Mental Health Champions: Why & How Filmmaker Michelle Melles Is Helping To Champion Mental Wellness

An Interview With Michelle Tennant Nicholson

Practice a sense of gratitude every day. Even when life is really hard for me and I’m feeling depressed and anxious, I try to think about what in life I am grateful for.

As a part of our series about Mental Health Champions helping to promote mental wellness, I had the pleasure to interview Michelle Melles, MFA.

Michelle Melles was raised by an artist father obsessed with Bob Dylan and who taught her the words “military-industrial complex” at the age of four and a mother who captured her attention with vivid, sometimes terrifying fairy tales. She is a fierce believer that the personal is in dialogue with the political and that good story-telling challenges our preconceived ideas and offers unique ways of perceiving each other, ourselves, and the world. She is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, mental health activist, and seasoned story-editor whose first feature length documentary film Drunk on Too Much Life (New Day Films) is challenging the way we understand and treat “serious mental illness.”

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about how you grew up?

I was born in GrandRapids, Michigan but my young father and mother left the U.S. during the turbulent 1970’s and I was raised in Toronto, Canada. I grew up in a bohemian, artistic home near the beach of Lake Ontario with a stay-at-home artist father who taught my sisters and I about art, philosophy, and Bob Dylan in equal portions. My father wanted his children to question materialism and fight for social justice. Rebellious intellectual questioning, the freedom and drive of the artistic spirit, and the desire to fight against oppression is woven into my DNA (from my father’s side) and from my mother’s side, I get a deep love of story-telling. As a teenager, my father introduced me to the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing. Laing believed that mental illness was “a sane response to an insane world” and he questioned biologically based psychiatry. When my 21-year-old daughter developed complex mental illness (Bipolar 1), my husband and I embraced biomedical psychiatry wholeheartedly (until it didn’t lead to healing). The biomedical model of health is the dominant way we treat mental illness in the United States and Canada and it speculates that mental disorders are brain diseases or chemical imbalances and emphasizes pharmacological treatment to target presumed biological abnormalities.

You are currently leading an initiative that is helping to promote mental wellness. Can you tell us a bit more specifically about what you are trying to address?

In 2017, while our daughter was in a locked-down psychiatric institution, her father was diagnosed with cancer. One thing that became very clear to us early on was the stark differences in the care and treatment they both received from the respective health systems. At Princess Margaret Hospital, one of the world’s leading cancer treatment centers in Toronto, my husband’s treatment was genuinely caring, thorough and holistic while our daughter’s treatment in psychiatric wards was limited, somewhat indifferent, and lacked the necessary tools and environment for holistic recovery. The mental health system’s focus was almost exclusively on medication. My husband, on the other hand, had access to two brilliant oncologists, a nutritionist, a therapist and a whole caring, devoted team. They treated him as a human being. The walls were colorful, there was light in the building and even an odd plant here and there. They talked about the importance of good nutrition. The contrast was eye-opening.

I am an advocate for a new paradigm in mental health — one that is holistic and focuses on community-based and recovery healing models. This model of health care celebrates resilience, peer support, and the healing power of creativity and creating meaning in your life. This new paradigm of mental health is grounded in lived experience and self-determination. It enables us to look beyond medicalized and disease-centered thinking, opening up our narrow definition of “normal” to the full range of human and psychic experiences.

This new model of mental health care recognizes that our thoughts, emotions, and experiences are dynamically interwoven with our community, culture, economic and political systems — not simply biologically determined. The scientific language surrounding ‘mental illness’ is just one way of thinking of ourselves and there are literally thousands of years of philosophy, art, music, and poetry all related to the human condition and what it means to be “mad.” In many cultures, hearing voices or seeing visions was not seen as a sign of mental illness but potentially shamanic. By reducing the stories we tell about “madness” to diagnostic language (they are “schizophrenic”, they are “bipolar”, they are “depressive,” they are “OCD”), we do a great disservice to ourselves and people who struggle. We create stigma and shame. We create an “us and them” attitude and we create fear. The person who struggles is defined by their diagnosis rather than their humanity. As the poet Jeanette Winterston says, “language is not something we speak; it speaks us.” From words come our thoughts and sense of who we are. As the American activist, writer and clinician Sascha DuBrul says, “rather than seeing ourselves as diseased or disordered, we see ourselves as having dangerous gifts, like the wings of Icarus.” Defining himself outside of convention, he sees his condition as “a dangerous gift to be cultivated and taken care of rather than a disease or disorder that needs to be ‘cured.’” The question is, then, how can we tell a different story about ‘madness’ that is more empowering, humanizing and caring?

