TRANSCRIPT
The main overt reason is to show that people can recover from schizophrenia. That it’s not a lifelong disorder, that you’re not stuck with it and screwed over if you get schizophrenia. And that the hopeless message that society tells, and the mental health system tells, and that the media tells is just not true. I want to fight that message because I’m a therapist. I’ve worked with a lot of people with schizophrenia. I’ve seen several get well, and I’ve also seen some people not get well. And I’ve wondered, why don’t they get well?
One of the main reasons is that they’re stuck into themselves, believing everything the mental health system and everything their psychiatrists and past therapists and their families and the media and all the psychology books they’ve read have told them—that they can’t get well. I know it’s a lie, and I wanted to do my best to prove them wrong. I specifically chose schizophrenia because it’s the most extreme mental illness. And so if I can prove that without any medication at all you can recover from the most extreme mental illness, what does that say about every other mental illness and metaphorically almost every human problem that there is?
So schizophrenia was my model to show across the boards human potential is amazing. And it’s not what the experts tell, it’s not what the pharmaceutical industries tell, and it’s not even what a lot of mental health advocates tell. A lot of them are telling the stuff that’s not true, and they say it with such love and such caring. We want to help people with schizophrenia, but underneath what they’re really saying is you’re hopeless and your problems are some sort of brain problem. And you know what? Schizophrenia is a brain problem, but it’s a brain problem that you can get well from. And really, because it’s really a soul problem.
Yes and no. I knew from the beginning that I could make the film. I knew I had a vision for what I wanted to make, and I knew I could pull it off. But the thing is, I had no idea how to do it. The only camera I owned was a camera on my cell phone, and my computer doesn’t even allow me to play DVDs. So it sort of seemed impossible. But then I thought, you know, if people can recover from schizophrenia, I can make a movie.
I had a lot of people say, “Oh my God, how can you make a movie? You don’t know how to make a movie. Maybe you need to hire a documentarian who knows this stuff and hire a film crew.” But then I had other people, the people who knew me really well. They said, “You could totally make this movie.” People who knew film and knew me, those are the people I listen to. And it’s the same thing in the mental health field. If you go to a therapist who says you’ve got this disease called schizophrenia and it’s a biological chemical problem and it’s probably genetic and you really can’t get well from it, but you can learn to live with it and probably have a halfway decent life, do you think that patient is going to get well?
But if that patient goes to a therapist who says, “Listen, you got really screwed up in your childhood. You’ve gotten screwed up messages all the way along. Your life has been totally confusing and difficult to sort out. You live in a society that doesn’t support you or your truth at all. But I know people who have gotten well. I know other therapists who have helped people get well. I understand the mechanisms of why you got screwed up, and I understand the mechanisms of how you can get well. And I haven’t even talked to you hardly. I know you can do it, and I already see the truth in you,” that sets up a situation that allows people to get well.
And so when people told me I could make the film, deep in my heart I knew I could make the film. It really wasn’t that hard. It just took a lot of hard work, and it forced me to challenge myself and get out of my comfort zone and to learn all this new technology, which seemed so impossible. But I learned how to do it. I learned how to do white balancing. I learned how to do focusing. I learned how to set up a tripod, and I learned about distances. And I learned how to set up the microphones and do sound checks and do all the different things. And I learned all the levels that I had to do, and I did a lot of practicing. And I did it all in my free time, and I made the whole movie while working full time as a therapist.
And people said, “Go and watch documentaries and see how they conceive of some of their ideas.” I watched a few, and then I realized I can’t watch documentaries because I need to not kill my own vision. Some of these people in this film are big shots. These are people that I worship. They’re like the guru therapists, and they’re like Joanne Greenberg. She’s a guru that the guru therapists respect. So in terms of my career, I’m more of a piddly little nothing. But when she said yes, because she’d read a paper that I wrote and she knew who I was and she knew what I was about, when she said yes, it was a risk for her to say yes because I told her I’m going to come and ask you the most personal questions about your life. She’s a world-famous figure. Probably 10 million or more people have read her book. Everybody knows it.
