Authors: Margaret Helfgott
The fact is that David’s illness exists completely independent of his environment. Although modern medicine has yet to determine
precisely what causes such biological disorders, we do know that they commonly begin to manifest themselves in adolescence
and then gradually develop, as happened in David’s case. Often it develops so gradually that the family and even the person
with the disease may not realize anything is wrong for a long period of time. Or sometimes, as in our case, relatives sense
something is wrong, but have no idea as to its seriousness until an acute episode is experienced. Certainly, for me, it has
been extremely painful to watch the personality changes that David has slowly undergone since he was a young teenager.
Dr. David Leonard, the director of psychiatry at Frankston Hospital in Victoria, Australia, is an expert on this disorder.
He explains: “People with schizo-affective disorder will have both the symptoms of schizophrenia, and also the symptoms of
bipolar disorder (manic depression). They may have manic episodes when they become extremely overactive, experience feelings
of elation, and develop grandiose views of themselves. At other times the reverse may be the case and they will suffer severe
depression. They will be profoundly unhappy, slowed up in their movements and unable to act … At other times they may believe
themselves persecuted victims of complex conspiracies, a belief that may be confirmed by the presence of tormenting auditory
hallucinations. These presentations are called paranoid and may be consistent with a capacity to continue to function reasonably
in some spheres of their lives despite their delusions.”
Yet the stigmas attached to mental illness are still largely rooted in society. Members of a patient’s family can easily feel
in some way to blame, or guilty about finding it hard to cope. These myths are put across with so much energy and power in
Shine
that almost without exception the critics got it wrong, blaming my brother’s illness on my father’s alleged brutality. And
in doing so, since they were under the impression that
Shine
was essentially based on fact, they naturally made no distinction between the fictional Helfgotts and the real Helfgotts.
I had the pleasure of reading in various newspapers in the United States and elsewhere that David’s mind “snapped because
of intense performance pressure from his demanding, overprotective father”; that his “emotional torment under a domineering
father led to schizophrenia”; that “after the way Peter Helfgott treats his son, it’s no wonder David ended up as a nervous
wreck … with mental problems.” Yes, here he was, the “Holocaust Survivor … [who] relentlessly pushed his talented pianist
son to the brink of insanity.” The speculation about Peter Helfgott’s ability to cause chemical imbalances in the brain was
occasionally so preposterous as to be laughable. One newspaper in Scotland didn’t just blame the “stress which clearly existed
between Peter and his son” for “David’s mental illness” but even suggested that my father was “a hardline Stalinist” and this
might have something to do with it.
Some papers got it spectacularly wrong. For example, the London
Sunday Times
said: “Despite the formidable task of being about two subjects—mental illness and music—that the cinema gets wrong on an
almost annual basis,
Shine
gets both right.” It was when the publicity surrounding
Shine
started spreading beyond Australia that many medical organizations felt the need to speak out in an attempt to counteract
its harmful myth-making.
Dr. Margaret Leggatt, president of the World Schizophrenia Fellowship, and Barbara Hocking, executive director of SANE (the
Schizophrenic Association of Australia), together began writing letters to newspapers; SANE urged its sister organizations,
NAMI (the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill) in the United States and SANE in the United Kingdom, to do likewise.
“It is time that the myth of bad parenting or family arguments causing mental illness is put to rest,” they wrote in letters
published in November 1996 in
The Australian
and in
The (Melbourne) Age
(which had written that David “was battered psychologically by his father to the point of breakdown”). Leggatt and Hocking
continued: “David Helfgott’s story has made public the plight of 180,000 families where someone will have a schizophrenic
illness. What a pity that the filmmakers chose to make David’s father the villain of the piece…. If family members are portrayed
by filmmakers in cruel and fictitious scenarios, the blame will continue. Fictionalization in films such as Shine which are
perceived by the community as true does matter. It is inaccurate and unjust.” (Much to the amazement of Margaret Leggatt and
Barbara Hocking, Gillian went on a well-known Australian radio program,
Family Matters
, and said they had no right to write to newspapers about her husband’s illness and this was none of their concern.)
