Stigma Videotape. By the Royal College of Psychiatrists. London: Royal College of Psychiatrists. 1990. 14 minutes. £5.00.

With a cheerful piano accompaniment by Nicholas Medtner (at times sounding like the arguably more appropriate Charles Alkan) and punctuated by some catchy rock lyrics, this 14-minute videotape takes off from the previous College cinema short on the same topic. Like the earlier film this attempts to argue the propinquity of mental illness: if not you, then your mother or your lover. Unlike the previous shorter one, this new update largely eschews images of cinematic horror and madness that at a previous showing Lewis Wolpert and others had argued were counterproductive in our attempts to confront stigma.

Instead we have a largely Whiggish perspective: once regarded with superstitious fear, mental illness is now amenable to a scientific knowledge and control in which the College is fully involved. Some of its fast-moving montage depicts past human cruelty — Nazi executions of civilians and electroconvulsive therapy (Eh? Electroconvulsive therapy is not a therapy?). This upbeat science sweeping away prejudice has problems with the very non-understandability of psychopathology. Here it is a disease as illustrated by various brain scans, and addiction too is just a disease. Best left to the experts, yet some human sympathy won't go amiss. But surely, one of the reasons ‘insanity’ still provides one of our most enduring tropes, not least in the cinema, is its ready illustration of unintelligibility, alterity, and its awkward position between naturalistic and voluntaristic ways of understanding. Hardly the fault of the filmmakers: we still do not have a model of psychosis that makes any sense in terms of popular knowledge. Nor, with the fading of the anti-psychiatric approach (which at least offered some model of insanity as a response to not unintelligible social conditions), are we likely to get that soon? The neurobiology of schizophrenia is still too distant from commonsense understanding. By contrast, a broken leg (which the film offers as a counterpoint) is apparently approachable through knowledge of a broken stick or something similar. Not so a ‘broken mind’ as it is called here.

It might be felt that the producers could have gone for one illness as an intelligible model (say depression), rather than collecting together psychosis, addictions, eating disorders, dementia and the psychoses. (Do we really think a unitary model for all these will emerge?) But, reliance on the one, apparently intelligible, pattern of depression as a general model might have been regarded as dishonest. In short, we have here a succinct and humane little film that is unlikely to do any harm (not least to the reputation of psychiatry). Whiggish? Certainly, but none the worse for that.