The opening of my personal documentary film Drunk on Too Much Life is this quote from the author Ben Okri: “We live by stories, we also live in them….If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.” Drunk on Too Much Life documents our family journey to learn to tell a different story of what gets called ‘serious mental illness’, creating meaning, and building resilience. The assumption that dominates our daughter’s treatment and much of medical thinking, is that my daughter is tormented by a biological disease of the brain and her suffering is managed by mediations ingested for a lifetime. She has no power in this story, no agency to heal. Diagnoses can be useful in understanding patterns and categories of behavior and experiences as long as we do not mistake them for explanations.

I want our society to ask socially relevant questions such as what is madness, who gets to decide and where (and how) do we draw the lines between sanity and insanity? How can people like my daughter — people who are extremely sensitive and creative and who experience extreme psychic states and emotions — become more resilient? How can sensitive, often creative people, learn to cope in a world that values productivity, hyperrationality, and compliance?

Drunk on Too Much Life follows my 21-year-old daughter’s mind-opening journey from locked-down psych wards and diagnostic labels towards expansive worlds of creativity, connection and greater meaning. On our journey, we begin to question the widespread idea that mental illness should be understood in purely biological terms. We learn the myriad ways that madness has meaning that goes far beyond brain chemistry. In a world gone crazy, my daughter discovers that her madness is a fierce and powerful gift that makes her more fully human.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?

When our daughter was six years old, she began to worry about ‘going crazy’ and described it as “being drunk on too much life” a beautiful and poetic way to describe the extreme psychic states and heightened moods that our daughter would later experience. At the age of 21, at a camp in Northern Ontario, she had her first ‘psychotic break’ and spent close to two months in a locked-down psychiatric ward in Toronto. When she first became unwell, our family knew no other way of conceptualizing states of “madness” except for what psychiatrists told us. Psychosis, we were told, was like a fever that can result from a complex and extreme mental illness such as Bipolar 1 or Schizophrenia. The longer she was in psychosis the worse it was for her brain. If our daughter took her medications, however, if she was a good and compliant patient, she would become stable. Two years after our daughter’s first psychotic break, she had been diagnosed with multiple and serious psychiatric conditions and had been put on cocktail after cocktail of medications. None of the medications kept her stable for long, they had horrible and sometimes debilitating side effects, and some of the medications made her condition worse. She began ‘rapid cycling’ from episode to episode, or from one extreme state to the other, unable to find peace or healing. When my husband and I grabbed our camera in 2017 to begin our documentary film Drunk on Too Much Life, we were desperate for help and sought to expand our understanding of our daughter’s experiences. We began asking ourselves this question: when the biomedical model does not lead to healing, how can we come to reconceptualize mental illness so that recovery is possible? This is the central question of the film Drunk on Too Much Life.

Many of us have ideas, dreams, and passions, but never manifest them. They don’t get up and just do it. But you did. Was there an “Aha Moment” that made you decide that you were actually going to step up and do it? What was that final trigger?

In the summer of 2017, our daughter was experiencing one of her worst and longest episodes of ‘mania with psychosis’ since being diagnosed with Bipolar 1 disorder. She was obsessively worried about her father and believed that his life was being threatened by a dark force. This imminent danger seemed to be confirmed by the fact that he had a nasty cough that didn’t go away. At that time, I thought that my husband had a very bad cold that had led to bronchitis. Overall, he was very healthy, rode his bicycle every day, and so I wasn’t too worried. But, on this summer day in 2017, in the family kitchen our daughter looked at an old picture of her father when he was a boy and saw two dark shadowy spirits lurking behind him. My husband and daughter then went into our family backyard when she was suddenly gripped with intense fear. She saw two dark spirits (demons) coming out of my husband’s chest and sucking away his energy. Several weeks later, doctors found two 7 cm tumors growing in my husband’s left lung, one of which was in his lymph nodes. At the age of 51, he was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. He had never smoked and none of his family members had ever developed cancer.

