Now Return Us to Normal

At 16, I was struck by severe clinical depression and, seemingly overnight, transformed from a healthy, socially-active teenager to someone unable to function. I was put on suicide watch. Overwhelmed by anxiety and leery of institutional options, my parents sent me to the Oakley School, an isolated reform boarding program for “problem youth,” near Park City, Utah. Its glossy brochures promised a radical reversal of dysfunctional behavior – a fixed kid. I went to Oakley voluntarily, but others were taken from their homes by adult escorts and were unable to contact anyone. Twelve years after graduating, I experienced a post-traumatic attack as buried memories flooded to the surface – and this became the catalyst for the film. I began reaching out to classmates, eager to find connections to a shared experience. The deeper I looked, the more complicated the past became.The focus of the film is my confrontation with the trauma of being sent away for my depression. I reunite with four alumni for the first time in over a decade. Intimate character portraits are woven with VHS tape material, dream-like sequences of me skating in ice hockey gear; my parents, trauma specialists and experts in the field, and my own search for answers. As a filmmaker, I am not only interested in the inherent tension of acute trauma, but am equally concerned with its reverberations, which in my experience flow forward in a person’s timeline and often displace pieces of the past. Landscapes and sonic experiences are prominently featured to emphasize the physical and psychological remoteness of being cast away and the difficulty of reconciling the past with the present. Formal choices were made to visually prioritize and ask viewers to listen to graduates speak, while representation of the staff and former faculty of the school remained secondary. The editing concept was to layer the storytelling of the formal interview spaces with verite coverage and visual treatments of my own personal journey. The intent in interviewing my former peers was to piece together their perspectives and weave them into a tapestry that communicates the difficulty assimilating this experience into our adult lives. Some embrace it, while others deny it happened. Whitney, a Latinx dancer, whose self-destructive episodes landed her in four mental institutions; Denise, a young professional, whose severe anxiety stemmed from physical abuse; Karen, a Lakota woman and youth activist, removed from home for her own protection; “Lynn”, a lawyer, disguised in our interview, fearing the stigma of institutionalization could derail her career as an attorney. And me, Leslie a filmmaker, whose severe depression broke my adolescence into separate halves I am, through this film, struggling to reconcile.What distinguishes my film, is a personal look into the mental health of teens driven to the margins of the U.S education and medical system. My directorial approach is to create a storytelling space that inspires teens dealing with these issues to find recognition in the testimony of adults speaking full-voiced about a vulnerable, voiceless time.