Shines actors have also, perhaps unwittingly, perpetuated the myth of the film they had starred in. Geoffrey Rush—who won
the Oscar for Best Actor for his role as David—told journalists: “This film is about how easily you can f**Uk up your kids.”
Armin Mueller-Stahl—whose role as my father also won him an Oscar nomination—said: “Peter pushes his son to be a great pianist.
Because he’s a very strong person, a true survivor, he pushes far too hard, which ultimately destroys David.”
SANE became so perturbed by the way these myths were being spread by the hype surrounding
Shine
that it issued a special briefing on the movie: “The film’s portrayal of David’s father had rekindled the untrue, inaccurate,
and destructive myth that parental and family behaviour caused psychotic mental illnesses such as schizo-affective disorder.”
Barbara Hocking said: “This concerns us very much in the mental health field as irresponsible comments by public figures [such
as Rush and Mueller-Stahl] further reinforce the preexisting misconceptions. Scientific opinion accepts that psychotic illness
does not develop unless there is an underlying biological predisposition.
“Scenes in
Shine
,’ she continued, “such as the one in David’s London apartment, implying that the father’s alleged rejection of David by returning
his letters led him to overdose on medication, and the one in which it is stated that David’s character is not really ill
but is in hospital because he has nowhere to go, make our work much harder. It is irresponsible to suggest that someone would
have been hospitalized and medicated just because he had nowhere else to go.”
The medical inaccuracies in
Shine
have created such a stir that psychiatrists have even written papers in order to set the record straight. Under the title
“Schizophrenia, Schizo-affective Disorders and Shine,’ Dr. David Leonard of the Frankston Hospital wrote:
“A film, of course, is never reality. But Geoffrey Rush’s presentation of David Helfgott in
Shine
looks a lot like a disorganized presentation of schizophrenia. The character in the film has the typical jumbled thoughts,
wildly inappropriate emotional responses, and lack of social judgment characteristic of the disorder. Fortunately for him,
it all translates into a lovable zaniness that everyone finds appealing … It is a pity that the film chooses to seek out a
villain in David Helfgott’s father as the cause of the disorder. We do not know what causes schizophrenia, or similar disorders,
but it seems quite clear that it is not a result of faulty upbringing. To blame a family for the illness is to double their
pain. Not only must they bear the loss of their often promising and delightful children to this merciless illness, but they
stand accused by others and by themselves of being the cause of the catastrophe. Families who have been touched by schizophrenia
stand in need of our utmost kindness, support, and compassion, instead of such cruelty.”
There was growing disquiet on the other side of the world, too. On January 11, 1997, the prestigious
British Medical Journal
published an article by Dr. Simon Wessely, from the department of psychology at King’s College School of Medicine in London,
entirely devoted to
Shine.
Under the title “Medicine and the Media—Mental Illness as Metaphor, Yet Again,” Dr. Wessely wrote: “
Shine
repeats the error … that mental illness must have both a meaning and a cause. The roots of David’s breakdown are laid firmly
at the door of his father. The script comes straight out of those 1960s books on the schizophrenogenic family, replete with
double binds, harsh discipline, overprotection, excessive love, and impossible expectations … a version of reality that is
both inaccurate and patronizing.”
American medical experts were also coming forward in an attempt to expose the myth. Patricia Backlar, senior scholar at the
Center for Ethics in Health Care at Oregon Health Sciences University and author of the book
The Family Face of Schizophrenia
, wrote an opinion piece on
Shine
for the
Oregonian
of Portland, Oregon, on March 29, 1997. She said that if she had not known better, she “would believe that [Helfgott’s] father
had caused his son to become seriously mentally disordered.” She felt that inherent within this film was “the evil implication
that the father was powerful enough to cause his son to become seriously mentally disordered.”
