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Saturday, 26 Jan 2002, 6:30

Untangling The Mind
The Legacy of Dr. Heinz Lehmann
BR>Produced by Catherine Mullins for Green Lion Productions

This riveting documentary shows the transformation that has occurred in psychiatric care through the pioneering work of Dr. Heinz Lehmann. When Dr. Lehmann fled Nazi Germany to Montreal in 1937, he devoted the next sixty years to finding new and more humane treatments for the mentally ill. One of his dramatic achievements, captured on archival film, was a series of experiments involving intense human contact with his most regressed women patients. They had spent their days smearing feces on the wall, but by the end of the treatment were nicely dressed and participating in activities.

But Dr. Lehmann’s greatest legacy came with a single pill – Largactil – the first anti-psychotic drug used in North America. By successfully treating patients with this drug, Lehmann introduced the world to the idea that biology plays a role in mental illness.

While Untangling the Mind is a record of Lehmann’s perseverance and humanity, it is also an important historical record. Extraordinary archival footage of doctors performing electric shock therapy and lobotomies demonstrate how far psychiatric medicine has come. The doctor wonders too whether we've gone too far toward the medical model and lost some of the compassionate work and institutional care that, in spite of the crudeness of older therapies, protected people withmental illnesses from the dangers being down and out on the streets.

The film takes us to the world’s leading brain research center in Washington, D.C. where Lehmann’s remarkable work is being taken to the next level. This film will be an indispensable resource for courses in the history of psychiatry.

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