So once she said yes, a lot of people started saying yes too. And my energy caught on, and people believed what I was doing, and they started believing in me. And sometimes this is what was fascinating because there were times where I was hopeless. I had a lot of nights where I’d wake up at 3 o’clock in the morning going, “You stink, an idiot! There’s no way! What are you thinking? You can’t make a film!” And then it was like, “Yeah, but Joanne Greenberg believes that I can.” Deep in my soul, yes, I believe I succeeded. But there are things that I wished I’d done better.
For instance, if you notice, if you watch the film carefully, Joanne Greenberg is wearing two different shirts because the second day I interviewed her, she asked me, “Should I wear the same shirt I wore yesterday?” And I was kind of scared of her because she was just a big shot, and I didn’t want to bother her. I wasn’t thinking as a director; I was thinking this scared Daniel. I said, “No, no, the shirt you’re wearing looks great.” Well, I ended up with interviews where she’s wearing two different shirts. How could I splice those interviews together? It drove me nuts during the editing process. I must have kicked myself a thousand times for that. But I had to be creative to get around the problem, and eventually I think I succeeded.
If I could wave a magic wand, I would have everybody who has anything to do with schizophrenia. And by the way, I think that’s everybody, so I’m being a little grand. But if I could wave my magic wand, I’d like everybody to see it and to consider what I’m saying. Just consider it, and then let them go out and collect their own data and see if it’s true. Let them sit and sit with people who have schizophrenia and listen to their stories and really listen to what they’re saying. Because I think there’s so many mental health workers, including right up to the top, the big shot psychiatrists, deep down they don’t listen. They don’t really want to hear what the patients are saying.
We should allow a person to explore their potentials, to explore what they feel, explore what they hear and see, and study, stigmatizing them as being crazy and dangerous. You know, I think it’s a gift. I don’t think that is a mental illness; it’s a gift. But if I could have my best wish in the world, I would like people to see how this film is not just true literally, but metaphorically what it really, really means deep down—that we’re not screwed up as individuals and that we can really recover from a huge amount of stuff. And really what it is, that we can all become enlightened.
I never really wanted to be a filmmaker. That’s actually a lie.
I was a kid. I wanted to make films, and I used to have a video camera when I was a kid. But I had no editing equipment. I had nobody to help me, and it’s like I still made some little films anyways. Even with no editing equipment, I just had to get it all right on the first take. And so it was very complicated, and I never really had any access to it. I had other callings in life other than being a filmmaker. So this film was a great chance to express a different side of myself.
But other films, I’d like to make a film that more directly expresses the metaphorical content of this film. I’d like to make a film that directly shows that people can become enlightened. I’d like to make a film showing the value of celibacy. People are so obsessed with sex. It’s all about sex, sex, sex. And sex is the way to find peace in life? No, I don’t think that’s true at all. I think sex is a major diversion. And I know a lot of people that actually use celibacy to not deal with themselves. So celibacy in itself is not good, but it can be used for good.
Maybe I’ll interview the pope and the Dalai Lama if I can get access to them. I had access to some great people in the schizophrenia field. I don’t have any access to the pope, you know, and to the Dalai Lama. But you never know. If you put the idea out there, it might just happen.
This film is not a textbook on how to recover from schizophrenia. This film is meant to give people hope. This film is not a textbook for mental health professionals on how to be a great therapist. This is a film that’s here to help people get hope and to believe that something other than what we’ve been taught is possible.
If I had made the film five hours long, which would have been boring as hell, frankly, if I had done that, I could have put a lot of things in. For instance, this film might give the impression that psychotherapy is the only way to recover from schizophrenia. I don’t believe that’s true at all. I know people who’ve recovered from schizophrenia who didn’t go to therapy and didn’t get their help through therapy. They got it through really good friends, through being in a really nurturing environment.
I’ve known people that they had to get far, far away from their family and go to other countries to get away from all the toxicity of their childhoods. I’ve known people who’ve gotten help through being around their families. I didn’t get into the drugs at all. I know people who have been triggered into schizophrenia by smoking pot or dropping acid. Certainly, it could be caused by taking too much drug use, like heavy psychedelics like LSD.
I once worked with someone who came to me and told me that, and told me not just told me that he did it, but how he did it by smoking marijuana. It helped him work out his problems, and he showed me proof of how he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia for years. And he was like laughing. He’s like, “Nobody will believe me.” But I believed him because it makes sense to me.
