"Bedlam" Film Screening
Tuesday, October 1o, 2023
7:00 pm
Smith Warehouse, Bay 4, Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall, Room C105

Join the Duke Human Rights Center for a screening of the film "Bedlam," the first film in the 2023-2024 Rights! Camera! Action! Film Series. Through intimate stories of patients, families, and medical providers, BEDLAM is a feature-length documentary that immerses us in the national crisis surrounding care for people with severe mental illness. Filmed over five years, it brings us inside one of America’s busiest psychiatric emergency rooms, into jails where psychiatric patients are warehoused, and to the homes – and homeless encampments – of members of our communities with mental illness, where silence and shame often compound personal suffering. 

Post-Screening Panelists

headshot of Jae Richardson
Jahkazia (Jae) Richardson is a Black femme, licensed clinical social worker and a healer, energy worker and educator. Through her own root work, she discovered her calling was guided by three principles: Healing is resistance. Magic is resistance. Resistance is liberation. She uses collaboration, affirmation and empowerment to support others in their own healing work and practice from a social justice, holistic and afro-spirituality framework. She also integrates skills from Narrative Therapy and DBT into her counseling work. Her passion towards individual and collective healing stems from her own trauma work. Her desire to break down generational traumas runs deeply and vibrationally. As marginalized individuals, we must heal our communities on a spiritual, vibrational, and psychological level. Centering black and brown bodies, our rights to our power, our magic, our hope, and our wholeness is at the very core of her work- her being. Wellness is our birthright.
Headshot of Billy Cao
Billy Cao is a junior at Duke studying literature and biology. He has an academic background in the history of psychiatry, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. He is currently teaching a house course in mad studies, where students trouble the distinction between madness and sanity and investigate the construction of mental illnesses by the psych disciplines. He has published articles in Duke Chronicle on disability justice and campus mental health practices.