Documentary by Daniel Mackler
I can’t recommend this movie enough and have in fact bought about a dozen copies for friends and colleagues.
Take These Broken Wings is a feature-length documentary film showing that people can recover fully from schizophrenia without psychiatric medication. The film features the untold story of bestselling author Joanne Greenberg, whose fictionalized memoir of her recovery from schizophrenia, I Never Promised You A Rose Garden, rocked the mental health world.
The film also features Catherine Penney, whose gripping tale of unmedicated recovery was chronicled by her therapist, Daniel Dorman, MD, in the book Dante’s Cure: A Journey Out of Madness.
Their accounts are interwoven with interviews of internationally renowned giants in the field of schizophrenia recovery. These include Peter Breggin, MD (author of Toxic Psychiatry), Robert Whitaker (journalist, author of Mad in America), and Bertram Karon, PhD (author of Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia: Treatment of Choice).
The result is not just an arc of a healing story, but a challenge to the current model of schizophrenia treatment – that schizophrenia is a lifelong, incurable “brain disorder” treatable only with anti-psychotic drugs.
Trailers for the movie:
I read I Never Promised You a Rose Garden decades ago now as a young teenager. It was a book that made a huge impact on me, but it was before I knew anything about mental distress of that nature either personally or professionally. I think it’s time to read the book again.
This is a little excerpt from the filmmakers website:
My name is Daniel Mackler and I am a psychotherapist and filmmaker in New York City. My writings focus on the causes, consequences, and radical significance of childhood trauma. I see childhood trauma as ranging from the extreme, which is common, to the mild, which is so much MORE common that few even notice it at all, much less call them by its proper name. I view the norm in our culture as being highly traumatized, and I view the average, and even above-average, childhood as being extremely traumatic – and the average parent as lacking both awareness of this and deep empathy for the child.
I see our world growing more pathological, confused, polluted, overpopulated, and disturbed by the day – and I feel that to stand by and say nothing while we destroy our planet is irresponsible and even criminal. Yet I write with great hope – both for individual healing and for the collective healing of our world. I seek to offer a new perspective – on relationships, on enlightenment, on celibacy, on the pathology of the family system, and on the future of our species.
Daniel and Will are currently looking for appropriate people for a new video project on psychiatric drug withdrawal. See here if you are interested.
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