Narrating the Housing Crisis: Madness & Homelessness in Documentaries

Tim Martin:
So this slippery terrain is that flipping of the narrative or is naming that dynamic of saying, rather than take responsibility for it, we've let homelessness slip into or be equated with madness.

Joeita Gupta:
I'm Joeita Gupta, and this is The Pulse. The stereotype that many homeless people also have mental health diagnoses is so entrenched that most people don't even question it. This idea also crops up in several modern films about homelessness. In documentaries especially, there is a tendency to seemingly conflate homelessness with madness. The onscreen depiction of homelessness helps in this way to create a distinction between the homeless and those in the middle class. This portrayal is neither accidental nor innocent. It stems from the logic that homelessness is a result of madness rather than societal factors. And if, sorry. And if homelessness is perceived as an individual biochemical problem, then there are far-reaching consequences for the solutions put forward. Today we discuss the depiction of homelessness in documentaries. It's time to put your finger on the pulse.
Hello and welcome to The Pulse on AMI-audio. I'm Joeita Gupta. Today we're talking about homelessness and how homelessness is depicted in documentaries. For those of you who are visually impaired or blind as I am, I just wanted to describe the background. I am brown-skinned, and I have dark hair, which is pulled back in a bun. I am wearing a gray sweater. It's a crop-neck sweater. And you might be able to see from my left ear one headphone, which is where I'm getting my screen reader. And that's how that's been piped through. I'm sitting against a white background today, but that's the description portion of it. I just wanted to make sure we're all on the same page and I love to know what people are wearing. So now you know what I'm wearing, but my guest today is Tim Martin. Tim Martin's article Narrating the Housing Crisis: Encountering Madness, Homelessness and Neoliberal Logic was recently published in the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies. Tim, hello and welcome to the program. It's great to have you.

Tim Martin:
It's really great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Joeita Gupta:
Before we dig into your article, I wanted to ask you a little bit about some key concepts. You talk a little bit about a neoliberal logic that has governed some of the portrayals of homelessness. What do you mean by this neoliberal logic?

Tim Martin:
Yeah, so I think when people hear the word neoliberal or neoliberalism, people say, they associate it with the free market and they say, Oh, let the market correct itself. And they think of neoliberalism in those terms. And there's a lot of really compelling work now and in the past number of years that situates neoliberalism also as a rationality. I talk about neoliberal rationality, a way of thinking. So what happens when we look at the rise of neoliberalism, when we look at the 1980s to today, it also is embedded in a thinking that sees everyone as individuals. And a lot of people go back to Margaret Thatcher. There is no such thing as society. There is no collective, the end of this notion of collective care.
So this way of thinking suggests then that we are all responsible just for our own lot and we have to figure it out ourselves. And if anything is a problem, if there's a problem with us, it's because we haven't been trying hard enough, pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps well enough. And that's a tip of the iceberg way of situating that neoliberal rationality. And there are all kinds of writers talking about how the implications of that and social policy and education and what have you. But yeah.

Joeita Gupta:
And you are one of them. But the other key concept that you talk about is a critical Mad Studies framework. Can you bring us up to speed about what that is?

Tim Martin:
Yeah. So I touch on a small view theorists and thinkers that help me situate my critique. I think that broadly Mad Studies is in the work of questioning the psychiatric-centred outlook on what we term mental illness or psychiatric illness. And it's questioning these regimes of power that say solutions can only be found in the work of diagnosing and fixing the "Mad Citizen," or the mad individual. And so the Critical Mad Studies framework that I use is drawn on, in part anyways, is drawn on a study that was in itself a work of collective care. It was done by the Wellesley Institute and it was a participatory action research study that included voices of mad individuals, folks with lived experience of homelessness, or being de-housed, as some of us would say, by the state and being abandoned by the state. And it was done also with mad studies researchers and academics. But it was this collective work of critiquing, psy-centred ways of thinking, psychiatric-centred ways of thinking and diagnosing and individualizing and isolating individuals. And so that's where I lodge my critical mad studies approach is there as well as elsewhere. Yeah.

Joeita Gupta:
And so what got you thinking about the documentary film genre and its handling of the homeless population and some of the issues surrounding why people end up being homeless?

Tim Martin:
Yeah, a really circuitous route. I am not a filmmaker, I enjoy films. I, part way through my PhD, I did an entire 180 where I changed everything I was doing. And part of the reason for that was a lifelong or for many, many years being involved in community work alongside marginalized folks, street-involved folks, but also constantly thinking about how these topics were being arranged or presented or portrayed in the media and being frustrated by that. And then in particular, one of the things, this might seem a bit out of left field, but one of the things that motivated this particular study and how I went about it was I attended this panel discussion a couple years back and there was this discussion, it was with a lot of folks who were involved in organizing in Toronto, folks from Ontario Council Coalition Against Poverty and those Shelter Housing and Justice Network and so on.
And one of the questions, someone asked a question during the Q&A and they said, What about housing first? Isn't there this thing now everyone's talking about, and we're housing people, we're going away from this archaic linear model of housing, which I talk about in the paper. And is this just another piece of the neoliberal puzzle? Is it being critiqued or is it as good as it sounds kind of thing? And so the answer was, this is an imperfect solution, it is problematic, and no one's really talking about it, or no one's really talking about some of the problems that come out of this housing first, so-called housing first model where we're fixing homelessness and we're supposedly putting everyone in homes now.
And so that was one of the pieces of the puzzle that when I wanted to look at film and when I wanted to look at these portrayals, I specifically tried to find it, especially in the Canadian example that I use, an example where we were lading and in an unquestioning way, this perfect solution that we now apparently have, even though many of us know that the housing crisis is only ever been worse for 40 years. So that was how I found myself there.

