Resilience: The Biology Of Stress & The Science Of Hope Review

Certificate –12A

Director – James Redford

Running Time – 60 minutes (1 hour)

★★★★✩

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 As a dyslexic, I know of James Redford (son of Robert Redford) work with his documentary The Big Picture: Rethinking Dyslexia and annoying I still haven’t seen it. So when I heard about Redford releasing a new documentary, I was interested as it was dealing with another important subject – mental health and stress.

Resilience: The Biology of Stress & The Science of Hope focuses on a study known as Adverse Childhood Experiences (or ACEs for short) and how this new movement can prevent Toxic Stress – which is linked to heart disease, cancer, drug abuse and depression.

After being shown at last year’s Sundance Festival, this documentary is coming out at the right time thanks to more people talking about their mental issues, like Prince Harry.

It is important for people (especially the Health Minister, the whole NHS etc) to watch this as there’ll be a lot of similarities between America and ourselves about this issue.

The film focuses on the ACEs study from its beginnings in 1998 when Drs. Robert Anda and Vincent Felitti worked together to publish a study on how traumatic stress experiences in childhood can impact you for the rest of you lives. To now with expects from doctors to teachers using this in selected parts of the United States.

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It features a lot of talking heads from these fields and with the added scientific talk and stats could be overwhelming for some people, it is helpful (though shocking) this is happening to everyone especially kids.

However, Redford and producer-writer-editor Karen Pritzker never focus on the negative or political side even when they reveal only 5% of the trillion-plus dollars the US spent on healthcare goes towards mental health. These stats could easily match the UK.

Instead, they focus on the positives and all the fantastic work these individuals putting the ACEs study into practical ways to treating people and kids with Toxic Stress. One awesome woman is Dr Nadine Burke Harris, a doctor who works in the final poor area of San Francisco.

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She does a great job explaining these complex ideas into understandable sound bites and why it isn’t simply as diagnose kids with ADHD and why more needs to be done to help kids.

Elsewhere, we go to a kindergarten (primary school) in New Haven, Connecticut and we see heartbreaking footage of therapists working on a program to help these kids talk about their issues and problems and teach them it’s not right for someone to hurt them or teach them inappropriately.

There’s no way you can’t weep when you see images of letters from these kids writing to their imaginary confident.

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Finally, the film is shot like all documentaries, but what helps is the animation to focus on key points and the editing was effective as I cried as a couple of times. Yet it feels it wanted to tell more and the hour run-time wasn’t enough so maybe 90 minutes would’ve been perfect.

However, this will fit perfectly on BBC Two or Netflix as it should be watched by everyone.

Verdict

A fascinating insight yet heartbreaking, but shows more needs to be done and hopefully this is the beginning of something major in the field of mental health.