[body_image width='720' height='477' path='images/content-images/2015/04/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/30/' filename='the-last-black-man-in-san-francisco-body-image-1430415916.jpg' id='51723']

Prentice Sanders and Jimmie Fails in a production still from 'The Last Black Man in San Francisco.' Photo courtesy of Joe Talbot

When I was growing up in San Francisco in the 90s and early 2000s, the streets east of Mission Street were intimidating to walk down. There was a gang presence, a notorious high-rise housing project on Army Street, and scores of homeless people sleeping by the dirt-pocked field at Garfield Park.

Today, while the neighboring Valencia Street has become a haven for boutique shops and five-dollar lattes, the area east of Mission has kept its old flavor. Still, as I waited for Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails, creators of the film The Last Black Man in San Francisco, at Philz Coffee on 25th and Folsom, I could see that it too is changing. Almost everyone at the café was working on a laptop and almost everyone was white. Fails, over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and black, stood out in the crowd. Talbot, slighter, white, and dressed in checkered pants and a tan overcoat, fit right in.

But as I talked to Talbot and Fails, who finish each other's sentences and love to tell stories about their incongruent, yet linked childhoods, they both felt equally alienated from the new San Francisco. Their film The Last Black Man in San Francisco, which they are hoping to fund through a Kickstarter that launched Sunday, is the loosely biographical story of Fails's life in the city. But despite the name, they stressed the fact that the story is not simply a tale about being black in a predominately rich, predominately white city. Instead, they said, it's an outsider tale—closer to Ghost World than Dear White People.

"A lot of people can relate to feeling like an outcast in their city," Fails said.

Last year, the concept trailer of the film, which stars Fails and is directed by Talbot, won the Best of Bernal award at the Bernal Heights Outdoor Cinema Festival. Since then, the two have worked on expanding the script to tell a story that is classically American and still relevant today. In the proposed film, the protagonist's grandfather builds a home in the Fillmore district, which his family loses when the Fails's character is five years old. Fifteen years later, Fails dreams of finding a way to buy the house back. It's Horatio Alger meets the housing crisis—riches to rags to the seemingly unattainable dream of riches again.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco from Joe Talbot on Vimeo.

It was a fistfight that first brought Talbot and Fails together when they were kids. Talbot's family had moved to Bernal Heights when he was five—"It was a very different neighborhood, Latino families, funky old liberal artists, lesbian bars"—and as a white teenager, he became a target in the neighborhood. At 12 or 13, Talbot squared off with another teenager at Precita Park.

"People were mad because he was white and he had beat a black kid," Fails said. "I was the only one who was like, 'Nah, bro, he lost.'"

"Jimmie was the one who came to my defense," Talbot said.

[body_image width='720' height='477' path='images/content-images/2015/04/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/30/' filename='the-last-black-man-in-san-francisco-body-image-1430415860.jpg' id='51721']

Director Joe Talbot and actor Jimmie Fails. Photo courtesy of Joe Talbot

After that, the two started hanging out, skateboarding and exploring the neighborhood. Fails was living in the projects on Army Street at the time, while Talbot was the lone white kid who was never without his camera.

"Jimmie and I bonded because we both felt like outsiders, outcasts, we both didn't feel like we fit neatly into one category or another," Talbot explained. "I think that bond that we had, even having totally different experiences, totally different backgrounds, is a testament to what was great about San Francisco. And in future San Francisco, I don't think that exists."

When you eavesdrop at cafes or restaurants around San Francisco, you will undoubtedly hear a conversation about the changing city. You'll hear about the outlandish cost of rent. You'll hear about the artists forced out to Oakland. You'll hear about when the Mission was still the Mission.

Most of the ire is focused at the techies, the young, white, 20-somethings shitting golden eggs in the form of new apps that offer to do your laundry or track your girlfriend's menstrual cycle. And though the rich, brash, and young are easy to dislike, it's an oversimplification to blame them for all that's wrong with San Francisco.

[body_image width='720' height='1086' path='images/content-images/2015/04/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/30/' filename='the-last-black-man-in-san-francisco-body-image-1430428475.jpg' id='51787']

Jimmie Fails in 'The Last Black Man in San Francisco.' Photo courtesy of Joe Talbot

"What's happening now is not a new thing in San Francisco. People have been getting pushed out of San Francisco for a long time," Talbot said. "I think it's important to show through a historical lens what happened in the 60s to the Fillmore. Especially for me, growing up in the Mission and seeing it happen now, it's important to see what happened to other neighborhoods before this."

