These days children and youth easily get into depression, frustration, complexes etc due to which they sometimes they get involved into activities which the are not supposed to do, such as drug addiction and sometimes in more serious cases they often get suicidal and try to take away their own life. For such reasons parents of the children indecisively send their children to mental asylums or mental hospitals thinking that this is the only solution left for them to save and change their child’s life. Sick is a film about the mental health institutionalization of youth. It was completed as part of the social justice program at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It explores mental health institutions in the context of Erving Goffman’s ‘Total institution’ and looks at parallels between the institutionalization of youth in mental hospitals and the prison system. One part historical, one part sociological, one part personal – former patients share their experiences. Based on personal experience, we asked as our premise – if you are sending someone somewhere to get healthy, why would you send them to a prison? In this film we offer a critical look at the institutionalization of minors.
