HOW MAD ARE YOU? A Search for Insanity (2 Programs)
Is it easy to distinguish between the mentally ill and the supposedly sane? In this two-part series, ten subjects live and work together for five days, facing a battery of mental and physical tests. Five of the volunteers are considered normal; five have a history of mental illness. Monitoring them is a panel of experts with no prior knowledge of the participants or their histories. These mental health professionals must detect and diagnose the sick based merely on observed behavior. Will the bipolar and obsessive-compulsive personalities reveal themselves, or will the "normal" subjects trip up the experts? An unflinching look at the stigmas attached to mental disorders and the ways in which society and the psychiatric profession define mental illness.
There are two programs in this series:
HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: Looking for Mental Illness
With their mental health histories kept secret, ten adults enter a period of psychiatric observation in an isolated group setting. It is up to a panel of experts to determine who is healthy and who isn’t. This program documents the first three days of the session, which features several tests designed to bring out evidence of mental disorders. Simulated urban warfare evokes reckless behavior; stand-up comedy stints highlight social anxiety; a barn-cleaning task points to aspects of OCD; and the Wisconsin Card Sort Test brings flexibility, or a lack thereof, into focus. By the end of the program, the assembled mental health professionals are only beginning to distinguish between illness and eccentricity. 50 minutes
CLINICAL IMPRESSIONS: Identifying Mental Illness
How long can mental illness stay hidden, especially from the eyes of trained experts? This program rejoins a group of ten adults - five of them healthy and five of them with histories of mental illness - as psychiatric specialists try to spot and correctly diagnose the latter. Administering a series of collaborative and one-on-one tests, including assessments of personality type, physical self-image, and rational thinking, the panel gradually makes decisions about who suffers from depression, bipolar disorder, bulimia, and social anxiety. At the conclusion of the program, the professionals confess to a wariness of their own diagnosis methods, and labels of "sick" and "normal" are seen in a new light. 51 minutes
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