Film Review: Inside Outside
Building a life outside the hospital
Paul Chipkin, Senior Peer Advocate, Staten Island Peer Advocacy Center
Inside Outside is a film of hope created by ex-patient film-makers Pat Deegan and Terry Strecker.
There are still some prison-like asylums in existence. Hospitalization, except in the “ritziest” of places, is still hell-on–earth! The institutional environment invades the psyche and bogs us down even further. It seems much of the time there is no reason to live yet most of us keep doing it for whatever reasons. For years it can appear that there is precious little sense to any of it.
Perhaps the very things we are most passionate about drive us crazy, but much of what we experience are disjointed hunches and a lot of suffering. Phenomena that most people ignore, we can’t. Life hasn’t gelled so it is always unstable. In the end, we may be able to delineate the path of progress, but until then it just seems like a fiery, magic carpet-ride with all manner of people consumed in the path of the flames.
What should be controlled? What should not? What is held back? What is left to explode? We know we were born to live. Are we there yet? Is the genius I experience firmly rooted on the Rock of Ages? Is my personality sound or am I still standing too much on the quicksand?
Getting from here to there is something we do with our two feet. If we essentially do nothing to improve our lot, to grow up, we will get nowhere.
What happens when one’s life is guided by one’s choices? Perhaps the choices of a conventional lifestyle don’t fit the likes of us too well. Still, unless we want to waste our lives away, we can explore our way through our choices.
The eight individuals in this film take us through their journeys, each showing that it is possible for a mentally ill person to make good. I would have loved to view it thirty years ago inside the institution where I resided.
Today, the recovery movement out of which this film has come not only provides fulfillment to many of the folks in this story, but also teaches many of us that there is hope, that there is life after the hospital and after mental illness.