Our story …
In the fall of 2009, my brother Gabriel and I decided to make a film together. It would be a documentary exploring the subject of mental illness and would examine both the experience of living with a mental illness and the stigma and misconceptions surrounding it (as fed by societal ignorance, the media and even the medical establishment itself). We felt we were in a unique position to talk about the subject; Gabriel had been living with the diagnosis of schizophrenia for nearly two decades, and as a brother and sister filmmaking team we thought we could give both an insider’s and outsider’s perspective on the subject.
Then on June 24th of 2012, I received a call from my mother that Gabriel had leapt from his 59th floor balcony to his death. He left his glasses, wallet and cigarettes on the table. He did not leave a note. “No words” everyone said to us.
Since Gabriel left us, I have struggled to find the words. To put the pieces together. I did relentless Google searches on schizophrenia, read first person accounts and scoured the DSM5, learning only what I knew before -that there is no explanation, there is no cure, and that 20% of people diagnosed with the disease attempt suicide. But it wasn’t until I began to delve into Gabriel’s creative work, that I began to see his life and his world from his unique perspective. Reading his scripts and watching his films, a narrative began to emerge: the story of his life as he saw it, his “hero’s journey.” I have since come to appreciate how this narrative kept him going as long as it did, how in fact we all have narratives that help make sense of our lives. That we may all be, to some degree, on the spectrum of mental illness and delusion.
Artwork by Gabriel Mitchell
ARTISTIC APPROACH
This story has two narrators: myself, “the detective,” trying to understand the world my brother inhabited as I move through my grief of losing him — and my brother who, although he left no suicide note, infused all his creative projects with attempts to understand his illness and why the label of “schizophrenic” seemed to designate him as an outsider.
Using selections from his prolific body of creative work—films, drawings, songs, screenplays and essays--I bring his internal world to life. For his screenplays and essays, I plan to use artistically rendered storyboards (mimicking his artistic style) and live action recreations. Together they provide insight into how he authored his “hero’s journey,” and the evolution of his illness from childhood until his death.
This material works alongside archival footage of his own documentary exploration of mental illness (he conducted a series of interviews on the subject of mental illness after he was first diagnosed), as well as my interviews with him, myself, our parents, his case workers, and the real-life people on which the characters in his fictional worlds were based. These narratives intersect and collide, growing into more fully realized and fantastical stories, opening a window into the world of schizophrenia… from the inside and the outside.
Scene from Gabriel’s Politics of Dreams as illustrated by Rob Tokar
Although the question of why Gabriel died by suicide is the one that drove my initial investigation, the question of how he lived with this diagnosis is what I ended up finding more interesting. How does a person live with the stigma of schizophrenia? My brother often said that being given this label was like being cast out of society, and that was possibly worse than the illness itself. As I delve into his creative work, my questions evolve; how did he use storytelling to navigate his illness? Was it the illness or the stigma of the diagnosis that ultimately led to his death? What can we do collectively to better understand how to respond to this illness and embrace perspectives from those that suffer from it?
Our culture loves to romanticize stories of tortured “mad” artists. We conflate insanity with genius, or vice versa. But no one described my brother as a creative genius until after he died; and I cannot believe that this way of characterizing the relationship between art and mental illness is helpful.
My aim is to instead look at Gabriel’s storytelling, not as a natural outcome of his beautiful or divergent mind (which paints his tragic death with poetic irony), but rather as a possible cure: one that helps him make sense of the nonsensical and bring order to chaos. A cure, that in many ways, we all use to solve the problem of the “madness” of the human condition.
-Carmen Elena Mitchell
Scene from Gabriel’s My Back Pages as illustrated by Rob Tokar