Filmmaker Jonathan Balazs and rapper Khari “Conspiracy” Stewart on Space Channel’s InnerSPACE talking about their film documenting Khari’s experience hearing voices.

The voiceover commentary describes how Khari “embarked on a journey for understanding through Canada’s mental health system” – where he was offered the usual orthodoxy :  he hears voices so he must have a broken brain – “in the hospital they call that ‘schizophrenic” and must be locked up and take psychiatric medications to control the voices and him.

Khari prefers a different, spiritual understanding – not dissimilar to those adopted in other cultures round the world –  even though that can present challenges in a society that seems to think there is only one way of understanding unusual human experiences.

“As I see it was chapter two of Khari: not the guy that I knew in my childhood, not the guy that’s my identical twin…. but some other person.”

“Hearing the voices I didn’t know what it was, who they were, where it was coming from,  whether it was my body or something external.
I didn’t know about hearing voices, being on disability, being in a mental facility, I didn’t know about any of that . I grew up as a normal kid. ”

As Jonathan Balazs says of Khari:

“there are people who believe far more outlandish things than this guy”

Dr Kwame McKenzie, of CAMH and  Professor of Psychiatry at UofT

“schizophrenia is a number of symptoms that have been put together, to say that this is ‘an illness’ – and that’s an idea, it’s not a thing.”

Jonathan Balazs…

“this matter of  ‘you hear voices, you have to be locked up I think is kind of, a faulty proposition…what can we learn from these voices?”

related

• unlikely friends take documentary look at mental illness https://recoverynetworktoronto.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/unlikely-friends-take-documentary-look-at-mental-illness/
• mars project https://recoverynetworktoronto.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/mars-project-jonathan-balazs-and-khari-conspiracy-stewart/