IMPATIENT! The Documentary- teaser #1
Impatient follows artist and activist Sue Armstrong’s efforts to make the Victorian mental health system safer for women.
Graphic stories of the rape and sexual abuse of female psychiatric patients have shocked Victorians, but it’s all terribly familiar to Sue.
“Genetically radical” and with her own lived experience of mental illness, Sue has been campaigning for fundamental changes in the treatment of women’s mental health for over two decades.
A lot has been achieved over the years, but there’s still a catastrophic cycle of illness, admission, treatment, abuse and re-admission and Sue wants to stop it by getting the powers that be to right the wrong and re-instate female only wards, because women continue to be unsafe when they are at their most vulnerable.
As simple and as logical as Sue’s proposition sounds, there are significant obstacles to overcome – political, financial and practical, but Sue believes that it can be done.
Sue tilts at her campaign in her own way. A trained fine artist, video producer and figurehead in the outsider artist movement, Sue brings her intelligence, humour and creativity to her efforts.
In between making zombie movies, working closely with both mental health advocates and consumers on a range of sector based projects, Sue takes us inside the mental health consumer advocacy movement, reveals the history of women’s treatment, introduces us to the psychiatric profession, and leads us into the political realm, where the crucial decisions about the safety of vulnerable women must be made – and made soon.
Featuring interviews with Professor Jayashri Kulkarni, Bevan Warner, Colleen Pearce, Cheryl Sullivan, Isabelle Collins, Bill Moon, Julie Dempsey, Sandy Jeffs, Peter Lane, Kate Hamond, Sophie Delaney, Frances Sanders and many others who share their stories, opinions and solutions to the problems of mixed gender wards in hospitals, a 42 minute version has been submitted to the Royal Commission into Mental Health in Victoria and the feature length version is now in post production.
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