Learning to Speak: A Filmmaker's Story of Life Before, During, and After Riggs

In this first-person piece, filmmaker Michele Beck draws on segments from her documentary film Learning to Speak, and talks with Austen Riggs Medical Director/CEO Ed Shapiro, MD, about the experiences leading up to and during the making of the film which she describes not as a story of overcoming, but of becoming—an exploration of how one makes meaning from the fragments of a life.

My name is Michele Beck. I'm a visual artist, filmmaker, and psychoanalyst. And I was a patient at Riggs over 30 years ago. 

You are looking at images from my recently completed film, Learning to Speak. It tells the story of what brought me to Riggs and how my life has grown since then. I had the opportunity to meet with Ed Shapiro, Medical Director and CEO of the Austen Riggs Center, to discuss the film.

Shapiro: You have created this fantastic film. How did you decide to do it? 

Beck: One of the things that came out of the film was that it really helped me to process this experience of being here. I worked on it for five years. So, it was five years of like writing it and rewriting and writing it and rewriting and I did a lot of that on my own. And then at the end, I had people look at it as well. I had to tell my own story to myself and make sense of it. And that's, I think, a really powerful way for anyone to process their life. 

Shapiro: You were making art before you came here. 

Beck: I was making art before I came here. Yeah.

Shapiro: What was the difference? 

Beck: Before I came here, I wanted to make art, but I felt like I wasn't allowed to. So, when I came here, I heard about the Shop, and I felt like I wasn't allowed to go there. But with the help of the nurses, I mean, there's a lot of support here. So, with everyone's help, I was able to get there, and once I got there, I met one of the teachers, and they started me off, and so I was able to start working here. 

Shapiro: For me, one of the powerful messages in the film is the usefulness of a separate space while psychotherapy is going on, which is uniquely, as far as I can tell, an interpretation-free zone.

Beck: That was so important when I was here because I remembered when I'd go to the Shop, it was very important to me that they were not clinicians. They are artists.

Shapiro: There are kinds of places where people get stuck, particularly in relation to translating their reflective imagery into language. And I mean, art is a medium for that. Your film makes that pop a lot. 

Beck: Having been in a hospital, there's always, for me, there was this sense of like I was always really grateful to be here, but it wasn't something that I ever told anybody because it has a stigma. And when I did tell people, they didn't know what to say to me. Even my parents didn't want to talk to me about it. So, I got left with a feeling of like, I mean, I'm ashamed of this thing, but it's also the most amazing thing that happened to me. 

Shapiro: This is why I'm so excited about the film, because it's our mission. This is the mission of the Austen Riggs Center, it’s about recognizing that we all have struggles and need help periodically with it, and we don't lose any of our confidence because we're caught in something. And this, I mean, your film makes that so clear.