“When I first met Myriam Anouk,” the narrator shares near the start of Catherine Mullins’ remarkable new documentary "Saving Minds" (Bullfrog Films 2024), “she was coming to terms with her life after 10 years in the mental health system.”

That deceptively simple sentence turns out to refer to nine hospitalizations in Montréal’s mental health facilities, during which Myriam Anouk (her complete first name) is forced to take medication, told when to sleep and when to get up, and, to all appearances, incarcerated in a high-security jail. Held involuntarily in such a way, she confides, “you have no rights.”

What had happened to Myriam Anouk that such “treatment” could be considered appropriate, even an aid to healing and recovery? “Family was important to me,” she confides, “and my mother was my family.” When her mother—a charismatic Québécoise poet—passes, leaving behind her creative works and a legacy of more than 900 poetry readings, her grieving daughter becomes “deeply depressed. I was in mourning. I had no family.”

After such loss, Myriam Anouk entered a 9-month period of “intense sensations,” involving hours of walking, during which she began to hear voices. “At first I tried to rationalize them away,” she explains with customary precision and self-awareness, but soon there were five or six of them talking at the same time, and they were “very invasive.”

“You’re walking down the street, and someone calls out, ‘Myriam! Myriam Anouk!’ I’d turn around, but no one was there.”

The hospital gardens in which "Saving Minds" opens is a place of sanctuary and calm in a setting clearly lacking both: “The few times I came here,” she explains, “I was accompanied by an attendant … in search of an oasis, freedom of sorts, that I didn’t have inside.” Back under involuntary care, she is made “a prisoner again.”

As Saving Minds revisits what happened to Myriam Anouk, including how........

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