Talbot and Fails hope their film will be that historical lens, while remaining grounded in the alienation of being young, poor, and native in the city today. The Fails family home, bordering the newly renovated Duboce Park, becomes the symbol of being cast out by the new San Francisco in the film. Buying it back would reaffirm Fails's place within the city.

In 1970, black San Franciscans made up 13.4 percent of the population. By 2013, that number had fallen to 6.1 percent.

In many ways, the history of the Fillmore District is the best way to understand being black in the city today. After World War II, a large middle-class black population arrived in San Francisco. They couldn't move into the city's white neighborhoods, so they settled in the Fillmore, a traditionally Jewish and Japanese neighborhood. During the Jazz Era, the Fillmore was considered the Harlem of the West—clubs like Bop City, the Champagne Supper Club, and Club Alabam were known around the country. Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Charlie Parker all came to San Francisco to play and hang out throughout the neighborhood. But apart from the music, the Fillmore of the 40s and 50s also played another critical role: It was a neighborhood where black San Franciscans could own business, own homes, and create a culture to be proud of.

In the late 40s, the San Francisco government declared the Fillmore District "blighted" under the California Redevelopment Act of 1945. That distinction granted the city the authority and federal funding to completely redevelop the neighborhood. Over the next 40 years, the city used eminent domain to demolish the old Fillmore—883 businesses were forced to close, 4,729 families were forced from their homes, and almost 2,500 Victorian houses were leveled. The black middle class was essentially destroyed in the process. In 1970, black San Franciscans made up 13.4 percent of the population. By 2013, that number had fallen to 6.1 percent. And even that figure is misleading. Thirty percent of the city's black population lives in the Bay View/Hunter's Point area, the city's southeast district where many white San Franciscans have never been.

Fails's grandfather bought a home in the Fillmore when it was still a middle-class black neighborhood and held onto it through the redevelopment of the area. Fails's whole extended family lived in that house when he was young, but after his grandfather passed away, his family members fell behind on the mortgage. When Fails was six, in the early 90s, the bank foreclosed on the Victorian and his family was evicted. After they were forced out, everything began to fall apart. His relatives fell harder into drugs and scattered, and there was infighting over money.

"I haven't had a family since the house," Fails said. "I can't call my cousin right now. I don't even know his number."

[body_image width='720' height='477' path='images/content-images/2015/04/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/30/' filename='the-last-black-man-in-san-francisco-body-image-1430425175.png' id='51770']

Prentice Sanders and Jimmie Fails in a production still from 'The Last Black Man in San Francisco.' Photo courtesy of Joe Talbot

Fails and Talbot focused their film around the house because they both understand that the eviction was the moment Fails's life changed. Afterward, Fails moved from project house to project house throughout his childhood—in the Mission, Hunter's Point, and many other parts of the city. In each new place, he had to get in fistfights to prove that he belonged.

"When you're born with a sense of ownership and then get that ownership taken from you," he said, "it's like... shit."

A lot of the film, Talbot said, focuses on the struggle to reacquire that sense of ownership that Fails lost when his grandfather's home was taken.

The two filmmakers struggle with those same feelings of a loss of ownership in their own neighborhood. After the coffee, as we walked around the Mission District, they scoffed at the turf field at Garfield Park and the lapdog being walked at Precita Park. They told me story after story about when the neighborhood still had an edge, but I understood they were really reminiscing about when it was still truly theirs. The two now live together in Bernal Heights, close to where we were walking, but they know it'll only get harder to afford to stay. And even if they do, the neighborhood will continue to change around them.

"There's so much great shit here that's worth fighting for, and that's why people are so upset," Talbot said. "Because if it was totally fucked, people would say, 'Fuck it, we'll move to Oakland.' But there are still things here that make you fall in love with it again and again."

It's not the kind of place you see during montages in The Princess Diaries or Mrs. Doubtfire.

The connection Talbot and Fails feel for the city is obvious when you talk to them. They dream about showing the San Francisco they grew up exploring—sites they called "the MUNI graveyard," "the Whoopty-Whoop," and "the Million-Dollar View"—to the world. Even when Fails recounted stories of racial alienation in the city—a five-year-old asking his mother why Fails's face was brown; a white hipster walking through the sprinklers at night because he thought Fails was following him—it was clear he hadn't given up on San Francisco. He was giddy while telling me about all "the little shit that's never been on film before" that I'd see in The Last Black Man in San Francisco.

