Erik Ewers, co-director of the new Ken Burns documentary “Hiding in Plain Sight: Youth Mental Illness,” had an epiphany while he was filming.
It was about his own mental health, which he and his parents had the foresight to address when he was a kid — a relative rarity in that era; Ewers is 53. He said his parents used to drive him an hour or so each way to see a psychiatrist, where he learned to name some of his feelings and fears and stop blaming himself for most of them.
But then he’d go home.
“And without my father or my mother changing, I was pigeonholed back into that same kid again and again,” he said. “And I suffered long-term consequences.”
It occurred to him while he was listening to the 23 young people whose stories are woven throughout the documentary — really listening to them. In how many spaces do young people actually feel heard? Believed? Validated?
He felt listened to and known inside the psychiatrist’s office, but not in the moments outside of it. And that wasn’t enough to heal.
“I was not allowed a voice growing up,” he said. “I was not allowed an opinion. I was not allowed to be my own person, and that can be hugely damaging as a teenager trying to find your voice and your place. And I instinctively did that to my kids to some degree. And to my wife.”
Filming the documentary was his invitation to continue the work he started as a kid. To find and use a different way to love his family. He calls the work “brutal” but worth it. He hopes the film invites a similar reckoning — or other recognizing — for anyone who watches it.
“Hiding in Plain Sight,” a two-part, four-hour film, is available on pbs.org and Amazon Prime. It uses first-person accounts to look at mental disorders, the systems we have in place to identify and treat them, the stigma surrounding them and the people impacted by them.
I can’t imagine a more urgent topic, as we grapple with the latest round of gun violence — now the leading cause of death for children and teens in America. As we watch the Supreme Court roll back reproductive rights and hamper efforts to slow climate change. As we remain bitterly divided over the obvious results of a free and fair presidential election from two years prior.
Our kids are watching it all, wondering how and where to invest their time, their hearts, their heads. Wondering where, if any place, they’re safe.
Ewers, his crew and the film’s stars were invited to screen excerpts from the documentary for policymakers at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center and the White House at the end of June. First lady Jill Biden attended the White House screening and tweeted about it afterward: “I am in awe of these young Americans who so bravely shared their mental health journeys in @KenBurns’ new @PBS documentary, Hiding In Plain Sight. I had the honor of meeting many of them a few weeks ago, and I hope their courageous stories will help others, too.”
Ewers is hoping schools around the nation will add the documentary to their curriculum.
“Even if kids see small clips, a 10-minute section, they can say, ‘Oh wow, I can talk about that,’” Ewers said. “Or if they don’t talk about it, they might listen to ways they can help themselves or their friends or their sibling.”
I asked Ewers if he thought his childhood home was a metaphor for our nation. If we’re teaching kids to open up and name their feelings and fears and admit they need help, but then we’re not doing our part to change the climate and culture around them. Maybe America’s the mom and dad that fail to change our ways.
Maybe, Ewers said. But young people don’t seem all that interested in waiting for the rest of us to catch up, he said. They’re pretty set on changing the world with or without us.
“Younger people are more outspoken, more empathetic, more accommodating on mental illness,” he said. “We haven’t had the voice of the people demanding better attention for mental health, because it was too buried in stigma and shame before.”
I think that’s a great point.
It also reminds me of a quote I love, which I first heard from Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley: “The people closest to the pain should be closest to the power.”
