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women who were pregnant in mental hospitals. There was one woman I knew who was convinced they were going to give her electroconvulsive shock treatment while she was pregnant. I kind of doubt that's possible, but I really wouldn't put it past a psychiatrist. I don't have any confidence in psychiatrists anymorenot a single one of them. They're almost all of them drug pushers. Right now, I'm in a situation where I take the antipsychotic drugs and they do a blood test every two weeks and see if I've got it in me. That's all they want to know.
MacDonald:
But they would want you to take it, ideally, every day?
Robertson:
Every day and twice the dosage I'm taking.
MacDonald:
When you're on it, is it more difficult to make a film? Or is it just a different kind of film you're making?
Robertson:
I don't think I take as many pictures on lithium. I think my mind kind of closes down. What would have happened if van Gogh had taken lithium? They would have prescribed it for him. They probably would have prescribed Thorazine for van Gogh, too. They like to make people take a "chemical stew." I don't think he would have taken it. I think he would have had the same problem a lot of mental patients do: they just want to be off all their drugs. There's no one to talk to about it except the doctors, who say, "Take the drug; that's all you need." The patients have no way out.
Sometimes, the act of taking a picture every day has kept me sane. I believe in it. I have to take a picture every day. It's true with tapes, too, though diary tapes don't help as muchexcept when I started sending tapes to Tom Baker,
that
helped (I began in spring of 1986). There was a crisis one winter, when I was so depressed and so agonized because my family kept staring at me. I was the nut in the family and had to be carefully monitored, and I had no friends because the friends had left me because of the mental breakdowns and subsequent depressions. The only thing I could talk about was my films, and they just didn't want to hear about it. I found myself becoming autistic. If my mother said something to me, I'd stammer, and I wouldn't be able to say anything. The only thing that kept me going was taping for Tom every day. I gradually began to be able to talk again. And I still talk to him more than to any other human being. I talk on tape and I'm normal. I have to
lie
to my shrink.
I have to work part-time in order to make my mother think I'm sane. I can't talk to the people I work with. The last few jobs I've had have been extremely paranoid-building. I have hassles as soon as I emerge from a depression and try to pick up the real world again. A lot of people are crazy out there in the nine-to-five world, but they lay it onto me and say
I'm
the crazy one.