He and Talbot especially lit up when describing the bizarrely beautiful home of the protagonist's best friend, Prentice, which Talbot describes as looking like "Ghetto Tim Burton," an old fisherman's lodging across from a decrepit dock. The filmmakers are excited to set these scenes and others on the far edge of Hunter's Point—one of the few remaining predominantly black neighborhoods in the city—because it's not the kind of place you see during montages in The Princess Diaries or Mrs. Doubtfire. The neighborhood is notoriously violent, and because of the toxic waste from the abandoned naval shipyard, the residents there suffer from extremely elevated cancer and asthma rates. And yet, both Talbot and Fails agree that it's inevitable that the neighborhood will change along with the rest of the city in the near future. There's only so much land in San Francisco and the demand to move here is unquenchable.

"That's one of the last affordable parts of San Francisco," Talbot said. "But the nicest views in San Francisco are on the hill out in Hunter's Point. It's only a matter of time."

The Kickstarter for The Last Black Man in San Francisco runs through June 3.

Follow Joseph on Twitter.

On Saturday evening, as the first stirrings of violence shot through Baltimore , Washington's celebrity reporters and politicos were taking their seats at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, settling in for a long night of free booze, dad jokes, and "accidental" run-ins with that tall guy from HBO's Veep.

As Jon Stewart and plenty of Twitter activists quickly pointed out, the optics weren't great: A city as devolving into mayhem, while just up I-95, reporters in eveningwear fawned over supermodels and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. "Your hair is so white now it can talk back to the police," Saturday Night Lives's Cecily Strong, the evening's comic host, joked to Obama.

Self-righteous tweets aside, though, the stark juxtaposition highlighted ongoing silence in elite Washington about police brutality and the wave of protests sparked by it across the country. Despite almost daily reports of cops losing their cool against unarmed civilians—primarily men of color—national politicians have mostly avoided the issue, shying away from a larger debate about policing reform.

Of course, when Baltimore erupted on Monday after the funeral of Freddie Gray, who died of a mysterious spinal cord injury sustained while in police custody, the subject of law enforcement excesses became a lot harder to ignore. By now, most of the 2016 presidential candidates have said something about the riots. Hillary Clinton gave a whole speech on race and criminal justice reform Wednesday, calling for police body cams and sentencing reforms. Her long-shot Democratic opponent Martin O'Malley, a former governor of Maryland who was once mayor of Baltimore, rushed home from a trip abroad to hand out homegrown kale to protestors, a move that mostly just reminded people that he's a partial inspiration for Mayor Carcetti on The Wire. (David Simon, the show's creator, credits O'Malley with driving "the stake through the heart of police procedure in Baltimore.")

Reactions have been a little more muted on the Republican side. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker tweeted out "prayers for restoration of peace in Baltimore." Chris Christie also tweeted his response calling for a "peaceful resolution" to the protests, and sent 150 New Jersey state troopers to help patrol Baltimore. In an op-ed for TIME, Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon who spent most of his career at Johns Hopkins, expressed dismay at the violence.

"When rioting and looting occurs in instances like this, I cannot help but think how important it is to get police involved early on in the community so that the first encounter a young person has with a police officer is not a hostile encounter," Carson wrote. "That is the type of thing that will make a huge difference in this country. The police have to acknowledge any shortcomings, and if there is unfairness, we need to look at it and improve upon that. Objectivity is the real answer."

Related: Radley Balko on the militarization of America's police.

But apart from urging better community outreach, the candidates have mostly stayed away from the general problem of police brutality—the driving force behind the Baltimore protests and the broader #BlackLivesMatter movement. Instead, the political discussion around the protests has, so far at least, been a sort of catchall for social and economic justice issues like income inequality, lack of government investment in minority communities, and failing schools.

"There are so many things to talk about not in the immediate aftermath, but over time," Kentucky US Senator Rand Paul said in an interview with Laura Ingraham Tuesday. "The breakdown of the family structure, the lack of fathers, the lack of sort of a moral code in our society. This isn't just a racial thing. It goes across racial boundaries. But we do have problems in our country, and you see that we're close to the tipping point–closer to the tipping point on many things."

And politicians' attention has often turned away from Gray's still-unexplained death to the rioting in Baltimore, with candidates quick to voice their support for law enforcement. "When you have a situation where churches are burned and when nursing homes that are under construction to deal with frail elders are burned to the ground, there has to be a commitment to the rule of law and to law enforcement," Jeb Bush told reporters Tuesday.

