Witches (2024)

'Witches' is a courageously honest documentary by Elizabeth Sankey that brings together contemporary stories of postpartum depression and psychosis with the history of the prosecution of witches. Taking the form of an essay film, Sankey intersplices clips from popular cinema and television of witches and women in psychiatric institutes alongside personal anecdotes of women she met through her own experience of postpartum depression and anxiety and her time in a mother and baby unit. 

Sankey proposes is that perhaps some of the historical women who were accused of and killed for being witches may have been struggling with their mental health and hormonal shifts after birth. Instead of receiving treatment, they were seen as threats to societal order and God. Sankey and the interviewed women agree that it wouldn't be difficult to imagine that women in the Middle Ages suffering from these postpartum conditions were terrified of their own minds (and at times hallucinations) and the possibility that they might hurt their babies. Their suffering may have been so acute that in their desperate states, they could easily be coerced into confessing being a witch, a death at the stake a presenting a convenient suicidal escape and welcome relief from their ongoing horror. 

The film also suggests that the prosecution and murder of female healers and midwives for being witches has meant that we likely lost key generations of knowledge of the female body and pain, and experience and expertise supporting women through pregnancy, labour and postpartum that may have otherwise informed strides in women's health. Instead, with the threat of female mastery and dominance out of the way, the medical profession was taken over by male doctors and we know the rest... centuries of neglecting women's pain and wellbeing that has led to a disturbing gap in diagnostic research and treatment for women's health and ongoing, avoidable suffering.