Director: Jonathan Otto
Writer: Francesca Trifone & Jessica Lallouz
Running time: 1hr 32mins
The feature length documentary Depression, Anxiety and Dementia Secrets – produced, directed and presented by Jonathon Otto – is but the first episode in a ten-part series of videos on the theme of mental health and well-being. As you will have already seen, it has received an ‘Unrated’ score – because it falls into one of the running themes that bracket often features (see Swipe Left: The Age of Disposable Relationships, The Cost of Silence, or Love Thy Neighbor – The Story of Christian Riley Garcia). While the movie positions itself as an objective fact-finding mission, it delivers something resembling an advertorial for a spurious (and potentially harmful) beneficiary. In this case, that is the burgeoning vitamins and health supplements industry.
In the film’s submission notes, Otto modestly describes themself as “a highly acclaimed investigative journalist, humanitarian, and documentary filmmaker”.
Your redoubtable reviewer slogged their way through the film in which Otto is on screen almost the entire time. The only way I can describe the experience is it was as though I had been doorstepped by an oleaginous clergyman out of a George Eliot novel for an hour and a half. Otto brings to the party the peculiar blend of for-profit medicine and evangelical religion that it is at the core of the psychosis that is contemporary America. At the end of the film, Otto looks straight at camera, places his hand on his heart and tells us that bringing us the amazing solutions outlined in the film was a labour of love – something he was compelled to do.
Otto’s submission notes also contend that the goal of the film is “to share with you the most successful. life-saving treatments that health experts and doctors are using around the world – this is the way to emancipate yourself and your loved ones from the corrupt medical system.”
Presumably, the health experts and the legion of doctors featured on the film’s website are not part of the corrupt medical system.
Otto features two key medical talking heads. Googling them up, reveals one, Neil Nedley, is the owner of a thriving commercial operation, with a host of supplements for sale on its website – some going for £100 a pop. The other, Doctor Daniel Amen, has been critiqued by eminent scientists, who argue that the costly brain scans that he recommends patients to undergo are medically worthless – and some have gone as far as to accusing him of selling “snake oil”. Even if we don’t jump to conclusions about the commercial optics at play, I would have thought that an acclaimed investigative journalist and humanitarian would have addressed the perception of a conflict of interests and the scientists’ concerns.
And I would imagine quite a few viewers will leave this film feeling they have unanswered questions to that end, because oddly enough, throughout the film, the advice the incorruptible medics that Otto seeks out for advice recommend – to complement a sensible lifestyle – huge doses of vitamin supplements. At no point in the film are the commercial interests of the vitamin supplements industry alluded to.
At the same time, beyond the amazing solutions backed by this stellar cast, the health advice in the film is pretty standard stuff. (While Otto makes some pretty bold claims about the treatment of dementia at the start, but these are not followed up in the rest of the movie which concentrates on depression and anxiety.) This particular chapter in the Depression, Anxiety and Dementia Secrets saga has a veneer of sensible health advice – avoid processed food, eat your greens, don’t smoke, avoid alcohol and other drugs. All good stuff. Yet also, all things that numerous medical studies suggest will already deliver the benefits promised by expensive supplement use.
Worse still, perhaps, the film has some ghastly, intrusive moments. We meet only one real patient in it – a woman who we see captioned as a “DEPRESSION CONQUEROR”. A medic (and arguable vitamin salesperson) recalls a whole litany of issues that the woman has managed to overcome – effectively outlining her entire personal medical history.
On another occasion, Otto is standing at a desk with a holistic health practioner. Open in front of them are the medical notes of a patient, which they share with us. OK – the name has been anonymised and we can see that certain details have been blacked out, so it is one assumes, this is legally permissible. Meanwhile, in the case of the earlier patient, one also assumes (or hopes) that the filmmakers gained permission from a shell-shocked recoveree from depression. Legal, perhaps, but event then, I would contend both are nasty and exploitative devices, used to give a frisson of actuality to an otherwise propagandistic movie.
Hand on heart, writing this review has been a labour of love – something I was compelled to do. One lesson I did take away from watching Depression, Anxiety and Dementia Secrets has been that it reinforced for me how vital it is for the health of any good society to have a socialised, not-for-profit health care system.
Meanwhile, back in the USA, with the appointment by the incoming Trump administration of Robert Kennedy Jr as health secretary given the directive to Make America Healthy Again, I am sure that the vitamin supplements lobby will go on to great things. But, a note of caution, I see from Otto’s biography that he appears to be an economic migrant from Australia. Before the promised wave of deportations kicks off in 2025, I do hope his papers are in order and he does not end up accused of eating pets.