Last night at the Alderney Landing Theatre in Dartmouth, volunteers, filmmakers and average Haligonians got together for the Minds Wide Open Film Festival — a fest with a focus on mental health. Thing is, mental illness is common. About one in five people will experience some form of mental illness in their lifetimes. Minds Wide Open is an attempt to combat the stigma shrouding this form of illness.

And the festival went further than that. The films showed the political and social sides of mental health as well — from oppression to class to poverty, and everything else along the spectrum of injustice. The films touched on philosophical experience, too, asking the question: Is mental health really the responsibility of the individual?

Here are five short films and trailers about mental health. Some of them screened at the festival, and four of them have a local connection.

Superhero: A visual poem

Superhero, which screened last night at Minds Wide Open, chronicles Laura Burke’s day-to-day struggle with schizophrenia.

"When I was writing the poem, I was aching to be normal," Burke told The Coast. "Hoping that things will be different actually makes things harder. You have to live in the present."

Crooked Beauty (trailer)

Crooked Beauty was the feature film last night at the festival. Director Ken Paul Rosenthaul describes his film:

Crooked Beauty is a poetic documentary that chronicles artist-activist Jacks McNamara's transformative journey from childhood abuse to psych ward patient to pioneering mental health advocacy. It is an intimate portrait of her intense personal quest to live with courage and dignity, and a powerful critique of standard psychiatric treatments. Poignant testimonials connect the fissures and fault lines of human nature to the unstable topography and mercurial weather patterns of the San Francisco Bay Area. Crooked Beauty reshapes mental health stigmas through a new healing culture and political model for living with madness as a tool of creativity, inspiration and hope.

Here: A film about Halifax

This self-explanatory spoken-word piece screened last night at Minds Wide Open. It’s about this city’s people — not its policies.

Smile or Die: A visual argument

This one isn’t local, but it questions the root of the idea that mental illness is merely an attitude problem, and that if you just think positively, everything will change. In fact, Barbara Ehrenreich argues, having a realistic picture of the world isn’t a bad thing; it’s a bad thing if the world itself is depressing.

The Cure: A visual poem

This week, Michael Kimber gave a talk to students at King’s College. Here’s part of what he told them:

At 25, I worried until I was worried about how much I worried. I was so scared that I wouldn’t be able to sleep that I couldn’t sleep. I went for months on two hours of sleep a night. I wanted to be normal. Just normal, able to eat, sleep, work and love. I prayed to lose this thing that was killing me even if it is the same thing that made me a good person. I wanted to be normal even if that mean I’d no longer be special.

I was stuck in a negative cycle where thinking became torture and all I could do was hope for an escape. I know what it is like when the pain was so bad that you forget the world. I understand what people who commit suicide are thinking. Suicide is the failure of all language to reach you. It’s like selective deafness. Where you can only hear yourself and you don’t have any good things left to say. I never knew the world went away. I was lucky to have people in my life that reminded who I was when I forgot. I got to see the world return and nothing is more beautiful.

Read Kimber’s entire speech at King’s here, and follow his blog, Colony of Losers, for regular narrative updates that prove people with mental illness are not alone.

Other useful blogs about mental illness:
(With thanks to SaltySmile.)

• Rob Delaney: On depression and getting help;
• The Emotion Machine, a psychologist’s blog;
• Voice in Recovery, a blog on eating disorders and self-harm;
• Don’t Call Me Sybil, a blog about dissociative identity disorder;
• Bipolar Burble, a writer who deals with bipolar disorder;
• Daisies and Bruises: The art of living with depression.