Jim Carlyle’s wild college lifestyle in the Pacific Northwest contributes to his senior-year collapse, hospitalization, and bipolar diagnosis. Freewheeling, rock-music-loving, and literature-spouting Jim sinks into a stupor when his psychiatrist heavily medicates him to stop his mania. Alarmed at at her son’s condition, Ros Carlyle seeks solutions, and questions society’s quick diagnoses and overmedication of illnesses. Jim’s crisis turns the household topsy-turvy and shows viewers how mental illness challenges family relationships to the extreme. Love and mutual support, however, can eventually triumph and become the positive result of such ruptures and chaos. Click here for the synopsis

Families everywhere have a relative dealing with bipolar illness. This new feature film shares valuable and up-to-date information through a gripping story that contributes to meaningful progress in mental health care.

On every campus at which I have spoken, students described to me not only the pain and the hopelessness they felt from their psychiatric illnesses, but also the lack of understanding they felt from their professors and college administrators; the lack of adequate health insurance; their fears about being asked to go on medical leave and not being allowed to return to campus; and how aware they are that their behavior is frightening and disruptive to their roommates, and the guilt they feel and are made to feel as a result of this.

—Kay Redfield Jamison, from Nothing Was the Same

Break On Through deals with vital topics, such as the ways relationships in a family are affected by struggles with mental illness. This involves human problems everyone can identify with.

—Elizabeth Saenger, PhD, Psychiatry Department, Columbia University

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