Shock Head Soul

A study of mental illness and its treatment at the turn of the 20th Century that brings to life Daniel Paul Schreber's autobiography about his experiences of visions, delusions and almost a decade spent in an asylum.

Director Simon Pummell uses documentary interviews with contemporary mental health practitioners, dramatic reconstructions of events in Schreber's memoir and CGI animated hallucinations to offer an insight into how mental illness is perceived by both its victims and those who treat it.

A successful lawyer, in 1893 Schreber began to receive messages from God, experienced intense visual hallucinations, and formed the belief that his gender was being transformed by divine influence. He spent the next nine years of his life in an asylum, and documented his experiences in an effort to prove his sanity, making Memoirs of my Nervous Illness a rare first-hand account of mental illness from this era.

Less