Madness isn't just a clinical state. It's also a storm of primal emotions, painful memories and dubious treatment. This twilight zone of the heart and mind is the focus of Dialogues With Madwomen, a video documentary by Allie Light, the Academy Award-winning director of the 1991 film In the Shadow of the Stars. Light herself was briefly institutionalized in the 1960s for severe depression, and she includes herself in the video as one of the interviewees.
Schizophrenia, multiple personalities, manic depression and states of euphoria form only part of Dialogues With Madwomen's subject matter. It also covers such territory as the ironic points of confusion between madness and sanity – such as when one woman relates how a doctor told her to ignore a man who was running down a hallway screaming that the president was dead. It was the day of Kennedy's assassination and the patient knew more than the doctor about what was happening.
Dialogues With Madwomen presses hard – and successfully – on the treatment of women within the mental health field. Light's first-hand experience convinced her that women's stereotyped roles and limited social options place then within a category that makes it easier for them to be classified as insane and more difficult to be considered otherwise. Further, the women she interviews come from various social, racial and economic backgrounds, yet their histories are similar enough to suggest that society itself is insane.
All of which makes Dialogues With Madwomen an important, fascinating piece of work that's both powerfully moving and, at times, very difficult to sit through.
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