‘I need you to feel how it feels to lose your mind completely,’ narrates Elizabeth Sankey early on in Witches, her brutally honest documentary about postpartum depression and psychosis. The British director has constructed an imaginative and courageous call to arms about the way women’s mental health is treated by speaking about her own personal experience in a mother-and-baby psychiatric ward. 

Through the depiction of witches and pregnancy in film, Sankey cannily explores how women are perceived in society and links that to real testimony from witch trials. Together with interviews from experts in the field, and women and men who have been impacted by postpartum issues, she has crafted a sensitive spellbook packed full of vital information and shocking statistics that pays beautiful tribute to the powerful bonds of sisterhood. 

‘I had been out of the ward for about two months when I started thinking about making a documentary as a way to process what had happened to me,’ explains Sankey over Zoom. ‘I can’t really remember what my thought process was because I was still very much in recovery. I just know that I really wanted to spend a lot of time watching witch films and finding solace in these women who behaved in ways that society didn’t expect them to. It made me feel comforted. That’s how it all began.’ The list of films Sankey viewed included The Snake Pit, Return To Oz, and her favourite, The Witches Of Eastwick. ‘It manages to sit between being very poppy and aspirational. You want to be the women in the film but also find comfort with them being badly behaved and, by the end, they’re not stripped of their powers.’

Through the shared knowledge and openness of the We Are Motherly Love group (founder Milli speaks frankly in the film about intrusive thoughts), Sankey found the help she needed. After speaking to a psychiatrist who appears in the film, she discovered why there was an increase in mother-and-baby units in the early 00s. The case of Daksha Emson, a psychiatrist who took her own life and that of her three-month-old daughter Freya in 2000, was a major turning point in addressing suicide and the stigma of mental health for NHS professionals. Subsequently, a government inquiry led to changes in the care of post-maternal women. ‘Reading about Daksha Emson destroyed me,’ Sankey explains. ‘I worked out where her husband lived. I sort of wanted to say that although it is a horrific, tragic thing that never should have happened, they have left behind an incredible legacy. They have saved so many lives, and my life was saved because of what happened to them.’ 

Witches is available on Mubi from Friday 22 November.