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A Mind In Pieces

Student documentary gives an

insider's account of schizophrenia

By Gordon Young

Kate Cadigan expected her thesis project for Stanford University's documentary film program to have a happy ending. It was supposed to explore the psychotic break her younger brother, John, experienced while attending art school in Pittsburgh and to chronicle his recovery.

"When we started filming, I thought the doctors were wrong, and this would be a film about how the doctors were wrong," says Cadigan, who spent an unexpected 19 months directing, editing and producing Out of My Mind, which screens Wednesday at Stanford. "I could not conceive early on that this would be a film about John getting schizophrenia."

Out of My Mind is not the uplifting documentary its maker or its subject envisioned, but it does provide an intriguing look into the mind of someone afflicted with mental illness. It also helped Cadigan and her family deal with a situation that frequently tears families apart.

"It was a way for us to get something good out of a horrible, horrible circumstance," says Cadigan, who left a career as a high-tech marketing consultant to pursue filmmaking.

John was 21 when he was suddenly beset by paranoid thoughts and depression early in his senior year at Carnegie Mellon University. He came to California to live with Cadigan and her husband, Mark, after it became clear he couldn't function at school. His condition worsened. "It seemed like John's brain was under attack," Cadigan narrates in the documentary. "We watched his logic, his language and his concentration deteriorate."

During a session with a Bay Area therapist, John entered a catatonic state and was hospitalized. "He's frozen," the therapist tells a 911 operator during a call that is heard during the film. "He literally can't move; and he's shaking; and he can't even blink his eyes right now."

John's ability to step back and comment on his condition, even while in the throes of paranoia and depression, gives Out of My Mind a rare perspective. Like author Donna Williams, who describes the previously impenetrable world of autism in her book Nobody Nowhere, John describes the thoughts he can't seem to escape.

"I guess the best way to describe it is a constant argument inside trying to figure out what is the truth and what is not the truth," he explains in a flat voice. "It makes it very difficult to be around people because the argument is loud."

John suggested a film about "what hell it is to have to be me" shortly after Cadigan finished her course work and was "casting about" for a thesis project. "We spent the next couple of days talking about what would be in the film," Cadigan says. "Then we started to try and figure out how to do a film that would be most helpful and therapeutic for him."

John's paranoia made it impossible to enlist the technicians necessary to shoot in film. Instead, Out of My Mind was shot in video, and principal photographer Cynthia Wade--another Stanford student--acted as a one-woman crew. "I'm a firm believer in letting your subject matter dictate your format," Cadigan says. "Making John as comfortable as possible pushed us to video fairly early."

There was also a more fundamental cinematic problem. "One of the enormous challenges was to make a visually interesting documentary that is essentially taking place in someone's mind," Cadigan says. "When John is struggling with his illness, he just sits there. He's not a person who's running around screaming and banging on walls."

Cadigan solves this problem with compelling narration and interviews. In one sequence, John is doing nothing more than driving a car on a rainy day, but the voice-over of him describing his illness transforms a seemingly mundane activity into a tension-filled exercise.

"I have lots of violent thoughts and fantasies," John reveals. "That's what happens with the paranoia. You become paranoid about someone; and you get angry; and you're full of rage; and you want to hurt them."

The documentary then cuts to an interview of John with his dark, charcoal drawings in the background. He continues, "I've been lucky that I haven't been so blinded by the rage that something really horrible happens. So I think that I'll be able to stop myself."

Another jump shows John with a young relative who playfully beans him in the head with a small toy. John laughs--the only time this happens in the documentary--and you get a glimpse of the person who is slipping away.

The same is true for the segment that captures Cadigan and her mother helping John move out of his Pittsburgh apartment. Shots of them cleaning the bathtub, mopping the floor and shaking out a rug signal more than a move to California. John is packing up his old life and, in a sense, his grasp on reality.

"Another definition of psychosis is a break from reality," John says in a voice-over as he collects his belongings. "But then the big question is, well, what is reality?"

Cadigan's technique also adds an intriguing visual component to the documentary. As John de-scribes the doctor's at-tempts to diagnose him, the camera zips over his medical forms in extreme close-up, blending everything from "depression" to "schizo-affected mania" into a steady, confusing stream of medical argot. At that stage in the documentary, no one was quite sure what was happening to John.

Later, the camera scans down John's fifth-grade report card, dominated by A's and a few B's, as he says, "That is when I really started being an introvert. I remember drawing some really terrible pictures." Cut to a crude, childlike drawing of smiling stick figures with a sun in the background. For a second, you wonder what is so foreboding about this happy, predictable rendering. Then the camera slowly pulls back to reveal that the stick figures are imprisoned in a bubble or crystal ball surrounded by larger, more elaborately drawn ghouls and monsters.

This trick is nothing new, but Cadigan uses it to perfection by tying it to the narrative and, once again, adding an engaging twist to what could have been a very straight-forward shot.

Cadigan's approach has already earned her the International Documentary Association's David L. Wolper Student Documentary Achievement Award and several screenings throughout the country. John also gave it his endorsement.

"He really likes it," says Cadigan, who is preparing for a second documentary on John titled Mind Over Madness. "He's seen it several times, but he can't quite remember what was in it the time before because his memory is not that great. Each time, he says the exact same sentence: 'Wow, I said some really good things.' "

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Stanford's Documentary Film & TV Program will screen four thesis projects (Katie Cadigan's Out of My Mind, Sarah Whiteley's Requiem, Beth Cohen's Farewell Bosnia and Cynthia Wade's Almost Home) at Stanford's Annenberg Auditorium in the Cummings Art Building on Wednesday (Nov. 8) at 7:30pm. Admission is free.


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