Madness
Last of seven films about the source of human abilities
In the summer of 1961, Richard Jameson was a promising undergraduate at Oxford University and one of their most brilliant actors. Within three months he was confined to a psychiatric hospital: the first of nine such admissions in the next 20 years. He had delusions of being God, hallucinations about imaginary trials of his mother and the whole fabric of his life and thoughts was destroyed.
The symptoms and treatment of his madness as retold by him, his mother and his psychiatrist, reveal what went wrong in his brain to cause schizophrenia. Particular insights came from another disease, and sufferers from it, such as the comedian Terry Thomas. Like Richard, he never gives up: somehow even the damaged brain can still create the will to survive, and in Richard's case perhaps even to recover. But despite his apparent health, he says: ' I've just been out of hospital for five or six years and I'm just about due for my next bout. I'm making desperately sure I'm all right.' Narrator Colin Blakely
Film cameramen IAN STONE. COLIN MUNN Film sound ALAN COOPER
Film editor MICHAEL FLYNN Research GILL NEVILL
Written, produced by ROBIN BRIGHTWELL