April 5, 2020

According the PBS “Independent Lens” documentary “Bedlam,” there are 15 million American families living with serious mental illness. For psychiatrist and filmmaker Dr. Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, one of those families is his own.

In the film, Rosenberg chronicles the history and the failures of the mental health system through interviews with patients and their doctors and families, and reveals his sister’s 30-year struggle with schizophrenia that eventually claimed her life.

Rosenberg, the New York-based author of “Bedlam: An Intimate Journey Into America’s Mental Health Crisis,” spent seven years inside the Los Angeles County jail, homeless encampments and the emergency room at the L.A. County-USC Medical Center to document patient histories. “If you’re going to make a film about serious mental illness, you have to go to the center of the crisis, which is in L.A.,” he told the Journal. That involved a lot of red tape.

His first hurdle was securing access and permission from the L.A. Board of Supervisors, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and consent from the interviewees to be filmed repeatedly over the years. “We didn’t make a film about these people, we made a film with these people,” Rosenberg said. “The patients and the family members were true collaborators. We looked for the people who were the most interesting and had the best stories to invest the time, money and energy to follow.” One of them is Patrisse Cullors, whose brother’s mental illness was the catalyst for her advocacy and activism for prison reform and mental health issues, and the co-founding the Black Lives Matter movement.

“The fundamental problem is the disease,” Rosenberg said. “These are bad illnesses and not easy to treat. We have drugs that are very good in some ways, but they’re 70 years old and imperfect. In the past 17 years, the research in schizophrenia drug trials has decreased 90%. There’s hope but we need to make this a priority.”

There are other issues beyond finding better drugs with fewer side effects. “This is a much-neglected social crisis,” he added. “In Los Angeles, there are at least 20,000 people with mental illness who are homeless. People with mental illness are 10 times more likely to be in jail, and jails are terrible places to be right now,” he said, referring to the coronavirus pandemic. “We don’t save lives or money by putting people in jail or letting them languish on the streets. It already costs us quite a bit in terms of the economics and human toll. We need to invest in research.”

The other factor is the shame and disgrace —the shandah — associated with mental illness that many families deal with, Rosenberg said, placing his own parents among them. “We all want to hide from it, but if you don’t talk about it, how can you get help?” For that reason, he decided to put himself in the film and talk publicly for the first time about his sister, who is the reason he became a psychiatrist.

 “This is a much-neglected social crisis. In Los Angeles, there are at least 20,000 people with mental illness who are homeless. People with mental illness are 10 times more likely to be in jail, and jails are terrible places to be right now.” — Dr. Kenneth Paul Rosenberg

“I had no intention of telling my story, but part of what changed my mind was the courage of the patients,” he said. “If these people could tell their stories, I could tell mine and say, ‘The reason I’m making this film is my sister died from it.’ ” It was cathartic, “a cleansing experience,” he said.

Raised in a Conservative Ashkenazi Jewish family and a Reconstructionist now, Rosenberg lost his two sisters and his parents within a couple of years. “Faith helped me with that enormously,” he said. “Judaism was always very important in my family and is in my life now.” It’s a theme in his first film, a short called “My Hebrew Teacher.” When his daughter, now a UCLA architecture student, took Hebrew lessons to prepare for her bat mitzvah, Rosenberg decided to join her and learned that the teacher had lost her parents in the Holocaust as she prepared for her own bat mitzvah. He told both stories in the film.

A graduate of Brandeis University, Albert Einstein Medical School and a residency at Cornell University, Rosenberg took some elective film courses to alleviate the boredom of basic medicine classes and discovered that he loved it. “It was a way for me to connect to what I love: talking to people,” he said. With four documentaries for HBO and two for PBS to his credit, he doesn’t have his next film lined up, but he said it “will probably be a Jewish topic or a medical topic.”

Right now, he’s dealing with a full load of fearful patients as a result of COVID-19. “It’s not necessarily the disease but the fear of the disease,” he said. “If you have a pre-existing condition, COVID makes everything so much worse. My old and new patients with anxiety disorders now have big anxiety disorders. Everything is magnified.”

Rosenberg hopes that “Bedlam” will underscore the importance of grass-roots activism in the mental health crisis. “The way to change the system is through advocacy. It’s not about electing a government official. It’s about standing up for our rights,” he said. “There’s hope for people with serious mental illness and there’s hope to change the system. But it will only happen if we demand change. The one thing that could change the system is advocacy. It changed breast cancer, HIV/AIDS, a lot of diseases. We need more of it for people with serious mental illness.”

“Bedlam” premieres April 13 on PBS’ “Independent Lens.”