Mental Health Association in New York State, Inc.
(Publication Archives)

Friday Fax from Albany

Timothy’s Birthday Events: Several regions throughout the state held similar events to the one held in Albany, yesterday, to commemorate what would have been the 17th birthday of Timothy O’Clair. Below is the Timothy’s Law Campaign press release from yesterday’s event on the steps of the NYS Capitol.

Timothy’s Law Advocates Release Balloons with
‘Messages to Timothy’

Timothy O’Clair, lost to suicide 4 years ago, would have been 17 today

Gathering at the steps of the NYS Capitol in Albany, Timothy’s Law supporters today celebrated what would have been the 17th birthday of Timothy O’Clair, the Schenectady, NY boy who took his own life 4 years ago after his parents were unable to get him the mental health services he needed. Supporters wrote messages to Timothy on helium filled balloons, which were then released skyward from locations throughout the state. Those messages consisted mostly of the support of millions of New Yorkers to enact the legislation named in Timothy’s memory – legislation that would end discrimination in insurance coverage for people with mental health and addiction needs.

Under current law, health insurance plans restrict the amount of coverage they provide or charge higher co-payments for mental health and addiction services than they do for other physical health services. Tom and Donna O’Clair struggled for nearly 5 years to get Timothy the services he needed. However, due to these mental health service restrictions, they were forced to ration the care that Timothy so desperately needed. As a result of this insufficient treatment, Timothy O’Clair hanged himself in his bedroom closet at the age of 12.

Timothy’s Law would require health insurance policies to provide mental health and addiction services equally to the other physical health services they provide. This would allow those with the most severe mental health and addiction needs to access services as long as it is medically necessary. Such additional coverage has been estimated, based on the experience of 34 other states and the Federal government in providing parity-based mental health and addiction services, to cost an additional $1.26 per person per month – what equates to the price for a cup of coffee.

Timothy’s Law supporters from throughout the region came together today to mark Timothy’s birthday, as others in various locations throughout the state did the same. Here in Albany, Timothy’s father, Tom O’Clair, stood at the steps of the NYS Capitol, saying that he could feel the support of those gathering in other locations statewide.

“Knowing that we are not alone in this fight to enact Timothy’s Law gives me great comfort,” O’Clair said. “I can feel the support of those releasing balloons with messages to my son.

I can only imagine how it looks from Timothy’s perspective, seeing hundreds, probably thousands of balloons rising from locations all over New York State toward his vantage point in heaven,” O’Clair said.

Movie Fundraiser - Great Success: On May 3rd, MHANYS presented our first movie fundraiser - Maangamzi—The Ancient One. This was a very compelling story about the relationship that develops between an American psychiatrist and a woman who has been in a psychiatric facility in Tanzania for the past twenty years.

This was a wonderful way to announce May as mental health month. A large crowd filled the Spectrum Theater in Albany to watch the movie and then take the opportunity to talk with the movie’s director/producer Ron Mulvihill. Mr. Mulvihill was a terrific speaker and people stayed for hours afterwards for the opportunity to talk with him about the creation of the movie.

Aside from the fundraising aspect of the evening, the showing of the movie was a wonderful way to expand the horizons of our organization. A large contingent of people attended from the African community in the area and we had the opportunity to talk to them about the work of the Mental Health Association and our 31 affiliates.

In addition, due to the tireless efforts of MHANYS’ Board Fundraising Committee Chair, Susan Murante, we made over a dozen radio and television appearances over the last few weeks promoting May as mental health month and talking about the work of the Mental Health Association, our anti-stigma efforts and Timothy’s Law. Following in the In The News section, there is an editorial and article on the movie,

Special thanks are due to Susan Murante who dedicated a great deal of time and energy to insure the success of the movie. We would also like to thank the movie’s producer/director Ron Mulvihill for making the evening so successful as well as the many board members and staff, especially our administrative assistant Lillian Lasher, for helping to make the evening such a huge success.

We look forward to many more of these events in the future.