Somehow, our daughter had sensed there was something terribly wrong with her father, much before his diagnosis. This was the “Aha Moment” when we began searching for a different understanding of our daughter’s voices and visions. We first turned to the father of analytical psychology, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung. He believed that psychiatry often reduces psychotic symptoms to cold and clinical observations, ignoring the possibility of meaning and preferring to label and pathologize problems. As I say in the film: “while doctors searched for a cocktail of medications, my world was reduced to a biomedical and material reality. Suddenly, personality and consciousness itself were reduced to chemistry and neural connections.” A psychiatrist at the hospital had told us that personality itself was, simply, a result of brain chemistry and these ideas had led me to question the nature of consciousness itself. Did nothing exist except material things or motions of material things? Jung had become disillusioned with biological determinism and scientific rationalism and wanted to make room for magic, coincidence and the mythological metaphors delivered by visions, dreams, and hallucinations.

Slowly, we began to step outside of the materialist worldview that explains most irrational experiences and even consciousness itself as something that emerges from brain chemistry and neural connections and look at mental health using different, more colorful lenses.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company or organization?

Since making Drunk on Too Much Life I have noticed that the psychiatric field is changing and there is more open-mindedness and understanding of the limitations of psychiatric medications. There is more of an understanding of how trauma and mental illness are connected as well as the social determinants of health. In 2022, there was a big serotonin study that was published by scientists (Joanna Moncrief, et al) at University College London. The study concluded that there was little support for the idea that depression was related to abnormally low levels of serotonin. This study created shockwaves in the mainstream press as mental illness is still widely understood in biological terms and thought to be caused by a “chemical balance.” The serotonin theory of depression was first proposed in the 1960s and started to be widely promoted by the pharmaceutical industry in the 1990s in association with its efforts to market a new range of antidepressants, known as selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs. The idea was also endorsed by official institutions such as the American Psychiatric Association, which still tells the public that “differences in certain chemicals in the brain may contribute to symptoms of depression”. Countless doctors have repeated the message all over the world and people have accepted what they were told. Society wants to believe in the quick and easy fix because it fits into the larger story — or cultural narrative — of medical progress and capitalism. We don’t have to put the work into understanding the complexity of personality, consciousness, unconscious processes and the impact of cultural, political, and economic systems on our mental health — we just need to buy a pill!

Mental illness is real. It is devastating and painful, but a pill alone is not the only answer. There needs to be a clearer distinction between the usefulness of psychiatric medications on the one hand, and, on the other, the limitations of the bio-psychiatric model that reduces the complexity of human experience and behavior to chemicals and neurotransmitters.

None of us can be successful without some help along the way. Did you have mentors or cheerleaders who helped you to succeed? Can you tell us a story about their influence?

In 2019, on our family journey, we sat with the renowned speaker, author and family physician Dr. Gabor Maté in his house in Vancouver for a one-on-one family therapy session, on-camera. Dr. Maté was honoured by the Order of Canada for his work on addictions, trauma, and the mind-body unity. His latest book, “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture” is a New York Times best-seller. Sitting with Dr. Maté, our family began to uncover what lay beneath our daughter’s more extreme psychic and emotional states and recognize their deep unconscious dynamics. To be fair, much before we met with Dr. Maté we intuited that our daughter’s so-called psychosis was not simply akin to a fever as we had been told by psychiatrists. We had come to understand that some of her delusions were reflective of her childhood emotional reality. Although our daughter came from a very loving home, my husband and I had gone through a difficult time in our marriage when she was 11. We fought and there were tears. Our daughter was also bullied in school for many years from Grades 3 to 9 and, as she says at the beginning of Drunk on Too Much Life, she had always felt different.

Dr. Maté made us aware of how extremely sensitive our daughter is. He made us aware of intergenerational trauma and the trauma we carry from our childhoods. My husband is a political refugee from Chile, his father was tortured and his family forced to flee their country, their home, family and friends and in fear for their lives. My young parents had a brutal divorce and our family was torn apart. Essentially, Dr. Maté believes that our daughter was a lightning rod that absorbed all of our dysfunctional family dynamics and that this trauma manifested in her bipolar disorder. “So how about this possibility that what is called your manic-depressive illness,” he says, “and what doctor’s see as a biological problem in your brain, which is to be fixed with medications, how about it’s actually you’re just the one who’s downloading all the family trauma and all the family pain. My problem with the medical treatment is not that they give medications. It’s that that’s all they do. Like, you’ve probably never has this conversation with anybody before.” And we hadn’t.

