About the Self-Representation...

The topic of insanity is the content of hundreds of documentaries and fictitious films which give the audience the more or less appealing possibilities to deal with the matter in a variety of ways. However, people with experiences in psychiatry rarely had the opportunity to tell their own stories and talk about their own ideas in the medium of film. A small number of actors, directors and authors have only recently gotten this chance, whereby they often stood in front of and behind the camera with their own experiences. The increasingly popular genre of the autobiographic film supports this rather subversive development, which goes hand in hand with the empowerment-movement and the rediscovered interest in subjective experiences. This talk will deal with the historic and transformative meaning of this development through some film examples.

About the person:

Dr. Peter Stastny studied medicine in Vienna and is currently Associate Professor for Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. He is the author of medical publications about topics like psychosocial treatment, self-help and self –qualification, history of film and psychiatry etc. and has developed innovative projects about new roles of the people affected in the care system, self-help companies and alternative practice models. As a courtroom expert he is specialised on psychiatric force treatment and misuse in a therapeutic context and is the director and producer of various documentary films in the area of psychiatry and self-experience.