Mental illness doesn’t discriminate. Wealth and social status can’t protect you from its debilitating and frightening impact. Old, young, male, female - three hundred and fifty millions of us have problems with our mental health. With demand rising and, in a global recession, funds shrinking, the six programmes will highlight novel and innovative ways being used now, around the globe, to treat and cope with mental illness.
From Africa, to Asia, to the Middle East and to Europe, the programmes will explore radically different attitudes and definitions of mental health and mental wellbeing (“mad or sad?”). Using personal stories as the starting point, they will show how individuals (and their families, friends and colleagues), wherever they live in the world, can have hope that treatment and recovery is possible from a range of painful mental health conditions.
Mad or sad
The first programme, Mad or Sad, asks how mental illnesses are defined in different parts of the world and explores whether treatments developed in one country will work elsewhere. The programme explores how last October in a village outside Bangalore, Keshava was dramatically rescued from ten years of being bricked into a room, in his own home. As police knocked down the walls, the young man in his thirties emerged, dishevelled and naked. He’d been locked in a tiny room without doors or daylight and was fed through a window. Keshava had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in his early twenties but, unable to get him the help he needed or cope with his increasingly violent outbursts, his family gradually walled him in.
Future programmes in the series:
31 May – Mad or sad
7 June – Children and war
14 June – Four walls
21 June – Healing Norway
28 June – The treatment gap
5 July – Japan: Culture and stigma
For more information see details on OpenLearn
Posted 30 May 2013
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