SECOND ANNUAL WALK FOR MENTAL HEALTH:

May is Mental Health Awareness Month

Week of May 14 – May 20, 2005

If you are interested in participating, please contact Ann or Alexandra - e-mail the Walk Committee at mentalhealth_walkers@yahoo.com, or call Ann at (845) 566-0810 or Ali at (845) 703-1042 and they will connect you with the agency coordinating the walk in your region.

SAMARITANS SUICIDE PREVENTION CENTER'S
7th Annual HOPE Candlelight Vigil

Thursday, May 19, 2005, 6:00-9:00 P.M.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart,
and you shall see that in truth you are weeping
for that which has been your delight. ~Kahlil Gibran

On May 19th, Samaritans Suicide Prevention Center will hold its 7th annual candlelight vigil on the steps of the NYS Capitol in Albany.

This event not only memorializes the lives that have been tragically lost to suicide (through the faces on the NYS 1998 - 2005 LifeKeeper Memory Quilts), but will also work to save future lives through sharing, courage, and the commitment to the prevention of suicide. In addition, the Vigil serves to recognize those individuals dedicated to the prevention of suicide through the Annual LifeKeeper Memory Award. This year’s LifeKeeper Awards will be presented to NYS Office of Mental Health Commissioner Sharon Carpinello and Associate Director of Clinical Operations for the Albany County Department of Mental Health, Bill Dickson.

For more information, go to http://www.timesunion.com/communities/samaritans/, e-mail sams@fcscapitalregion.org, or call (518) 689-0080.

IN THE NEWS:

Push for psych care - Pol, doc want mental health coverage expanded. By Bob Kappstatter
New York Daily News, May 6, 2005

A coalition of politicians and health care providers pushed yesterday for passage of a law named for a young suicide victim whose insurance lacked adequate mental-health coverage.

They gathered on what would have been Timothy O'Clair's 17th birthday. The Schenectady boy committed suicide at age 12 after suffering from depression for years while his family was denied adequate mental health insurance coverage.

May is National Mental Health Month, and the coalition brought together at the Bronx Psychiatric Center yesterday by state Sen. Jeff Klein and Dr. Derek Suite of Full Circle Health called on Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno to pass a Timothy's Law as previously passed by the state Assembly.

Most insurance plans only pay for 20 visits a year, and co-payments for mental health care are as high as 50% of the customary fee to see a doctor.

With high co-pays, once patients reach their visit limits, it is prohibitive for many to afford much-needed mental health services.

"Here in the Bronx and Westchester, families and their employers spend an enormous amount of money on health insurance coverage, but mental illness is not covered adequately, and so families are left to pay the bills," said Klein (D-North Bronx).

"It is time to pass Timothy's Law so our health care system can address mental illness and substance abuse, which cause great pain to families, and cost our businesses billions of dollars in lost productivity."

The law would eliminate discriminatory and unequal mental health and substance abuse coverage by insurance companies.

"Many doctors, nurses and counselors have worked hard to erase the stigma attached to mental illness so that we can get to the important business of healing," Suite said. "Mental health treatment can literally be a life-saver, and that's why we need Timothy's Law: to make sure that treatment is available to the people who need it."

Hefty costs of care for mentally ill. Letter to the Editor
Albany Times Union, May 1, 2005

In the United States, 53 million people experience mental illness each year, and one in five families is affected by a loved one's serious mental illness. Today begins Mental Health Month, so you're sure to hear more statistics like these for the next 30 days. You can expect to see their softer side in made-for-TV movies, public service announcements and celebrity interviews. Those stories are intended to tug at your heart and to make you care about mothers with depression, fathers with anxiety, adolescents on the brink of suicide and children who suffer with mental illness.

In Albany, we'll also see lobbying. The top issue is insurance parity for treatment of mental health problems. Again families will tell heartbreaking stories, but the truth is mental health care is also an issue of dollars and cents.

