Documentary
Denmark 2014
59 minutes
Director: Katrine Borre
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-Iyqil4ULI
Summary:
We follow Mette, a Danish woman, through four years of her life. She fell ill fifteen years ago. At the time, she was working as a nurse and had also grown up with heavy responsibilities for her younger sister and sick mother. She had never revealed that she heard voices and had also tried to forget the episode of deprivation of liberty and rape in her youth. It was her colleagues who eventually had to have her admitted when she became seriously ill, and this was followed by several long-term hospitalizations, heavy medication, and 150 ECT treatments. The change began when a nurse finally asked, “What happened to you?”
Mette is now in her 40s, and the documentary is about tapering off medication, uncovering underlying trauma, and various forms of therapy that helped Mette return to a social and active life. Through the process, we see what it took for Mette to gain control over the voices, which also partially disappeared. It highlights the seriousness of the side effects of medication and how they deprive people of contact with themselves and others.
A warm and thoughtful film about hope and coping with your own life. Denmark ranks as no. 2nd country in the world consuming psychiatric drugs. “Mette’s Voice” has become a strong manifestation against the traditional one-sided focus on the medicalization of mental disorders. It won first prize for Best Foreign Film at the Mad in America Film Festival in Boston in 2014 and has been translated into five languages. It is still both relevant and up-to-date.