of seeing people with a mental illness shot by police,” Hill-Tout says at the film’s opening, as images from recent infamous cases such as Sammy Yatim, Chantel Moore, and Ashley Smith alight on screen.

“I was tired of the numbers in the jails and in the streets and what we do to them. It’s insane really,” she adds, as if to highlight that the film’s title points not to the mentally ill but to society’s deportment toward them.

“My brother Bruce had a mental illness when he disappeared 25 years ago. And what I want people to know is, he was loved.”

That point underlined by Hill-Tout’s siblings and father who, like her, remain palpably tortured by Bruce’s disappearance, by guilt at what they might have done differently to help him, and by the sadness endured by their mother, who died not knowing where her son was.

It’s debatable whether the unfussy but sincerely moving Insanity will bring about much societal change. But it is certain to arouse compassion for the people we encounter daily living unimaginably hard lives that could be vastly improved if only the will to help them could be sufficiently corralled.

Insanity: The Mental Health Crisis. Directed by Wendy Hill-Tout. Starring Brandon Dewyn, and with Kristin Booth. At Toronto’s Imagine Cinemas Carlton May 19-25.