It’s easy to say Maladjusted is a play about mental health.
Easy, accurate — but also incomplete.
In the hands of the actors and crew of Theatre for Living, the play takes statistics and turns them into situations that have the capacity to touch their audience.
Then, once touched and engaged, the troupe gives those same theatregoers the opportunity to have their voices heard, their viewpoints expressed.
Think of it as participatory theatre that has, as one of its many goals, the hope it can in some way affect public policy.
Maladjusted was created and is performed by people with mental-health issues and their caregivers. The cast includes Jack, a man diagnosed with bipolar disorder and ADHD as a child who struggles with it and with the medications prescribed for him.
It includes a social worker who means well when she finds Jack, now homeless, shelter — but it’s in an addictions-treatment facility, where his medications are confiscated.
There’s the psychiatrist working with Jack, a man who is tired of the politics of medicine.
The three storylines that touch on Jack come to a head — and then director David Diamond takes over and the audience becomes more than watchers.
Under Diamond’s direction, some of the scenes are revisited to allow members of the audience to, in essence, become part of the play as they intervene, step up and make their own suggestions on what should be happening to deal with the specific aspect of mental health the scene is addressing.
David Ng, outreach co-ordinator with Theatre for Living, said at each performance on its current tour — which brings the play to Kamloops on Saturday, March 14 — scribes will record the interventions, the suggestions, the ideas, the concerns of the audience and, once compiled, the report will be sent to the provincial government in the hopes of having an influence on public policy surrounding mental health.
Diamond, artistic and managing director of the Vancouver theatre company, has to maintain control over the second part, allowing it to be “a bit organic as the audience reacts” without seeing the momentum taken off track. The segment is facilitated heavily, according to company publicist Dima Alansari. The point is to discuss how society “can create more human-centred care.”
Each participant brings personal involvement in the health-care system to the play.
Pierre Leichner, for example, is a former psychiatrist who was dismayed with the direction of the health-care system — and gave it up, taking up the arts.
Martin Filby, who plays Jack, brings to the play his own experience of misdiagnoses, reactions to improper prescriptions, coping with various therapies all while learning to live with his mental-healthy reality.
Kamloops is one of 28 performances the company is presenting throughout British Columbia and Alberta.
The cast takes the stage on Saturday, March 14, at 7:30 p.m. in the Grand Hall at Thompson Rivers University.
Tickets are $12 for students with valid high-school or post-secondary student identification and $15 for the general public.
Tickets are available online at eventbrigte.ca/e/maladjusted-tickets-15492770293, on campus at the TRU student union offices i or in room S215 of the science building.
They can also be bought at the Phoenix Centre, the Elizabeth Fry Society or at the White Buffalo Aboriginal and Health Society.
Behind the data of mental illness
Amanda Parker remembers the first time she dealt with someone who has schizophrenia — she was scared.
Danika Maartman blames the media for creating the stereotype that jumps immediately into people’s mind. If there’s a violent crime and the media can, they slap a mental-health label on the criminal, even if there really is no direction connection.
Savanna Pavan said she also had stereotyped people with mental-health issues because “before I started getting knowledge, well, you hold your own stereotypes.”
The knowledge the Thompson Rivers University students is getting comes from being enrolled in the faculty of nursing. As part of their studies, they are required to do a community project — and, by bringing the play Maladjusted to Kamloops, they’re hoping that work will help others, like them, expand their understanding of mental illness.
Partnering with the Phoenix Centre, the students are promoting and will record notes during the March 14 Theatre for Living interactive play.
The notes will join similar documentation at the other stops the Vancouver-based theatre group is making during a tour through B.C. and Alberta and all that information will be used to create a report to be sent to the provincial government.
It’s all part of the company’s goal to use theatre to hopefully influence policy.
Maladjusted is a half-hour play with three distinct storylines that eventually come together.
The cast is composed of people who have dealt with mental health in some way, either personally or professionally.
The project was assigned to the three students but, once they found out what it involved, “we really wanted this one, Parker said. Maartman agreed, seeing it as a way to address the issue for Kamloopsians who attend the performance in a way that’s not clinical or stereotypical.
Pavan has done a rotation through the Hillside Centre psychiatric facility and said one thing she’s learned is there medical charts might have the data but they might not include the realities that are also part of the reason behind the illness.
As fellow student Parker said, it helps “if you also know their story.”
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