Healing Troubled Minds

Senator Michael Kirby’s Senate committee’s call to bring discussion about mental illness out of the shadows at last seems to have some legs. People are talking, writing and, increasingly, making movies about mental illness. Since the 2006 Senate committee report, Canadian money has gone into Frankie & Alice, a drama about dissociative disorders starring Halle Berry; Kiefer Sutherland has starred in Mirrors about schizophrenia and more recently Melancholia; we have seen Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl, featuring a person with delusional disorder; Atom Egoyan released Chloe in which there is a prominent role for a woman with borderline personality disorder; and now David Cronenberg has got in on the act with A Dangerous Method, which chronicles the relationships between Freud and Jung and between Jung and one of his patients. So if the media zeitgeist is a true reflection of popular culture, things are looking...