An Interview with Ken Rosenberg

I first became interested in the film Bedlam, which debuted on PBS’s Independent Lens last month, as a documentary about the mental health crisis in America: the abandoning of the seriously mentally ill in jails or on the streets, overcrowded psychiatric emergency rooms which can only perform triage on patients desperately in need of long-term care, and the ways in which race, class, and our broken healthcare system seriously jeopardize the lives of the most vulnerable. I learned that the filmmaker was a psychiatrist who had been drawn to his profession by his sister’s schizophrenia. It wasn’t until I watched the film that I realized I knew the psychiatrist personally, and had, in fact, been just upstairs over a decade ago when he had to make some difficult phone calls about his sister’s care.