At first glance, it does seem heartless to not include mental health coverage equal to other coverage. The stories of folks who can't get help are tragic, and years of research shows that early treatment and therapy do have great outcomes. So why not save lives and families by legislating parity?

Advocates say parity won't increase costs that much and that treating mental illness isn't expensive. However, there is a bigger story.

Consider: In the United States today, half of all visits to primary care physicians are for conditions caused or exacerbated by mental health problems, and more hospital beds (23 percent of all beds) are occupied by people with mental illness than with any other disease. Thus the expenses already exist, but they're poorly managed and a lot more costly as a result.

Many people are afraid that parity legislation will increase health care costs. Anyone with a full-time job knows that when the insurer's cost goes up, the employer's costs rise and that faster then you can say "manic depressive disorder," those costs will show up in what employees pay for health care. So we have to think through this parity thing. Why, sad stories aside, would we want to pay more for health care?

Well, we have to look at all of the numbers in this debate and there are a few that often get left out. Here is a small part of the much bigger picture:

Each year, more than 1 million young people enter the juvenile justice system, with more than 125,000 placed in correctional facilities. Studies consistently find the rate of mental disorders is three times higher in that juvenile population than among the same age group in the general population, so we know that treatment for mental illness is showing up late and more expensively there. We also know that more than one-third of all homeless people have a mental illness, and that prisons too are housing the mentally ill.

And there's more. Serious depression is the No. 3 cause of poor performance and absenteeism in the workplace. Fortune Magazine reported that the cost of mental illness in business, including lost productivity and earnings, is estimated to be $148 billion each year. So we're already paying for mental illness. We pay in business, in social services, through Medicaid, in programs for the homeless and in the skyrocketing budgets for juvenile justice, law enforcement and the corrections system. Maybe the question isn't should we pay, but which pocket we pay from.

Our choice -- as taxpayers -- is whether we want to pay for mental illness through a convoluted and inefficient series of last-gasp interventions by way of Medicaid, welfare and the criminal justice system, or to choose a financial strategy that is more effective, with better, cheaper outcomes for the whole community.

The bottom line in mental health parity is just that: better and cheaper outcomes. You don't even have to care; you only have to count.

Diane Cameron is a Capital Region writer. She previously worked in the mental health field. Her e-mail address is oklota@localnet.com.

Businesses say proposal is too costly. By James Schlett
Schenectady Daily Gazette May 5, 2005

Some want exemption from Timothy’s Law

The spread could not have been any thinner or more insurmountable for Scott Stevens, president of Dimension Fabricators Inc. in Schenectady.

The New Jersey Department of Transportation Monday notified Stevens that the Maxon Road steel part maker lost a bid for a $60,000 bridge project in Newark. Another manufacturer won the project offering the state steel bridge parts for $189 each, $6 less than Dimension’s final offer.

Several factors played into Dimension’s inability to beat that competitor’s bid, from property taxes to wages and health care costs.

And with New York lawmakers considering a proposal to prohibit insurance plans from excluding or limiting benefits for mental health care, that $6 spread may become an almost abysmal rift, Stevens said.

"You’ve got to watch them because it’s chipping away at our business’ ability to be competitive," Chamber of Schenectady County President Charles Steiner said of New York’s 42 insurance mandates.

Stevens, Steiner and several other small business representatives and owners Wednesday tried to head off the economic impacts of the insurance legislation. They called on lawmakers to exempt businesses with fewer than 50 workers from the mental health mandate.

However, small business’ opposition to the mandate pits them against a two-year-old Assembly bill named after a Rotterdam 12-year-old, Timothy O’Clair, who committed suicide in 2001.

Fearing the Legislature will soon focus on what mental health advocates have dubbed Timothy’s Law, three major New York small business associations mounted opposition to the proposal that would increase premiums by 1 to 3.5 percent.

For Stevens, the mandate may make him pay an additional $400 monthly to cover the 28 employees insured at Dimension. The steel fabricator will spend $150,000 on health insurance this year. It employs 35 people.

