When Medicine Got it Wrong
An imageReal Pictures co-production with KQED San Francisco and ITVS
Media contact
Katie Cadigan, producer
katie@imagereal.com
310 435 4338
Logline
Family activism rocks the halls of psychiatry
Narrator
Rita Moreno
Description
In the 1970s, a small group of ordinary parents rocked the halls of
psychiatry, launching a grassroots movement that challenged
medicine, policy-making and American culture at large.
Running time
Format
53 minutes
HDCam
Broadcast
May 2010, public television
Broadcast schedule: www.whenmedicine.org/MedW/Watch.html
Distributor
Documentary Educational Resources
www.der.org
Major funders
California Council for the Humanities
Independent Television Service (ITVS)
KQED San Franciso
Website
Facebook
Twitter
www.whenmedicine.org
When Medicine Got it Wrong
@whenmedicine
When Medicine Got it Wrong
Fact Sheet - MEDIA
www.whenmedicine.org
Synopsis
Rita Moreno narrates the story of a small group of middle-class parents who, in the
1970s, got sick and tired of being blamed for causing their children’s schizophrenia. They
built a grassroots movement and launched a multi-pronged rebellion.
When Medicine Got it Wrong opens a hidden chapter of recent American history, one
where parents declared “Yes We Can” and took on doctors, politicians and the cultural
fear surrounding schizophrenia. Their battles played out amid the life-and-death
consequences of medical misunderstanding – from the assassination attempt on
President Reagan to rampant homelessness and incarceration for those not receiving
treatment.
This family movement helped shape dramatic advances in brain research and an
explosion of neuroscientific discoveries. By the 1990s the term “schizophrenogenic”
mother disappeared from textbooks for good. Medicine now knows that people with
schizophrenia can live fulfilling lives as long as good treatment, medications and services
are in place.
The story is as much a human rights saga as a medical one, revealing one of the last
areas of widespread discrimination in America. “Imagine if half the people with
Alzheimer's disease were living on the streets or in jail: people would be outraged,” says
a world-renown researcher. “But that's the situation today for people with
schizophrenia.” The film asks: where is the outrage today?
When Medicine Got it Wrong
Fact Sheet - MEDIA
www.whenmedicine.org
Creative Team
Katie Cadigan
Producer
Director/Writer with Laura Murray
Katie Cadigan is a documentary filmmaker whose films have been broadcast on
HBO/Cinemax, PBS, A&E and the History Channel. Her first feature, the highly acclaimed
HBO/Cinemax documentary People Say I’m Crazy, which she produced with Academy
Award winner Ira Wohl, won awards at virtually every festival appearance and broke
ground as the first film on schizophrenia ever photographed by a person with the illness.
She is currently in production on Catch the Baby, the history of the Chicago Maternity
Center, a radical home delivery service run by doctors and medical students. She is also
producing Ending Edithmae, a feature documentary on matricide. In mid-1990s Cadigan
taught graduate and undergraduate documentary production courses at Stanford
University. In 1997 Cadigan founded the non-fiction production company, imageReal
Pictures, which she runs out in Los Angeles, CA. She holds an A.B from Brown University
and a M.A. in Communication from Stanford University’s Documentary Film Program.
Laura Murray
Director/Writer with Katie Cadigan
Editor
Laura Murray is a documentary filmmaker and editor currently in post-production on
Predator House, a cinema-verite feature exploring the efficacy of sex offender
rehabilitation. Murray’s directorial debut, Slender Existence, a 30-minute documentary
on recovering from eating disorders, screened on PBS and received broad acclaim,
including a Student Academy Award. Named a "Filmmaker to Watch" by the
Independent Film Channel, Murray has since edited five feature documentaries
including People Say I’m Crazy for Katie Cadigan, Best Sister for Academy Award winner
Ira Wohl, and Out of Faith for USC film professor and former International Documentary
Association president Lisa Leeman. Murray received her B.A. in film and drama from
Vassar and holds an M.A. in Communication from the Documentary Film Program at
Stanford University.
Bill Susman
Composer
Bill Susman is an award-winning orchestral and chamber music composer, notable for
integrating many influences, including the Western classical tradition, Afro-Cuban music,
free jazz, and a variety of non-Western folk traditions, as well as the Fibonacci series and
fluid mechanics. His recent documentary film scores (Oil on Ice, Fate of the Lhapa and
Native New Yorker) have won numerous festival awards. His orchestral and chamber
compositions have been performed internationally, and have won numerous prizes
including the BMI award for Pentateuch and the Gaudeamus Award for Trailing Vortices.
He studied at the University of Illinois with Herbert Brün, Salvatore Martirano, and Ben
Johnston, and was invited by Pierre Boulez to work at IRCAM. He also holds an M.A.
from Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.
When Medicine Got it Wrong
Fact Sheet - MEDIA
www.whenmedicine.org