Drunk on Too Much Life

When our daughter Corrina was six years old, she began to worry about 'going crazy’ and described it as "being drunk on too much life" – a beautiful and poetic way to describe the intensely emotional and psychic experiences she would later experience. After her first ‘psychotic break’ when she was 21, our family knew no other way to conceptualize states of ‘madness’ except for what psychiatrists told us. This film is our search for a different story and language with which to understand hearing voices and seeing visions, stepping outside of the biomedical perspective. As Sascha DuBrul, one of the main participants in the film says: “Defining ourselves outside of convention, we see our conditions as dangerous gifts to be cultivated and taken care of rather than seen as diseases or disorders needed to be ‘cured’ or eliminated.”

In a deeply personal way, the film advocates for a new narrative of mental health that is grounded in lived experience, holistic recovery, community, creativity, and connection. My aim is changing the culture and language surrounding mental health care to one that is truly person-centered, recovery-oriented, and trauma-informed. I want to celebrate each person’s full humanity and their right to make meaning of their experiences and make choices about their lives. The film is both a love letter from me to my daughter and to community-based and peer support healing models. All the participants in the film are connected to our family, including the renowned speaker and author Dr. Gabor Maté.

Many personal documentaries that explore issues surrounding mental health focus on the parent, sibling or the filmmaker who struggles with mental illness. These films, and the media surrounding these films are often enmeshed with the biomedical model of health which is the dominant way we treat mental illness in Canada and the U.S.A. This film is unique in that it journeys outside of the asylum towards a more complex understanding of mental health. Its POV is of a family’s journey towards healing involving a holistic understanding of extreme psychic experiences such as hearing voices or seeing visions – often labelled as “psychosis.” The film is a kaleidoscopic journey towards healing and recovery, telling a different more complex story of what gets called mental illness.

As a filmmaker and mother, I have never seen a personal documentary exploring mental health from the parents and daughter’s POV – together and intertwined on their road to healing and greater understanding. A grass-roots celebration of transformative mental health through self-awareness, supportive families, communities, and peer-support, I stayed away from talking head psychiatric expert and focused instead on ‘open dialogue’ and a poetic visual language that celebrates creativity. This film moves beyond medicalized and disease-centered thinking towards regenerative, holistic, and transformative mental health practices. DOTML rebels against the straight walls of the asylum and illuminates how the interesting journeys are never taken on concrete roads - especially journeys of the mind, creativity, and spirit. To quote Jeanette Winterson: “Going mad is the beginning of a journey it’s not supposed to be the end result.”