"This is more than an economic issue. This is a discriminatory issue," said Michael Seereiter, director of public policy for the Mental Health Association of New York State.

Thirty-four states have mental health parity mandates and 18 of them have small business coverage exemptions. New York has the fourth most mandates in the country.

"Our hands are getting tied further and further behind our backs," Stevens said.

The small business associations are concerned about legislation sponsored by Assemblyman Paul Tonko, D-Amsterdam. They support a bill sponsored by Sen. Thomas Libous, R-Binghamton. That Senate bill includes the fewer-than-50-worker exemption and covers biologically related disorders, such as schizophrenia.

Tonko’s Timothy’s Law bill lacks the small business exemption and includes coverage for addictions, biologically related disorders and any other psychological disorder ranging from phobias to mood disorders.

Timothy’s Law would prohibit insurance companies from having caps on mental health care treatments, which are commonly limited to 30 inpatient visits and 20 outpatient ones annually. Coverage for cancer and other illnesses lack those caps.

"It would make the playing field level for people with mental illnesses and addictions," said Seereiter.

Both houses last year passed different mental health mandate bills, but only Tonko’s legislation has the support of the Timothy’s Law Campaign, which includes 400 mental health advocacy groups.

The small business associations fear Timothy’s Law would make it too difficult for small businesses to provide their employees with health coverage. The Mental Health Association does not believe the mandate would be financially burdensome, costing employers $1.26 monthly per employee.

The number of businesses with fewer than 50 employees that offer health coverage in New York dropped to 47.6 percent in 2002 from 53.6 percent two years earlier, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

"We’re struggling with the system as it is today, because the costs are driving us under," said Mark Alesse, president of NFIB, which represents 20,000 small businesses statewide.

The NFIB, Support Services Association and Business Council of New York State are backing the small business mandate exemption. The last insurance mandate adopted by New York came in 2003 and was for infertility services.

Stop the Stigma. Editorial
Altamont Enterprise, April 21, 2005

Half of Americans with serious mental illness refuse to seek treatment, according to the President's New Freedom Commission report.

Why?

The stigma of metal illness is cited as one of the major reasons.

The Mental Health Association in New York State is working to lift that stigma.

One thing the association is doing is holding a special screening of Maangamizi - The Ancient One on May 3 at Albany's Spectrum 8 Theatres at 290 Delaware Ave.

The association is showing the film both to raise funds and to raise consciousness. Proceeds will go to an anti-discrimination program run by the association.

Susan Murante, who has worked as a volunteer for the association for 20 years, said of the film, "I found it very powerful…It raises your awareness; it gives you hope there's a possibility for healing…Because there's such a stigma with mental illness, a lot of people are in denial."

That stigma hits close to home for Murante; a family member suffers from manic depression.

"Everybody wants to turn their back on mental health," Murante said. "We need to turn that around."

As a society we congratulate ourselves on being modern and progressive. We look back with horror or superior arrogance at early civilizations where pagan priests performed rituals to banish the "devils" that we now recognize as mental illness.

Later, in the Middle Ages, beatings, starvation, and other tortures were used to drive the devils out of a sick person's body. As late as the 1600's, the mentally ill were still tortured or put to death as witches, or chained in dungeons.

But how far have we really come if those with mental illness are still discriminated against and shunned? And if those who are ill don't seek treatment for fear of being stigmatized?

Glenn Liebman, the chief executive officer for the Mental Health Association in New York State, said the stigma is perpetuated through stereotypes and through the media.

"People with mental illness are portrayed as crazy and referred to as loony. Most are doing their best to try to live productive lives," said Liebman. "Most are not violent or aggressive."

Liebman pointed to pop culture items that support the harmful stereotype. "There's nothing funny about T-shirts that say 'psych ward'," he said. "The Vermont Teddy Bear Company had a crazy bear - like crazy in love - for Valentine's Day that came with its own commitment papers."

Liebman went on, "we're one of the few populations about whom people feel they can be openly critical and make jokes."

