Filmmaker Adam Louw has been spending his time in a mental home. HAZEL FRIEDMAN reports on an emotional exploration of insanity
‘Why have you brought me here?” The young man stares wildly at the white coats surrounding him. “God will punish you all, I know what His plans are for South Africa.” Tell us, implore the doctors in tones that speak more of impotence than solicitousness.
The patient — recently brought for unruly behaviour and certified as psychotic — wraps his arms tightly around his chest, as if attempting to retain his last vestiges of privacy, and whispers: “No.”
This is just one of the many faces of Valkenberg, the psychiatric hospital which will be the subject of an extraordinary documentary to be screened on November 7 on NNTV at 9pm. Directed by British filmmaker Adam Louw, it is the culmination of a project initiated by Louw four years ago when he came to South Africa to make a BBC television series on famous writers and was “blown away by the enormity of South Africa’s ironies”.
But his venture into the hidden world of mental illness was postponed by a film project focusing on apartheid’s most famous institution and its prisoners — Robben Island (Voices from the Island), in which he collaborated with JUrgen Schadeberg.
“I saw an obvious link between Valkenberg and Robben island,” recalls Louw, “and that was not only due to the fact that patients from Valkenberg have been sent to the Island, but also because of the stresses of living in apartheid South Africa and their impact on mental health.”
Louw has focused on the problems and process of integration at Valkenberg since the hospital was officially desegregated in 1990. But instead of disclosing the Dickensian secrets that lie within Valkenberg’s walls, Louw concentrated on exploring the concept of madness itself.
“Valkenberg certainly didn’t strike me as a Victorian horror chamber. I saw the project less in journalistic terms than as a narrative that explores Valkenberg more in emotional terms. Most importantly, I wanted to demystify madness.”
Louw spent two months visiting the hospital on a regular basis to orient himself. He forged relationships of trust with both staff and patients, which explains the editorial freedom with which the film is made and the ease with which he was able to bypass the Mental Health Act prohibiting psychiatric patients from being photographed.
Unlike many filmmakers engaged in ethnographic studies, Louw does not allow the omniscient voice over commentary to direct viewer response. Rather, his subjects literally speak for themselves with a candour, self-awareness and sensitivity that is both heartening and poignant.
And as Louw reveals, Valkenberg today occupies a very different headspace to its pre-1990 era. Gone are the racially segregated wards (the former black section has been converted into a non-racial maximum security ward). And these days it would be unheard of to re- experience the racial disgrace of 1979 when a highly successful form of touch therapy known simply as D5 (after the ward in which it was used ) was abruptly halted after a black orderly reportedly hugged a white patient.
Relationships inevitably develop in a place where people find mutual solace in their pain. “You find out who your friends really are when you’re sick or poor,” says a hairdresser suffering from bi-polar depression. “The outside world doiesn’t understand us. They reject us out of fear and contempt, but here we are one family.”
Even love affairs blossom at Valkenberg, as illustrated through the interview with a woman who believes she is Princess Di and her fiance “Charles”. Yet sexual violence between patients is also commonplace particularly in the maximum security wards where petty criminals arrested for stealing a loa of bread, and drug addicts are dumped alongside hardened rapists and murderers.
As Louw suggests, integration has not alleviated the problems in diagnosing mental illness according to absolute scientific standards within the context of a multi-cultural society. After all, one culture’s psycho might be another culture’s psychic. This is illustarted in a filmed therapy session with a schizophrenic patient who insists he has received his calling to train as a sangoma.
Louw provides few soft touches. He reveals the trauma of of elderly man whose home and belongings — and probably his family — were incinerated in a faction fight at Croosrads squatter camp and the anguish of a young junkie and his troubled relationship with his father. He also focusses on the animistic rituals of a young girl who is guilt-stricken over the recent murder of her uncle and is trying to communicate with him through her ancestors.
To these patients Valkenberg is alternatively a sanctuary and a prison. It is a place where everything is heightened: the light that basks the hospital in an almost surreal glow; the powerlessness of conventional medicine to deal with the complexities of mental illness; and the effects of a political system that epitomised psychosis in its most rationlised form.
And you can’t help wondering whether the madness is contained within Valkenberg or runs rampant and undiagnosed outside its walls.