Women on the edge at mental health centre
“When you tie a string around your neck you get, uh, really dizzy and the feeling of being passed out feels good.”
Justine Winder, one of the mental patients who appears prominently in John Kastner’s Out of Mind, Out of Sight — which will have its world premiere on April 27 at Hot Docs — knows what she is talking about.
She was a friend of Ashley Smith, whose suicide by similar means at a federal prison for women set off a huge controversy.
“Me and Ashley Smith liked to tie strings around our neck,” Justine says on camera, referring to their friendship when both were at a Saskatoon mental hospital within the federal prison system. “Mostly to probably catch the attention of staff.
“It’s like, almost like a high. And that’s what I was looking for is that feeling that you get when you almost die. I like that feeling.”
Amazingly, Kastner, winner of four Emmy awards, gained access to the Brockville Mental Health Centre.
According to Nancy, a nurse at the Brockville facility, Justine turned a torn face cloth into a ligature, tied it around her neck and tried to strangle herself. She almost succeeded. Justine was found on the floor in the shower room.
“And we know that it’s all a matter of time with these strangulation attempts,” Nancy tells Kastner. “Sometimes it’s just a matter of time if we save them or not.”
This new film (co-produced by the National Film Board) is a followup to Kastner’s NCR: Not Criminally Responsible, which had its premiere at Hot Docs last year, but in a way it’s a prequel. NCR told the harrowing story of Sean Clifton, who was suffering from a mental illness and ruled not criminally responsible for stabbing and almost killing a woman he had never met, and was eventually forgiven by the victim.
Out of Mind, Out of Sight follows the cases of four patients at Brockville who committed violent acts. One of them is an engaging young man named Michael Stewart who, like Clifton, was judged not criminally responsible for his actions. But in Stewart’s case, the victim did not recover and she was not a stranger. He murdered his mother.
Intriguingly, while the male patients were involved in the most shockingly violent incidents outside the forensic psychiatric hospital, inside Brockville it’s the women who are more obviously dangerous.
“What’s surprising,” Kastner told me in an interview, “is that women do less damage on the outside but are holy terrors inside.”
That’s true in the case not only of Justine Winder but another woman who is considered a suicide risk. Carole Seguin hears voices, especially of her sister, whose temper she fears.
“I remember when she came here, she was like a wild animal,” says a nurse named Mark Earle, whom Carole falsely accuses of raping her.
Carole, who became a ward of the Children’s Aid Society at age 11 and is estranged from her family, suffered injuries when she tried to kill herself.
And as one image bound to stir up controversy shows, Carole was placed in the sort of restraints notoriously used in the case of Ashley Smith.
Charles, another nurse at Brockville, explains in the film: “Carole is one of those people that there is no question, once she started to be a problem, you had to get out the five-point restraints, because if she couldn’t get at you to hurt you she would start smashing her skull as well.”
In fact, Charles adds, “Women make the worst patients. . . . There is no explaining how or why, it’s just that way.”
Today Carole remains at the Brockville facility, but Justine has been released, having reached the end of her prison sentence Justine had been convicted of a crime (rather than judged NCR) and was transferred to Brockville from Saskatoon in the hopes she would have a better chance of avoiding the same tragic end as her friend in a full psychiatric institution.
But Kastner says that in a scene that was not included in the final cut, Justine rejects the idea that Smith would have been better treated if she had been sent to Brockville.
“It doesn’t matter where she was,” Justine says. “If she wanted to die, she was going to die.”
Kastner says, “I hope Justine has a better fate than her friend Ashley. But in cases like this, you always worry about the danger of crossing the line.” Out of Mind, Out of Sight will have three Hot Docs screenings, on April 27, April 30 and May 4. See hotdocs.ca for information. TVO will have the film’s TV premiere May 7 at 9 p.m. and midnight, repeating May 8 at 10 p.m. and May 11 at 11 p.m. mknelman@thestar.ca