family life (DVD, 1972)

Janice Baildon is a young woman living with her conventional, authoritarian parents. Her sister Barbara has already fled the roost. Janice becomes pregnant, is coerced into having an abortion and has a psychotic episode – resulting in being admitted into a Psychiatric Hospital. In there, she is treated. Initially by an experimental Psychiatrist who does not believe in over-medicating patients and has a very liberal approach. However, that Psychiatrist is told to move on by the Hospital Committee and Janice faces 1970’s medicine, crowded wards and ECT (Electroconvulsive Therapy). ECT is now typically used for depression. Once discharged, she continues living with her parents and seeing her problematical boyfriend.  However, the stresses of life result in more psychotic breaks, triggering Janice’s descent from everyday girl to mute, troubled woman. I don’t know how accurately this film, directed by Ken Loach, documents its subject but it is definitely a case of “same schizophrenia, different century”.