"Bedlam" at the drive-in

You can still stream this immersive documentary on the failure of our mental health system

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I recently watched the excellent new documentary Bedlam at the drive-in. It was a gorgeous night, with a cool breeze blowing through the windows of my Prius. Sixty or so cars were spaced out at the Madison Mallards stadium; some folks were backed up and sitting on their bumpers as if they were seeing Jaws or the newest superhero movie at the outdoor theater.

It was surreal, seeing a serious film in that way. Bedlam documents the burgeoning crisis for people with severe mental illness, highlighting the connections between homelessness and our criminal justice system, which warehouses mentally ill people instead of treating their disease. It also intersects strongly with the Black Lives Matter movement still roiling the streets of Madison and the rest of the country. 

It was a brilliant plan to bring the movie to the public in this way, showing how local organizations are improvising to get the word out during an international pandemic. The screening was sponsored by NAMI Dane County, Journey Mental Health, Rogers Behavioral Health, Tellurian, RISE Wisconsin and Downtown Madison Inc. Masked attendants at the gate handed everyone a yellow sheet of paper, with contact information for all the sponsors. And mental health professionals were available to chat afterward, if you felt inclined. If you missed the public showing, you can stream Bedlam at pbs.org through the end of August. 

The film wrapped before COVID-19 hit, so when I saw it, I kept projecting how much more difficult it must be now for people with mental illness — and those trying to help them.

The film’s message is clear: Our country has failed to provide adequate health care, housing and economic support for people with mental illness. The film’s director, Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, is a psychiatrist with several other documentaries under his belt, and a book by the same name. Rosenberg has a personal and professional interest in bringing these issues to light. His own sister, Meryl (his “first best friend”) battled schizophrenia, and his family’s response was to hide, rather than confront the challenges head-on. 

There are plenty of heartbreaks in this film, which takes the audience into homeless encampments, a psychiatric ward, a prison and an ER, spaces where the majority of care has taken place since the deinstitutionalization push of the 1980s. 

Over the course of five years the audience is immersed in the upsetting world of mental illness, as people cycle on and off meds, in and out of prisons and hospitals. We meet a young woman, Johanna, in the middle of a bipolar episode where she rants at the camera. We see her chaotic home, and her confession that she cannot remember the last time she slept. 

The story of Monte is especially compelling. He is a gentle African American man who struggles with paranoid delusions. His mother and sister speak frankly to the filmmakers, about the shame and stigma he faces in the community. After he breaks a window during a psychotic episode, Monte is sentenced to four months in jail. 

Todd, who is HIV positive, is angry and discouraged about the endless bureaucratic red tape involved in finding stable housing. “We run in circles, and we get nothing; it’s just sad,” he says.

An overworked psychiatrist admits she has to quit her job working in the ER. We see her ordering a patient into restraints and trying to keep it together as he threatens her. “The way we treat mentally ill people in this country is insane,” she says. 

I spoke on the phone with Peter Miller, one of the Bedlam producers, who was unable to attend the Madison screening because he was “staying safe” in New York City. He says the filmmakers never could have predicted rolling out the film in the middle of a global pandemic, but he is encouraged by the creative thinking that led to the Madison showing. “It's part of the miracle of COVID, which, as horrible and unthinkable as all of this has been, is just this extraordinary amount of improvisation that everybody's had to do to figure out how to do the stuff we normally do, but safely. This is improvisation on a whole different level when you started having your film screenings in cars at a baseball field.”

Bedlam was released at the 2019 Sundance film festival, and the filmmakers planned at least 100 community screenings this year, where audiences could connect with mental health professionals and filmmakers. They held about 20 before restrictions on gatherings made it unsafe to convene. “The last public screening that I went to was on Feb. 28 in San Francisco,” says Miller. “And it was amazing. We all knew that something bad was happening, or about to happen, but we were all in a room together in a movie theater. It was a fantastic event and then, boom, it all shut down.”

If the film seems especially relevant today it’s because it was re-edited after that Sundance debut to include scenes that took place after the initial five-year filming period. It turns out that Monte’s articulate sister, Patrisse Cullors, became a cofounder of the Black Lives Matter movement, and was an outspoken leader in fighting the building of a jail for patients with mental illness in Los Angeles.

“We made the film in Los Angeles because Los Angeles was the epicenter of this crisis,” says Miller. “LA was emblematic, and just such a great lens through which to understand this terrible situation. The city has also been in some ways, the epicenter of the change we've witnessed in the film.” 

The criminalization of people with mental illness is a major theme that runs through Bedlam and is even more critical now, says Miller. “When this crisis begins, you have a vast number of people incarcerated who should be getting treatment. And on top of that, you create a circumstance where not only are they not getting the mental health care that they need, they're being exposed to this epidemic that is certainly going to spread faster in jails and prisons. And on top of it all, in the middle of our pandemic, we have this remarkable social uprising and this national reckoning around race and law enforcement.”

As with other societal disparities, mental health care is not equally distributed in the U.S. “The story of mental health care and of the people who are living with serious mental illness impacts communities of color very differently,” says Miller.

Miller hopes the drive-in model for viewing the film can be replicated elsewhere. “In a weird way, this awful pandemic has created the kind of new ways of communicating that we never would have expected,” he says. “Like a drive-in movie when people are driving in their cars to a minor league baseball stadium to watch a jumbotron, to see a film about serious mental illness. It’s not what we normally do to roll out a film, but, by gum, it works.”