This kind of discrimination makes people who are mentally ill eschew treatment, he said. "Only one out of two people with a serious mental illness - like clinical depression, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia - will enter the mental health system."

The most recent statistics, he said, show that one out of five will suffer some form of mental illness in their lives.

That means mental illness will probably affect each one of us or someone we love at some time.

We would be wise to be understanding.

We could start by taking an evening to watch an interesting movie and support a good cause.

"Susan loved this movie," Liebman said of Murante when asked why Maangamizi was selected. "It's not your classic mental-health movie. It's more about the human spirit; it gives you a vision of hope and recovery."

Beyond seeing the film, though, we can each of us, make a difference by treating those who are mentally ill with respect.

Just a year ago, we praised a Voorheesville man, William Kinisky, for his courage in speaking out about his illness, bipolar disorder. We wrote about his quest for a Habitat for Humanity home. Although many in our community suffer from mental illness, very few are willing to put their story in print.

That's why we so admire William Kinisky. The Voorheesville native is not only dealing successfully with his illness, he was willing to talk about it with his community.

He didn't mince words when he described the depression that had plagued him since he was a teenager. He was hospitalized many times, and lost much - his marriage, his children, and three good jobs. Finally, he found what he called the right "recipe," including counseling and daily medication to balance his life.

He no longer contemplates killing himself; his highs and lows have evened out. He works two part-time jobs and his two teenage sons are living with him.

We believe there are many such success stories in our midst, but they are rarely told.

When we interview family members for obituaries, people often tell us how their father or sister or grandmother or brother suffered form mental illness, but they never want us to write about it. We tell them it's part of a person's life and recording it, especially if the person was able to achieve despite it, could inspire others.

No, they most often say, you can't mention it.

Once in a while, when we write of a public figure or an occasion when there's an award honoring someone, that person will tell us of his or her mental illness. But they don't want to see it in print.

No, they most often say, people wouldn't understand.

The stigma will only be lifted, the taboo will only be broken, if those who suffer from mental illness are willing to talk about it.

On our pages, people have talked - in obituaries and in news stories and features - about being recovering alcoholics, about battling cancer, and about a wide range of other illnesses. But they won't talk about mental illness. They feel it would reduce their standing in the community, that it would jeopardize their future, and they may be right.

Amy Spellos, who has worked in the mental health field for nearly three decades, told us last year that mental patients face a great deal of discrimination, behavior they wouldn't be subject to if they had other health problems.

And Dr. Cynthia Wible, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School, disputed the common misperception that people with mental illnesses are dangerous. She told us these disorders do not make people violent or inclined to crime.

Spellos says people have a skewed perception of mental illness because it ends up in the news only when someone with mental illness commits a violent crime, but there are plenty of people successfully dealing with their mental illnesses.

We believe her. It's time we stopped laughing at mental illness; and it's time we stopped cringing. Let us try to recognize our differences and value each human being.

Maangamizi says, "May your lives be filled with compassion and love." If we can't get that far, let us at least stop the fear and hatred.

Making an indie ‘film about truth’ - Queenae and Ron Mulvihill put their livelihood on the line…Telling of The Ancient One who guides the way to healing. By Melissa Hale-Spencer
Altamont Enterprise, April 21, 2005

When Ron Mulvihill was a college kid, he studied in Kenya.

“I was an American who got uprooted,” he said. “I ended up in Africa. It turned my life upside down. Everything I knew, or thought I knew, about Africa was a lie.”

Americans, he said, don’t understand the cultures of Africa or the love the African people have. He described himself as a white man “with an African soul.”

Mulvihill became a filmmaker. His film, Maangamizi – The Ancient One, is the first feature movie to be filmed in Swahili, an African language, and it was Tanzania’s first entry in the Academy Awards’ Best Foreign Language competition.

Maangamizi will make its local debut at the Spectrum 8 Theatres in Albany on May 3, as a benefit for the Mental Health Association in New York State. Mulvihill will speak about the film following the screening.

