Bedlam

Haunted by the death of a mentally ill sister, psychiatrist Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, M.D. takes on the role of filmmaker to examine a national health crisis. Bedlam follows the poignant stories of people grappling with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other chronic psychiatric conditions. Impossible to mask when untreated, their symptoms shove them into the path of police officers, ER doctors and nurses, lawyers, and prison guards. Shooting over the course of five years, Rosenberg takes us inside Los Angeles County’s overwhelmed and vastly under-resourced psych ER, a nearby jail warehousing thousands of psychiatric patients, and the homes — and homeless encampments — of people suffering from severe mental illness, where silence and shame often worsen the suffering. Bedlam describes the triggers pulled in the mid- and late 20th century to create this bedlam on a national scale. Massive federal defunding shuttered mental institutions across the country from the 1950s to the 1980s, leaving a skeletal support system in their place. Untold numbers of mentally ill people landed on the streets and, inevitably, stumbled on the cracks in American society that have led to misuse of jails, tens of thousands of people sleeping in parks and on sidewalks, and too many stories of loved ones lost while the clock ticks on solutions from policy makers and Big Pharma.