Joeita Gupta:
And so what are some of the documentaries that you're looking at and how do those documentaries take up homelessness specifically?

Tim Martin:
Yeah. So I mainly look at two, I guess, I reference a number, but I look at, there's the example from the states is by a filmmaker, James Burns, who did a short film on the crisis of mental health, mental illness as it's termed, but also associated with the housing crisis in Arizona, in a small county in Arizona. And then I couple that with what seems like a very banal short, almost newsy piece from CTV around housing first and around housing crisis in Toronto. And I wanted to do that, I wanted to offer a Canadian example obviously, but I also wanted to pick something that just is, other people have said this is not even, it's not like this is going to win a documentary film award. This is just a really basic news film video piece.
And my point is exactly, this is just the most basic, this is the stuff that's constantly coming out of whether it's CTV or wherever, where you get your daily fix of film-based media concerning homelessness. This is classic. So I just picked something that was as run-of-the-mill as possible in a way, but I made sure that it touched on some of these central issues. And it touched on housing first and it attempted to capture the "voice" of those with lived experience. And that was one of my parameters for both films. So for James Burns' film and for the CTV film, they attempt to narrate for and with those lived experiences of homelessness.

Joeita Gupta:
Tim, you're reading my mind because I was about to ask you about who it is that we're actually hearing from in the documentaries that you've examined. Are we mostly hearing from the homeless population itself, or is it social workers and the police who are getting to narrate the experience of homelessness through their specific experience of it?

Tim Martin:
Yeah, it's a great question and some great points. It's a mix. And what's interesting about the James Burns piece is that there isn't, or say there's a lot less of this kind of overarching narration where he's attempting to say, this is what I want you to get out of this film, or this is what is your takeaway. But he's interviewing a lot of different pieces of the puzzle. He's interviewing folks deeply embedded in this carceral system of prisons and carceral psychiatry and traditional forms of discipline and policing. But he is also interviewing peer workers. He's also interviewing folks with lived experience. There's one man in particular, Armando, who is the central figure of the film who is currently, or at least at the time, is unhoused. And he takes up a good portion of the film talking with him and letting him speak for himself.
So it's interesting in that way that he's trying to, without too much editorializing offer these different perspectives. And then the CTV piece, as you can imagine, is very narrated, very heavily mediated through the voice of a narrator. So yes, they interview, and then again, this is just classic. So they interview Merrick who has lived experience of homelessness, but it's very heavily narrated. And his reality is presented in many ways that I get into in the paper. But both are attempting to offer these different angles, I guess.

Joeita Gupta:
One of the phrases that you include in the paper that really jumps off the page, at least it did to me, was you said that there's a slippery terrain between homelessness and madness. Can you expand on that for us as well?

Tim Martin:
Yeah. So, geez, I wish I had the paper in front of me. It's a great question. I think that one of the main points that has led me into what I'm writing my dissertation on and my writing more generally, my thinking more generally, is that we often are saying, you touched on this in your really well-written introduction, you somehow captured it all in 30 seconds. But is when we talk about the homeless, the people on the street, what we have this societal expectation that this lack of productivity, this lack of capitalist involvement, this unemployability or whatever it is, well it's because they're mentally ill, it's because that they have these psychiatric problems. And so the neoliberal expectation is if only we could allow them to, if we could diagnose them properly, we could label them properly, then we could fix them, then they would be good members of capitalist society, they would be good contributors.
As opposed to a narrative that says, when we allow people to be de-housed, when we set up in policy and we gut our social assistance dollars and so on, we set up a situation that is traumatizing, we set up a situation that is deeply violent and results in, yes, all kinds of levels of social and emotional and psychiatric distress. These are distressed people. And being de-housed, being evicted, being isolated in these ways is a deeply traumatizing experience as we can all imagine. But rooting it in that way suggests that we are all at fault, suggest that it's something that we have actually voted for. It's something that we have promoted and supported in policy, and that ultimately, as members of this society, we are deeply, unfortunately, deeply guilty of and need to take responsibility for each of us.
And so this slippery terrain is that flipping of the narrative, or is naming that dynamic of saying, rather than take responsibility for it, we've let homelessness slip into, or be equated with madness, or vice versa, whatever, in whichever way it happens. And we've let that be now it's not our fault, now it's their fault. It's this shrugging off of the responsibility. Actually, I should say too before I forget while I'm on that is the original title of the piece was actually going to be a quote from Derek Seawood who's a peer worker in the James Burns piece where he says, "We are all at fault." And so my original title, and this got worked out in through the peer review process and whatever, but was we are all at fault. It was the original title of the piece. Yeah.