Changing nutrition can help. Changing diet, taking certain supplements can help. The film doesn’t touch in any of that. And people in Washington Square Park that I interviewed, they said a lot of positive things. There were people who knew that it’s not just therapy that helps people recover. Along with the talking stuff, you could do acting or something, Chinese medicine, proper nutrition, removal of guilt. I think serious vitamin treatments. I really do believe in vitamin B. People need to have a family base support, really love and understanding, removing yourself from high-stress situations.
I think smoking weed might help schizophrenia because it helped me overcome my anxiety. I think you need to be like in a nice sort of like, um, like a commune, like a monastery, but not with all the like early hours and drudgery and all that. Like some nice, like hippie commune or something, but where people were psychiatrists and not hippies.
And also, I’ve known people who medication has been part of their process, that they credit the medication with helping them. Do I ever suggest that people go on medication? Honestly, I really don’t. I think, or very rarely. But have I heard stories of people who said their medications help them to recover fully from schizophrenia? Yes, I have.
This film might give the impression that I only think you have value as a human being if you get off your medication and fully recover and do all your work white-knuckling it. And I don’t want to give that impression. I believe in everyone’s humanity, whether you’re taking medication or not. And I know people that do take medication. I work with people that take medication. I work with people who go to psychiatrists that are very conventional psychiatrists. And you know what? That’s their choice.
And for me, more important than helping people to recover from schizophrenia or depression or anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder or whatever it is, my key as a therapist is respecting what people really, really want. And people want different things at different levels.
I think it’s fair for me to say these are the risks as far as I know. And I think it’s also fair and honorable for me to respect when they say, “I’m staying on my medication, you crazy! Every time I’ve gotten off of it, I’ve gone totally nuts.” Some of the people that I interviewed made it very clear, and I think everybody who’s an expert in this film knows, and I just didn’t get a chance to fit it into the film in a good appropriate way, that when people do stop their medications abruptly, they’re taking a terrible risk. I mean, their brain can go totally fritzed out from stopping abruptly.
So anybody who wants to stop their medication, and they’re working with me as their therapist, even though I’m not giving medical advice, I say be very, very careful stopping your medication abruptly. I’ll send them to psychiatrists who I know who will help people taper, and taper very, very gradually, sometimes over a period of a year or two years even. And that’s the safe way to let their brain actually readjust to being off the medication.
Does my film express that? No. I think that some people might very well be genetically susceptible because we are genetic beings. Anything is genetic. But here’s the thing that I consider to be the most important: the reason I didn’t put genetics into the film, and I feel it was perfectly ethical for me not to put it in, I think the genetic component is so small as to be irrelevant. It doesn’t really matter.
The people that I’ve seen get well from any sort of mental disorder, be it schizophrenia or bipolar or, you know, or depression or anxiety or, you know, eat traumas or any of that stuff, might they have a genetic component to their problem? Perhaps. But it’s never really come up in the therapy. It’s not relevant.
How does it give someone hope to tell them, “You know, your problem has a genetic component?” If anything, I think when you start getting into something might have a genetic component, it starts saying that parents should really look very carefully at their genetics before they have kids.
This is by a New York Times reporter, actually. He said he liked my film. He liked the way I put it together. He was impressed by it, and he thought it was good. But he felt it was very one-sided. And I know what he meant: one-sided in that it’s against medication. It’s all about recovery. It doesn’t get into the positives of medication and all that. And it’s like I’m sort of blasting a case forward that doesn’t take all the other things into account.
By the way, all these documentaries I see and all these books I read that try to present every case, you know, in every side of the story, mostly they’re really lying. They’re not really telling all sides. They really have their point of view, and they couch it in pretending to tell all sides, but really they’re just very good propagandists. I’m not a very good propagandist. I wanted it to be strong. I felt it needed to just fly through and get across the point and not waste any time. The truth is my film is very one-sided.
Side that never gets told. So that’s really my bottom line reply. But it’s also one-sided because I’m one person, and it’s been my experience. But actually, even though I’m one person, I speak for a lot of people.