The phrase “The personal is political” has been more than a mere slogan it has also served as a battle standard for feminism since the 1960s onwards. “Witches”, which she wrote and directed, Elizabeth Sankey is both personal and political in the most visceral sense. She illustrates, comments, and derides policy and cultural discussions regarding mothers and the resulting shame guilt women have because they are given the task of achieving the unattainable. Witches, strong and dangerous conceptions of actual women, conjured up by patriarchy, and also hyperbolic pictures of witches in movies, formulate a discourse of madness, which marks the fear of women’s power. Sankey’s thesis exposes the topic of the psychology of female characters from the individual to the group, from medicine to the metaphor, clinical to cultural. The kaleidoscope of archival clips is varying in not only structures but in depth as well, so it is often distracting. There is some reality in the political arguments presented. What you will find difficult to forget, however, is Sankey’s incredible story concerning her bout of post-partum psychosis, one on one with her.
“Do you expect to see this when you think of witches?” Sankey takes us by surprise while the famous clips from “The Craft,” “Practical Magic,” “The Witches of Eastwick,” and other cult music videos play in the background. Female sorcerers in films is an image that is fast to associate with messy hair which is an indicator of feminine imagery that is disheveled, whether it is chaos of a woman’s unwillingness to be subdued by society- in essence to patriarchy. Women so often are seen with happy endings giving up their power so slightly used a smile on their faces. In the still frame from the movie I married a witch, made in 1942, Veronica Lake on proudly declaring to off screen Fredric March says I set the blazing fire all by myself and needed no magic for doing it. Like the American sitcom Bewitched, which was based on I Married a Witch and is a loose sequel to it and the movie Bell Book and Candle from 1958, this again results in a surreal ending where a witch decides to love like a satisfactory husband.
Sankey’s son was born, and she started to experience the symptoms of a disordered thought process. One of them was the awful invasive apprehension that she would inflict harm to her child. She ended in a psychiatric hospital along with the child. According to step therapy, one of the most important components was bringing the babies with the mothers. At first, the babies are kept within sight all the time; as the children thrive, they are left alone with the babies and then allowed to return home for a couple of hours, and then for a night. This immediately promotes bonding but at the same time shows the mothers that they can take care of the babies and do not have to worry. This is supplemented by medications and counseling.
Sankey claims that talking to other mothers who went through the same experience as her was the most profound and life altering. One of the points that is emphasized through out the movie is the distinction between postpartum psychosis and general mental illness which shares some of the signs such as hallucination, delusions, paranoia, and obsessive concern. The hormonal fluctuations and fatigue intrinsic to new-age motherhood, may be the two primary reasons why postpartum psychosis manifests itself much more rapidly. Women also may take a longer time to seek help because of the perception that they will be labeled as irretrievably unfit and their babies will be removed from them. According to Sankey, the fear and embarrassment of having disordered thinking at the ‘supposed’ perfect postpartum or after-birth bonding time with your baby by society puts this situation into perspective.
Almost at the fingertips, one can grasp Sankey’s relish when she goes out to fetch the women who went through what she went through and had the support that she considers was instrumental to her recovery. These women are now, quite reassuringly, highly recovers and even encouragingly open about their experience; one of them, a psych stress postpartum mental disorder practitioner herself, told us that even when she, by herself, thought her thought was already disordered, the medical specialists argued with her. In as much as Sankey appreciates the effort made in the UK for these developments, especially after the rabidly advertised case of a mother who committed suicide after killing herself and her baby, she makes it obvious that there is an array of conversations to be had especially for women like the ones she interviews today that are advantageous and still creates room for more change.
In Sankey’s perspective, it is important to understand what psychosis revolves around, within the context of society’s expectations and restrictions. During the English witch trials which date back to the 15th-18th century, were barely fourteen minutes long, historians recount. So why do so many women claim to have ‘confessed’ to the different atrocities? She claims that these women suffered from a form of postpartum psychosis in order to make them believe that killing them was the only way to prevent the children from being harmed. Indeed, the intimate is political here as well, however, in the case of Nelson’s documentary, it is not so much the bevy of battles or the inventive theories revised about history that makes the case, but the very personal narrative.
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