Who's Who: Decreasing the Stigma of Mental Illness Through Film

[Editor's Note: This feature originally appeared in our "Who's Who" section, but has been moved to our section on artist profiles.]

Name: Liz McBee

Age: 45

Occupation: Filmmaker

How long have you been in Albany? We moved to [California] from New York in 1993. We lived in Lafayette for a bit. We bought this house in 1998.

What is your background? I grew up in Austin, TX. I studied film at the University of Texas, in their film program, which was then not very well known. Now, of course, there’s the South by Southwest festival.

I went to film school; then I dropped out of school and moved to New York to work in the industry.

How did you decide to do that? I got a summer job [in Austin] as a lowly production assistant for this Merchant Ivory film. The whole crew was from New York, so after that I decided to move to New York. I worked on some commercials. Then I produced a couple of very low-budget independent films — and that’s where I met my husband. He worked for an advertising agency there.

How was your transition to filmmaking in California? It was quite difficult to "crack the nut." It was hard. It took me a year before I got established here in production. There’s a lot of corporate houses that do corporate videos; a lot were internal corporate marketing product launches. I was working free-lance. I was fortunate to get hooked into a non-corporate production company, Red Sky Films.

How did you get interested in your latest topic? My first daughter was born in 1999; eight months later, I became pregnant with my second. My husband was gone a lot. I became depressed. Although we’d been here several years, I did not have a community of friends. It wasn’t until my daughter was 3 or 4 that I heard other mothers talking at playgrounds [about these feelings].

The current film, Burning the Village, came out of this feeling that something was not quite right. I thought, "Oh my God, this is hard! I am an accomplished person; why is this so hard? Something seems harder than it should be."

It wasn’t until the concept of this film, when my daughter was 3 or 4, that I realized, "This is depressed." The genesis came from this feeling, "Where’s my village?"

I did start to see a therapist. I started to shift the film to postpartum depression – what that was, what it felt like, and the spectrum. The spectrum ranges from the "baby blues," with the hormonal drop – doctors tell us to expect it, but if they continue for more than four or five weeks, then you’re really depressed.

The term “postpartum depression” is now outdated; now [the term is] "perinatal mood disorders." A lot of women did not have depression but anxiety, or postpartum obsessive-compulsive disorder. At the far, far end of the spectrum is postpartum psychosis, when the mother takes her life or her children’s lives.

My goal is to raise awareness and decrease the stigma of mental illness, to help women build communities around themselves.

My goal – for the filmmaker-me – is to get the film out there, do the festival circuit. The activist, community-builder-me wants to get the film out to mothers’ groups and doctors’ offices.

What stage is the film at? I’m in post-production. I’ve been trying to raise funds. The economy’s very hard. I have an editor waiting to work with me, but I can’t afford to hire her, so I’m starting to do it myself.

Everybody makes mistakes ... ! If there's something in this article you think should be corrected, or if something else is amiss, give editor Emilie Raguso a ring at 510-459-8325 or shoot her an e-mail at emilier@patch.com.