{"id":18624,"date":"2019-09-13T10:16:51","date_gmt":"2019-09-13T17:16:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/?post_type=films&#038;p=18624"},"modified":"2025-10-14T15:27:47","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T22:27:47","slug":"bedlam","status":"publish","type":"films","link":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/documentaries\/bedlam\/","title":{"rendered":"Bedlam"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">To get to the bottom of the current mental health crisis in the U.S., psychiatrist and documentarian Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, M.D. chronicles the personal, poignant stories of those suffering from serious mental illness, including his own family, to bring to light to this epidemic and possible solutions. Shot over the course of five years, <\/span><b><i>Bedlam<\/i><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> takes viewers inside Los Angeles County\u2019s overwhelmed and vastly under-resourced psych ER, a nearby jail warehousing thousands of psychiatric patients, and the homes \u2014 and homeless encampments \u2014 of people affected by severe mental illness, where silence and shame often worsen the suffering.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Rosenberg follows the lives of three patients in particular who find themselves with a <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">chronic lack of institutional support while weaving in his own story of how the system failed his late sister, Merle, and her battle with schizophrenia.\u00a0 <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Featuring interviews with experts, activists, individuals living with a mental illness, and their families, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Bedlam<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> builds on historical footage and commentary related to mental health, exploring the rise of this issue on a national scale in the mid- and late 20th century.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To get to the bottom of the current mental health crisis in the U.S., psychiatrist and documentarian Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, M.D. chronicles the personal, poignant stories of those suffering from serious mental illness, including his own family, to bring to light to this epidemic and possible solutions. Shot over the course of five years, Bedlam [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":20008,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"topic":[1245,1254,1219,1261,1239,1225],"class_list":["post-18624","films","type-films","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","topic-crime","topic-disease-and-mental-health","topic-health-and-environment","topic-human-rights","topic-identity","topic-politics-and-government"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Bedlam | Examining Our Mental Health Crisis | Independent Lens | PBS<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Examine the mental health crisis through intimate stories of people in-and-out of ERs, jails and homeless camps.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" 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