SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS

VIEW OF THE MENTALLY ILL IN THEIR OWN WORDS Wednesday, January 28, 1987 By S.L. WYKES, Mercury News Staff Writer THE victims of mental illness exist most often as faceless people we read about in newspapers after they've done something insane. Lonny Shavelson gives flesh, blood and voice to these desperate human beings in his photography exhibit "I'm Not Crazy, I Just Lost My Glasses" at the de Saisset Museum of Santa Clara University. In an adjacent gallery, Mary Ellen Mark's portraits of women in a locked ward of a state mental hospital complete a sad package on broken hearts and minds.

Shavelson's portraits -- whose subjects chose their own settings -- are accompanied by a 30-minute cassette tape recording of his subjects telling their personal stories. The sound of a voice can be a powerful thing. Wade Fisher, for instance, appears in his photograph as a slender youth dressed in jeans and a stylish sweater. A shy smile bends his lips as he leans toward the camera with arms crossed over his chest. He was in graduate school when he began to believe people could hear his thoughts, he says. To read those words is mere repetition of a fear voiced by many of the mentally ill. To hear Fisher speak is another. His is a calm, gentle voice with a touch of anxiousness -- a human voice of great passion. Robert Fennell, on the other hand, gives a feisty, confident air to his speech about how, after years of political theorizing, he managed to combine communism with feminism. In his picture, he wears a "Born Again Lesbian" button and the wall behind him displays a "Hinckley for President/Jodie for Vice" poster. Most photographs of the mentally ill have been taken in mental hospitals -- an easy place to find such subjects. But Shavelson, an emergency room physician at Kaiser Hospital in Walnut Creek, knew that a large, in-between group existed that "nobody ever gets to see or hear from." He chose to photograph and record mentally ill people who live outside hospitals. His approach exposes the thin line between sanity and insanity. As noted by photography critic A.D. Coleman, in a forward to a book of Shavelson's photos, "(the book) brings alive and personalizes people who are all too often discussed as diagnoses, symptoms, types, statistics, patients, clients, units. I think it will be of great service to all those who need all the help they can get in rehumanizing those whom diagnostic jargon, mixed with societal anxieties, can easily make disappear." This joint exhibit is part of Santa Clara University's Institute on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. Six films, all relating to rights and freedoms in the Constitution, will be shown this winter. Two address the issues of mental illness and the homeless. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" will be shown on Thursday, Feb. 19, and Mark's documentary film about nine young Seattle street children, "Streetwise," will be shown on Thursday, Feb 26. Both films are free, open to the public and begin at 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium of the de Saisset. Lectures by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., theologian Michael Novak, political scientist James Q. Wilson, U.S. Rep. Peter Rodino Jr. from New Jersey and U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Mary Frances Berry also are planned. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays and from 1 to 5 p.m. on weekends. For more information on planned institute activities, call (408) 554-4443.

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