Mulvihill has put $150,000 worth of debt on his credit cards to produce the film, and all of the cast and crew have gone without pay, he said, until the critically-acclaimed film, which he is just starting to self-distribute, makes enough money.

“No one’s been paid yet. When I make good on my contracts, it will be about $1 million,” Mulvihill said of the cost of making the film. The cast and crew deferred their salaries, he said, because “they loved it; they loved the spirit of the story.”

Mulvihill had the backing of small investors. “The Tanzanian investors helped with local expenses and food,” he said during a phone interview from California, where he lives.

“My dream is to release it in East Africa,” he said.

“In Africa, cinema was only for the elite,” Mulvihill explained. “Most theaters have died because people couldn’t afford to go. The films were Indian or B American movies.”

Mulvihill envisions traveling cross-country, showing the film “on the big screen” at soccer stadiums, charging just 25 cents or 50 cents for admission.

“It would be a novel thing,” he said. “People would see themselves, people speaking Swahili, in a movie for the first time… In Africa, the market has been ignored.”

Mulvihill made his first African film when he was an exchange student at the University of Nairobi. The documentary was about his roommate’s family in rural Kenya, where the African family, rather than an outsider, gave the narration – a first, he said.

Mulvihill went on to film school at UCLA in 1982, where he met the woman who would become his wife – Queenae Taylor, an African American.

“I went off to shoot my thesis film on alternative medicine, but I couldn’t get funding,” he said. “Kenya had outlawed traditional medicine as witchcraft. Tanzania was using it in their hospitals,” along with Western medicine, he said.

It took Mulvihill years to make the film because of upheaval in the Tanzanian government. “The country’s infrastructure was nonexistent,” he said.

That experience did not deter him from returning to Tanzania; rather, it inspired him.

Women-centered

His wife wrote the screenplay for what would become Maangamizi with Hollywood and white actors in mind. Queenae Taylor Mulvihill called her screenplay Hecate for the ancient Greek fertility goddess, and she envisioned Bette Davis in the title role.

“She had the script and, six months later, she died,” Mulvihill said of Davis.

Martin Mhando, a veteran Tanzanian-born filmmaker who had produced Mulvihill’s thesis film, looked at the screenplay. “He said, ‘This is the most Tanzanian story I ever read,’” recalled Mulvihill.

Some of the threads of folklore common to Tanzania, he said, are twins having a pivotal role, children disappearing and coming back after years, and all-knowing women.

Queenae Taylor Mulvihill and Martin Mhando are the film’s co-producers, and Ron Mulvihill is its director. Mhando is now based in Australia – he chairs the media studies department at Perth’s Murdock University – and the film crew was international.

What the original meant-for-Hollywood screenplay and the Tanzanian Maangamizi have in common is the centrality of the women characters. Stories in the European tradition have a male and female character at their center – both of them white: Tristan and Iseult, Lancelot and Guinevere, Romeo and Juliet. American stories, as literary critic Leslie Fiedler pointed out, often have two male characters at their center – on white, on not: Huckleberry Finn and Jim, The Lone Ranger and Tonto, Ishmael and Queequeg in Moby Dick.

Two females are squarely at the center of the Mulvihills’ film – both of them black.

Samehe (played by Amandina Lihamba) is a long-time patient at a Tanzanian mental institution. She has not spoken for decades; she spends sleepless nights in unhappy wandering, and long days simply gazing out a window.

Asira, an African-American psychiatrist (played by BarbaraO), takes a residency at the institution and is immediately drawn to Samehe.

The two meet each other in a stunning scene. Without words, they “change eyes,” much the way male and female characters would in a Shakespearean play.

The mellow sounds of a marimba play in the background. (The film’s score was composed by Grammy Award-winning musician Cyril Neville, of the Neville Brothers.)

After their long look at each other – as if they peered into each others’ souls – the fates of the two women are intertwined.

Certainly, there are male characters in the film – a bureaucratic doctor heading the institution, another doctor and potential suitor of Asira, flashbacks of Samehe’s Christian preacher father – but those characters are peripheral.

