THE HOUSE AT THE END OF MY TETHER

2021. Film. Duration: 00:16:41.

‘The House at the End of my Tether’ is an analytically intimate loop, endeavouring to inexplicitly capture the internal experience of living with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). The illness itself is one of the most marginalised and stigmatised of all mental health problems, so is often institutionally placed within the untreatable ‘other’. NHS support is minimal, requires extensive proof of symptom-specificity and is often paradoxically withdrawn because of patients displaying said symptoms.

These symptoms, as shown in the film, place an individual in a perpetually liminal state. Identity shifts between binaries and emotional extremes – both ever present and ever fluctuating. Described on the NHS website as ‘an unstable sense of self’, this sense of in-between-ness is only exacerbated by therapeutic introspection. Trying to conceptualise your own instability becomes impossible, uncertain and, ultimately, absurd.

Misdirection and pseudo-truths continuously coerce the viewer to question, evaluate and re-evaluate their expectations. Humour and self-censorship throw focus from confession to fiction, establishing a universality to trauma beyond the confines of defined diagnosis.

EXCERPT FROM ‘THE HOUSE AT THE END OF MY TETHER’:

(full video available on instagram)