As difficult as it was, Dr. Maté provided our family with valuable insights and tools for moving forward. The American mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote that “the psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.” If this is the case, trauma could be one of the reasons they have difficulty swimming. If childhood trauma is a factor in our daughter’s painful psychic and emotional experiences, then, as parents, we wanted to take responsibility. We wanted to see the roots underneath her diagnoses and seek to understand their emotional texture and learn their stories. As Bruce Perry writes, “The brain is an historical organ, a reflection of our personal histories.” It stores our personal narratives and these stories become woven into our psychic states and become manifestations of pain. And this pain, and our human relationship to trauma is often connected to extreme sensitivity. As Dr. Maté tells my husband and me in our film Drunk on Too Much Life, “it’s very difficult to know what to do with such a sensitive child. Much less has to happen to a highly sensitive person to hurt them immensely.”

According to Mental Health America’s report, over 44 million Americans have a mental health condition. Yet there’s still a stigma about mental illness. Can you share a few reasons you think this is so?

I believe there is a stigma about mental illness because we have blamed the individual for there “problematic brain chemistry” or brain pathology instead of examining the role of families, communities, economic systems, technology, and culture in developing mental illness. We don’t see the health of our brains as connected to and interconnected with everything around us. The central recurring visual metaphor of Drunk on Too Much Life is the tree, embedded in the mycelial network (the wood wide web) of connection, support and nourishment. There is no better example of resilience in nature than trees with their branching nature and connections to the mycelial network beneath the surface. Resilience is not a solo project. It is not up to the individual to become resilient: we exist in a community. Like a person, a tree can only be as strong as the forest that surrounds it. “Their well-being depends on their community, writes Peter Wohlleben, in “The Hidden Life of Trees,” “and when the supposedly feeble trees disappear in the forest, the others lose as well.” Trees synchronize their performance so that they are all equally successful. Like trees, our connectedness with nature and our community makes us stronger and we are able to support those who struggle without shame or stigma.

In your experience, what should a) individuals b) society, and c) the government do to better support people suffering from mental illness?

a) individuals

Remember a person struggling with their mental health is in pain. Help them in whatever way possible — lead them to the resources they need. Let’s all build a more caring society that values mental health. Recovery, healing and building resilience cannot be the sole responsibilities of individuals. It is not up to the struggling individual (alone) to be healthy and resilient: we exist in a community. The health of individuals reflects the health of our political, economic, and social systems and our environment. Lasting healing happens on these levels simultaneously: in ourselves, our communities, our society at large and our environment.

b) society

We need community-based health care centers, peer-run respites for young adults in every neighborhood. These centers should offer young adults free mental health services, offer a holistic menu of programs, including peer support, clinical services, employment support, wellness, art, and recovery programs. These centers should work to help young adults learn skills, build community and be empowered to manage their own mental health. They should be places where young adults who struggle with their mental health can go to find connection with others, be creative along with a strengths-based approach to mental health. We also need to “decarcerate care” — take policing out of mental health crisis!

c) the government

Mental health care needs much more funding across the nation. Governments need to support a holistic and team-based approach to health care that is trauma-informed and addresses the social determinants of mental health. This new model of health respects neurodiversity and places more value in and funding for peer-support. The number of adults and children who struggle with their mental health has skyrocketed over the past thirty years in spite of the fact that the spending on pharmaceutical medications has increased 80-fold. Five out of six young adults do not have access to the mental health services they need. Clearly there is a problem here. We need easily accessible mental health facilities in communities across the country that provide harm reduction services, holistic care and celebrate autonomy, resilience and recovery. Meaningful recovery isn’t possible without recognizing the need to treat the whole person, moving away from an illness-only paradigm of mental health and creating a more supportive, caring society.

What are your 5 strategies you use to promote your own well-being and mental wellness? Can you please give a story or example for each?

Practice mindfulness every day.

Sometimes this means meditation but for me, it could also be doing yoga, walking mindfully, and trying to bring myself (constantly) into the present moment

Practice a sense of gratitude every day.

