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.
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