Joeita Gupta:
That's very profound. It almost seems like by relying on psychiatric labels, we're using the psychiatric label as a shortcut or a way not to have to think about the systemic causes of homelessness. I wanted to ask you about one specific interaction that I think a lot of us have witnessed, and that is the interaction between the homeless population and the police. In the documentaries that you are looking at, how do they treat that relationship? Do they do that relationship justice in terms of representing it accurately? Do they paint an overly glossy picture, or do the documentaries you look at actually need to be more critical in terms of examining the relationship between the homeless population and the police?

Tim Martin:
That's a great question. I would say the CTV piece, it's safe to say no, they don't deal with that in any meaningful way. I think that, and I say this in the paper, is that what is posed as the solution is very simply that this person, Merrick Roblowski, he was given a diagnosis and he accepted the diagnosis, he was given it, he accepted it, and therefore he could be fixed. And that was it. And before that, yeah, he's positioned as irresponsible, perhaps dangerous or at least dangerous to himself. And there's a quote that I use in the piece that's the mad bad and dangerousness stereotype, and that comes out of some earlier mad studies literature. But the James Burns piece is interesting in that way.
I think it's the deputy sheriff or whatever of Cochise County, Arizona, is interviewed in the film and he clearly is sympathetic, or he clearly has compassion. But again, unfortunately, it's rooted in these neoliberal expectations that we've all been conditioned by. It's not like it's everywhere. And yet at the same time there's this questioning of who is dangerous and who is at risk of danger. And there's this moment where Armando, who is unhoused, is evicted, or yet again prevented from accessing a safe place to sleep for the night. And they show this in the film and he is forced to then say, and he says this to the camera, I'm going to go find a back alley, but a safer place as I can find, and I forget the exact line, but what is highlighted there and what is true in the research and in literature is that who is at most risk of being in a dangerous situation is Armando as opposed to... And that is implicit in the film, I would say. Again, it's not heavily narrated.
So the narrator doesn't step in and say, here are the statistics on how at risk this population is. But what they're suggesting to the viewer, I would argue, is that here is a case where rather than say the housed citizens, folks like me are at risk of these dangerous, mad people roaming our streets, it's saying now here's a case where someone is dealing with de-housing and they're in a very precarious situation, they're in a very dangerous situation. And the research definitively shows that, that is the case and that Armando is the one at risk right now as opposed to the other way around. So they do show that.

Joeita Gupta:
We just have a minute or so left. And in that minute, I'd like to ask you how you'd like to see documentary films evolve in terms of their portrayal of homelessness and whether you'd like to see them in fact move away from the conflation of homelessness and madness?

Tim Martin:
Yeah. I touch on that in the conclusion and I try to suggest that there's perhaps not a way to create the Mad Studies version and documentary, because the point is that we're allowing people to narrate for themselves. So there's lots of folks that don't take on this label of madness or the politically charged individuals that want to disrupt conventional notions of the psychiatric regime, et cetera. There's lots of folks that, and it comes out in the Wellesley Institute study that I cite that there are folks that say, my medication helped me and my diagnosis helped me in such and such a way. The point is that what needs to happen are documentaries that really listen to people and really allow people with lived experience to speak and to guide the conversation. And maybe more than one, both of those films are examples that choose one subject, which could be okay, but again...
And then the other a flip side to that is I reference a film, an older film called Shelter from the Storm. And Shelter from the Storm came out of Tent City in Toronto 20 years ago. And what it does that I find interesting is it situates, rather it doesn't situate, it just interviews people. And I know for a fact there are folks in the film with lived experience and those that are housing activists and otherwise, and that there's not this sense of division or narration that says, okay, now I'm talking to a non-productive citizen. Now I'm talking to an unhoused citizen, or now I'm talking to someone with a steady job. But rather letting citizens speak for themselves and not buying into this division of having to name and label people. But I think filmmakers need to be modelling this, that we're in dialogue, all of us in dialogue as citizens together, we're all part of this messy public that is politically and socially responsible to one another and needs to care for one another. So, filmmakers I think have an opportunity to model that in their documentaries.

Joeita Gupta:
Tim, we'll have to leave it there. Thank you so much for speaking to me today.

Tim Martin:
Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Joeita Gupta:
Tim Martin recently published an article in the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, which is about narrating the housing crisis. That's all the time we have for today. If you have any feedback for us, you can always write to feedback@ami.ca or find us on Twitter at AMI-audio, use the hashtag PulseAMI. You're also welcome to subscribe to the podcast or subscribe to the YouTube channel where you are also free to leave a comment. And, of course, you'll also be notified about future YouTube videos if you are able to subscribe. Our technical producer is Marc Aflalo. Our videographers today are Ted Cooper and Matthew McGurk. And Andy Frank is the manager of AMI-audio. I've been your host, Joeita Gupta. Thanks for listening.