Even when life is really hard for me and I’m feeling depressed and anxious, I try to think about what in life I am grateful for.

Make life a work of art.

Before the end of his life, the great twentieth century philosopher Michel Foucault finished his writings with the motto ‘Make life a work of art.’ For Foucault, life as a work of art was characterized by creativity and achieved through work on the self. He rejected the idea of a ‘true self’ or ‘a fixed self’ and believed instead that one’s subjectivity is fluid, fragmentary, and complex. It is a historical, cultural, and linguistic construction (or fiction) that emerges in the process of thinking, speaking and acting. It is the epicenter of our journey to understand and transform ourselves and the world around us. For Foucault, then, the central question of our time is “Who are We?” And he encouraged a critical, creative, and experimental attitude towards oneself throughout one’s life, and a striving to transform life into a work of art. My personal documentary film Drunk on Too Much Life is my bold attempt to ‘make life a work of art

Remain connected.

One of the hardest parts of COVID 19 was the ongoing fear, the isolation, and the lack of connection with friends, family, and mental health services, where people who struggle could meet in person. If trauma is disconnection, it’s not surprising that healing comes from an Anglo-Saxon word for wholeness. So, to heal means becoming whole again.

Be aware of your parts.

Internal Family Systems is a model of psychotherapy that sees the mind is naturally multiple, or composed of discrete subpersonalities — each with its own unique viewpoint and qualities. These multiple parts are trying to get our attention, and underlying them is a person’s core Self. IFS therapy aims to heal wounded parts and restore mental balance. So, our aim (as human beings) is to have our core Self driving the bus of our lives and not our freaked-out little kid parts (who are pretty reckless drivers). I believe these parts of ourselves often develop from trauma. Trauma induces a hardening, a fracturing, a separation of the self. Dr. Maté says, “trauma is not the bad things that happen to you, but what happens inside of you as a result of what happens to you.” Trauma is not a story of the past, as mainstream mental health practitioners so-often focus on, it is the wounds and the pain that people who struggle with their mental health live with in the present moment. People who have been ‘traumatized’ have been changed. The way they are in relationship with the world, and with others gets changed too. They find it harder to feel safe in the world and in their bodies. Internal Family Systems or parts therapy, PTSD therapy, therapy of any kind can help you regain wholeness or healing!

What are your favorite books, podcasts, or resources that inspire you to be a mental health champion?

“The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture,” by Gabor Maté

“The Mind and the Moon,” by Daniel Bergner

“The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma,” by Bessel Van der Kolk.

“Madness & Civilization,” by Michel Foucault

“Madness in Civilization,” by Andrew Scull

“The Red Book,” by Carl Jung.

“The Myth of Mental Illness,” Thomas S. Szasz

“The Primordial Mind in Health and Illness: A Cross Cultural Perspective,” by Michael Robbins

Resources:

Wellness Recovery Action Plan (wrap)

The Institute for the Development of Human Arts (IDHA)

InterNational Association of Peer Supporters

National Association of Peer Supporters

Intervoice (supports the International Hearing Voices Movement)

Podcasts:

Madness Radio

The Mental Illness Happy Hour

DEPTH Work: A Holistic Mental Health Podcast

Bipolar Awakenings

If you could tell other people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

The word ‘trauma’ is the Greek word for ‘wound’ and wounds can heal. Resilience grows as we heal our wounds. A struggling person can develop resilience, if they remain connected to others, to the world, society, community, family (or chosen family) and friends. Trauma is disconnection and disconnection, dehumanization, and disempowerment are, indeed, big factors in what gets called mental illness.

Let’s all as human beings on this earth never forget the huge value in forming caring, nurturing and respectful connections with each other (and in our institutions) as a path towards healing our environment and our society.

How can our readers follow you online?

WEBSITES:

https://drunkontoomuchlife.com/

https://www.newday.com/films/drunk-on-too-much-life

FACEBOOK:
https://www.facebook.com/DrunkonTooMuchLife/
@drunkontoomuchlife

INSTAGRAM
https://www.instagram.com/drunkontoomuchlife/
@drunkontoomuchlife

TWITTER:
https://twitter.com/drunkontoomuch1
@DrunkOnTooMuch1

This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!