Asira and Samehe’s relationship is at the center of the story, and the plot is matrilineal. Each of them is close to her grandmother. Asira’s is a real-life grandmother; she keeps her picture by her bedside. Samehe’s is the ancient spirit of Maangamizi, the grandmother of all grandmothers. Both of the women are comforted by memories or visions of their grandmothers as they remember horrific childhood experiences.

The memories unfold in bits and pieces throughout the movie. Samehe was, as a child, taught the native healing ways by her mother. Her father was abusive and angry over his child being raised as a “heathen.”

“Remember that you come from a place of sin,” says the preacher, her father. He believes God has chosen to save the African continent from the devil through Christianity.

Soon after, Mulvihill met American novelist Alice Walker through a Somalian filmmaker; Walker had helped her with her film on female circumcision.

“I gave her the tape,” said Mulvihill. “She loved it and contributed $5,000.”

Walker has written “Maangamizi – The Ancient One is more than a movie. It is shocking and profound… It is a way back to who we still are deep, deep down in our psyches…”

Maangamizi has received recognition at festivals around the world.

“We were stuck in the black and African film festivals,” said Mulvihill. “We finally got in the Montreal Film Festival. That’s where we got a great review from Variety, which helped us get into the white film festivals.”

The 2001 review says, “Maangamizi avoids falling into New Age glibness despite the script’s potentially pandering mix of feminism, Western psychology, African mysticism and repressed-memory catharsis.”

Reviewer Dennis Harvey also describes the film as “a rare wade into multicultural spirituality that’s neither obscure nor oversimplified.”

While praising the film, Harvey also predicts its difficult marketing future. “Given all-black femme-driven cast’s slim marquee value, and less-than-obviously marketable themes, indie production won’t be an easy theatrical sell,” he writes, but he also speculates that grass-roots appeal to specialized audiences “could lead to sleeper status.”

The film has been playing in festivals for the last five years. Earlier this year, Mulvihill said, “We decided to do self-distribution.”

BarbaraO, who plays Asira in the film, “went city to city 10 years ago,” with another film she was in, Mulvihill said. “Her goal is to open this theatrically in seven cities,” he said.

Mulvihill had originally hoped to get a distributor. “It’s tough in Hollywood,” he said, “even though we’ve had critical acclaim. In Hollywood, what they want to know is how you’ve done financially… We’ve been tied up with this the last five years; my wife has 10 other scripts.”

Universal themes

Mulvihill says the film’s themes are universal.

“When it premiered in Japan – and the Japanese don’t usually show emotion – people came out of the theater in tears,” he said.

The character Maangamizi (played by Mwanajuma Ali Hassan) reaches across cultures, Mulvihill said. “Even those in white audiences say, ‘That character reminds me of my own grandmother,’” he said.

Just after the terrorist’s attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the film sold out, Mulvihill said. “People felt so horrible then and this helped them. That’s where we got ‘A Film of Hope and Healing,’” he said, referring to the phrase currently used to publicize Maangamizi.

The film has found a particular niche in the mental health field.

A “Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival” is held at a progressive mental institution in Toronto, Mulvihill said.

The institution, which has a theater and arts program for patients, has an annual week-long film festival where patients, staff, and the general public watch films at a theater in the institution.

The patients there responded warmly to Maangamizi, Mulvihill said. “They felt it showed a side that hadn’t been expressed before,” he said.

A psychologist from South Africa whose grandfather had been a traditional healer “felt the film mirrored her own life,” he said. “She showed it to one of her patients, a patient she could never reach. Watching the film, she had a breakthrough,” said Mulvihill. “The hospital bought copies to use for the staff.”

Additionally, he said, the National Black Psychologists showed Maangamizi at their conference and various conference members started ordering it.

“As a filmmaker, I feel great,” said Mulvihill with a laugh. “I’m in debt but I did my dream and it’s helping many people.”

Until next time, we remain,
Working to ensure available and accessible
mental health services for all New Yorkers