In a lengthy letter to the
New York Times
published on March 15, 1997, and entitled “
Shine
Depicts False View of Mental Illness,” Dr. Kenneth Paul Rosenberg wrote: “… the most egregious misinformation in the film
is the attribution of David’s nervous breakdown to the cruelty of his father. Since cinema began, mental illness has been
attributed to heartless parents. Most such films were produced during the middle of the century, when the idea was advanced
by mental health professionals, particularly by psychoanalysts who saw the ‘schizophrenogenic mother’ as the evil root of
all mental illness. Today we recognize that such theories added outrageous insult to severe injury.”
He continues: “I worry about the impact of the film on the millions of individuals and families dealing with major mental
illness.
Shine.
seems to continue a tradition of blaming parents for mental illnesses that rob their children of meaningful lives—illness
that, to the best of our understanding, defies the logic of searching for human villains.”
Another letter about
Shine
to the
New York Times
(March 30, 1997), printed under the headline “An Illness Rooted in Biology, Not Abuse,” by Dr. Jonathan Segal of California,
stated: “It is not appropriate to link David Helfgott’s illness directly to … Peter Helfgott’s terror … schizophrenia has
strong biological roots … Most schizophrenics don’t come from abusive homes, and most children in abusive homes don’t develop
schizophrenia.” At least the message about schizophrenia was getting through, even if not the truth about my gentle father.
This is not just an issue for the Helfgott family. Honest discussion of mental illness remains taboo in many circles, and
many people may not realize the extent to which it affects society. In Australia, around 20 percent of the population (3.5
million people) are affected by some form of mental illness at some time during their lives. In Britain, an estimated seven
million people suffer from mental illness. According to the Schizophrenia Society of Canada, 250,000 Canadians will suffer
from schizophrenia at some point in their lives. In the United States, too, about 1 percent of the population suffers from
schizophrenia (according to research at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore).
Nor is David alone among pianists. The celebrated British pianist John Ogden was engaged in a lifelong struggle against mental
imbalance. Vladimir Horowitz—to whom David had been compared by his professor in London, Cyril Smith—was unable to perform
for twelve years after suffering a nervous breakdown in 1953, at the age of forty-eight. Afterward, Horowitz, one of this
century’s greatest pianists, did resume his career but at a greatly diminished pace. And the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould
had to give up live public performance at the age of thirty-two. (Gould would talk and sing to himself while playing, in a
manner not unlike David’s behavior in the last few years.)
Even
Shines
favorite musician, Rachmaninoff, himself suffered a nervous breakdown in 1897 and did not compose for several years until
a prominent physician, Dr. Nikolai Dahl, used hypnosis and autosuggestion to bring him out of his despair. (To the best of
my knowledge no one has made up a film about Rachmaninoff’s father beating him into illness.)
Unfortunately, in spite of all this, the vast majority of newspaper commentary on
Shine
swallowed Hicks’s version. Only a small minority of writers understood the games he was playing. One of these, Peter Rainer
of the
New York Times
, hit the nail on the head when he said that
Shine
blames Peter Helfgott because “physiology doesn’t play as well as Freud.” Unfortunately, in making the kind of film he has
created, Hicks was not just hurting the Helfgott family but seriously misleading the public and affecting millions of those
touched by mental illness across the world.
H
e came, he played, he conquered.” Thus began the review in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
of one of David’s concerts on his 1997 world tour. It was about the only good review my poor brother got. In Australia, his
concert was compared to “a freak show.” In New Zealand, one critic said: “A Helfgott performance is like Beethoven on Prozac.”
In America, David’s playing was described as “shapeless and utterly incoherent.” A British newspaper said: “It was like watching
a Muppet give a recital.” His recital was “an exaggerated clatter,” said another.
To coincide with the release of
Shine
in Australia, a concert tour was arranged for David. The whole Helfgott family, myself included, attended the first concert,
a sellout performance at the Perth Concert Hall on August 31, 1996. When it became apparent that
Shine
would become a worldwide success, a lucrative world tour was hastily arranged, beginning in New Zealand in February 1997
and then taking David to some of the world’s most distinguished musical venues.