Car­ol Quash

Kwame Em­manuel Boatswain was di­ag­nosed with bipo­lar dis­or­der at the age of 24, but that didn’t stop him from pur­su­ing a BA in Film Stud­ies and Film Pro­duc­tion at The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI), St Au­gus­tine cam­pus.

The decade it took him to com­plete his de­gree was filled with chal­lenges, but dur­ing that time, he man­aged to merge his pas­sion for film with his grow­ing in­ter­est in re­search­ing men­tal ill­ness. That jour­ney is now the sub­ject of his new film, Why My De­gree Took a Decade.

Fol­low­ing his grad­u­a­tion, Boatswain shared a post on his Face­book page on No­vem­ber 7 that read:

“Did your de­gree re­al­ly take a decade?

Yes. How? Well boy… lol, fun­ny sto­ry.

Be­ing deemed med­ical­ly un­fit to go to class for a year by your psy­chi­a­trist af­ter two con­sec­u­tive ner­vous break­downs that took place dur­ing your first breakup could move a three-year pro­gramme to five years…”

And that was just one of the many hur­dles he faced on his jour­ney through uni­ver­si­ty life.

Boatswain told HE he used his fi­nal week of grad­u­a­tion as the film’s main plot point — “be­cause I fi­nal­ly grad­u­at­ed.”

“Now I have to go get in­ter­views,” he said. “Af­ter pub­lish­ing my ‘ar­ti­cle’ on Face­book, peo­ple came for­ward say­ing, ‘Yo, my de­gree, my pro­gramme al­so took ten years.’ There are many of us out there, you know.”

The sto­ry, he added, has grown be­yond his per­son­al ex­pe­ri­ence.

“Now I’m ea­ger to know who else. So I have to get in­ter­views and do some pick­up shots for the vi­su­al as­pect of the film. I hope to com­plete it in a year, or two years at most.”

When he was first di­ag­nosed, Boatswain said he couldn’t un­der­stand how a healthy, young man could have bipo­lar dis­or­der — a men­tal health con­di­tion that caus­es sig­nif­i­cant shifts in mood, en­er­gy, and ac­tiv­i­ty lev­els, of­ten in­ter­fer­ing with dai­ly life. He be­gan do­ing deep dives in­to men­tal ill­ness, par­tic­u­lar­ly with­in the Caribbean con­text.

“To some ex­tent, even ex­per­i­men­tal­ly, I went in­to re­search about men­tal health and men­tal ill­ness­es. And more im­por­tant­ly, where does this ‘bipo­lar’ thing start? And where does Kwame, the en­ti­ty that is, stop? Once I was able to analyse those two things, I grad­u­al­ly fine-tuned my un­der­stand­ing of what caus­es peo­ple to ex­pe­ri­ence men­tal ill­ness­es — and how they’re treat­ed in a post-colo­nial so­ci­ety. That’s been my area of re­search and ob­ser­va­tion for the last decade.”

A mu­si­cian who al­so took a lik­ing to pho­tog­ra­phy, Boatswain saved up to buy a cam­era to take pro­mo­tion­al pho­tos for his mu­sic. That hob­by even­tu­al­ly be­came a side hus­tle as he be­gan earn­ing mon­ey as an am­a­teur pho­tog­ra­ph­er.

“Then I shot Car­ni­val for the sec­ond time in my life, which was al­so the sec­ond time I ever went to Car­ni­val — be­cause when you grow up coun­try­side, like Pe­nal, you know, town life wasn’t re­al­ly a thing,” he chuck­led.

He lat­er start­ed ex­per­i­ment­ing with video set­tings and de­cid­ed to get for­mal train­ing — not for pres­tige, but to add struc­ture to his learn­ing process.

“I didn’t want to keep do­ing the whole cave­man, self-taught thing on YouTube,” he said.

He be­gan with a Cer­tifi­cate in Tech­ni­cal The­atre, a pre­req­ui­site for en­try in­to the film pro­gramme.

Boatswain be­lieves the “ob­ser­va­tion­al stan­dards” set by his fam­i­ly con­tributed to some of the pres­sures that af­fect­ed his men­tal health.

“My par­ents and oth­er rel­a­tives were mar­ried and had ca­reers by the time they were 25,” he said. “So you feel like you’re sup­posed to be at a cer­tain place in your life by 25 — work­ing, mar­ried with chil­dren — and here I was, a big hard­back man in UWI, just start­ing an aca­d­e­m­ic ca­reer. It wasn’t easy.”

He ex­plained that there are lev­els of strug­gle men ex­pe­ri­ence that of­ten go un­spo­ken. As his re­search in­to men’s men­tal health and well­ness deep­ens, he’s gain­ing a greater ap­pre­ci­a­tion for the im­por­tance of in­ter­nal re­silience.

“It gives a man a sense of ac­com­plish­ment and pride that makes him more un­wa­ver­ing in a very, very chaot­ic world.

“So you’re not just talk­ing to some­one who went through men­tal health chal­lenges and grad­u­at­ed af­ter over­com­ing them. I’m some­one who over­came chal­lenges be­cause I couldn’t ac­cept them as sim­ply a med­ical di­ag­no­sis.”

Boatswain said he has sev­er­al oth­er men­tal health doc­u­men­taries in de­vel­op­ment, and three com­plet­ed films have al­ready been screened. As a well­ness hu­man­i­tar­i­an, he us­es his art as a medi­um to de­mys­ti­fy men­tal ill­ness, re­move stig­ma, and nor­malise con­ver­sa­tions about psy­chosis.

“Be­cause it might seem crazy — how could you nor­malise psy­chosis? But it’s about un­der­stand­ing that a lot more peo­ple ex­pe­ri­ence psy­chosis than is ever doc­u­ment­ed.”

Now that he has fi­nal­ly grad­u­at­ed with his first de­gree, what’s next for Boatswain?

“The Di­manche Gras stage,” he said with a grin — pos­si­bly un­der the ca­lyp­so name Lord Fare­na.

“That’s be­cause of my mom,” he laughed. “She taught Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture… My ca­lyp­so St Ann’s Speak speaks di­rect­ly to a sce­nario in my men­tal health di­ag­no­sis.”

And af­ter that, he plans to pur­sue post­grad­u­ate stud­ies — a jour­ney he hopes will bring even deep­er mean­ing to both his work and his un­der­stand­ing of his di­ag­no­sis.