Mind/Game (2015, documentary)

Featured at the ReelAbilities Film Festival

Screening Wednesday March 27, 6:30 pm, at the O’Keefe Auditorium, Massachusetts General Hospital, with a prescreening reception at 6 pm. A discussion with Chamique Holdsclaw follows. 

Free admission, www.reelabilities.org/boston

Copresented with the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Psychiatry, Center for Diversity

 

The story of basketball superstar Chamique Holdsclaw goes a long way toward helping to destigmatize mental illness. This riveting documentary about her life—Mind/Game (directed by Rick Goldsmith)—also examines how athletes, in particular, avoid getting help when they feel depressed, because part of being an athlete is not showing weakness or vulnerability.

From age eleven, Chamique loved the movement and art of playing basketball. Though she didn’t realize it at the time, the game also vented her pain, anger, and frustration caused mainly by her difficult family life—an alcoholic mother, a father with mental illness, and her own care for mother and younger siblings. At ten she went to live with her grandmother, who put love, encouragement, self-discipline, and stability into her life. “Take out your aggression on the court,” her grandmother told her.

Years later, after suffering the ups and downs of clinically diagnosed depression, Chamique realized that it was actually mania that partly fueled her college and WNBA stardom. The drive, the aggression, the feeling of omnipotence came from a mood high. Unfortunately, her bipolar diagnosis didn’t come until a manic episode in 2012 resulted in violence and Chamique’s arrest. In the end, the injured party—her former teammate and girlfriend—dropped the charges, spurring Chamique to make a lifetime commitment to both her well-being and her advocacy for greater and global mental health awareness. As she tells the camera honestly, with a touch of wistfulness in her eyes, mania’s edge has powerful allure. It makes her and others “want to feel life!” The meds that keep her stable, healthy, and productive take that thrilling high down a peg or two. But that’s okay, for as a psychiatrist in the film tells us, the majority of people with mental illness who get help return to work and lead highly productive lives.

In her advocacy work, Chamique points out important truths, such as in minority communities like hers—African American—mental health isn’t an accepted topic and thus not helped enough. Chamique now works with kids from minority enclaves, teaching them life skills and the acceptability, the value healthwise, in opening up, speaking out about personal issues.

Chamique has journeyed from her magazine-cover celebrity of the early 2000s—often compared to Michael Jordan’s—to her mental health advocacy work of today. Her honesty and openness to talk to the world about her experience, coupled with her appealing sincerity, make us listen and learn. Her story is one of the keys to transforming social attitudes.