Texas US Senator Ted Cruz was, true to form, a little more extreme, saying Wednesday that President Obama has "exacerbated racial misunderstandings" and inflamed tensions. "The vilification of law enforcement has been fundamentally wrong and it has hurt the minority community," Cruz added.

The initial reactions underscore the political challenge candidates face as they attempt to validate protests against police brutality—and acknowledge racial biases in the criminal justice system—without appearing to declare open season on cops. "Policing reform is for some reason more racially tinged than reducing mass incarceration—it's a more racially polarizing issue," said Inimai Chettiar, a director at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's School of Law. "A lot of Americans are very pro-police. I think that perhaps people still believe the myth that you have to arrest everyone, that you have to imprison everyone."

The good news, Chettiar added, is that after decades of escalating tough-on-crime politics, there is a growing consensus that the system is broken. A new book published this week by the Brennan Center contains essays from many of the major 2016 presidential candidates on how to reform the criminal justice system, with proposed solutions ranging from reducing mandatory minimum sentencing to expanding drug treatment for nonviolent offenders.

Still, the issue of police violence and accountability goes mostly unaddressed. "The federal government tries to stay away from local law enforcement response unless it's absolutely necessary," said Maria Haberfeld, a political science professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. "There's a historical tendency to deal with policing issues at the local level, which is why we have 18,000 police departments, and the most decentralized law enforcement on earth."

"In general, police response to these events tends to be sort of a band-aid—there's minimal training, minimal reorganization, and that's primarily due to a lack of conceptual framework," Haberfeld added. "If something is going to change in a transformational way, the federal government is going to have to provide some sort of guidance for organization, recruitment, and training."

Follow Grace Wyler on Twitter.

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/05/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/01/' filename='k-marting-canadian-ex-pats-really-like-to-drink-in-front-of-korean-convenience-stores-body-image-1430493568.jpg' id='51940']

Lexy Mart at night. All photos by Jo Turner

On any given night in South Korea, you can see thousands of people drinking outside of corner stores. These are not your teenagers of North American suburban lore, knocking back Coke cans half-full of whiskey behind the 7-11, getting ready to be belted out as soon as the manager catches wind of them.

No, these are grown men and women. They are employed, often besuited, pounding back beer and liquor legally, at tables provided by the corner store's management. Koreans don't have a specific name for it. Foreigners in Korea, who have taken to it like pigs to shit, call it "marting."

Sang Man Seok, 51, is the manager of Lexy Mart, a corner store in the city of Ilsan, just north of Seoul. Any night in the spring, summer, or fall, he can have up to 30 people outside the Lexy, 60 to 70 over the course of the night. During the warm season, he estimates 30 percent of his profits come from people drinking outside. Even in winter, it can still reach 15 percent.

[body_image width='1200' height='783' path='images/content-images/2015/05/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/01/' filename='k-marting-canadian-ex-pats-really-like-to-drink-in-front-of-korean-convenience-stores-body-image-1430493781.jpg' id='51941']

But why drink outside a corner store anyway? "First and foremost is price," Sang says. "The anjou [drinking food] is much cheaper, too. Then there are the anti-smoking laws [in the bars]."

And though it's a bunch of plastic tables on a street corner, it has its own atmosphere. "When it drizzles outside, we lower the awning, and we provide an atmosphere no bar can," Sang says proudly.

Down the street at the CU Mart, Kang Sujin, 22, tends the register. Here the tables and chairs sit under a covered upstairs balcony, sheltering it from rain. This is especially useful for July and August, Korea's monsoon season.

"It just fills up," she says, throwing her arm toward the tables. "We get about ten people, all the tables and chairs out there. But there are people who walk by, looking to sit, see that it's full, and then move on to the next one."

[body_image width='1200' height='789' path='images/content-images/2015/05/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/01/' filename='k-marting-canadian-ex-pats-really-like-to-drink-in-front-of-korean-convenience-stores-body-image-1430493797.jpg' id='51942']

She says they're often on their way home from the bars, stopping in for a nightcap. "Those who drink are inevitably company workers or university students," Kang says. "Those of all people suffer the most stress, and what else is there to do to alleviate that stress but drink?"

It's older men who tend to mart the most, though there are groups of younger kids, too. And foreigners. Foreigners, especially English teachers (about a third of whom are Canadian), seem to be permanently fastened to the plastic seats.

"I like being outside and there's not really a lot of options when it comes to relaxing, drinking, hanging out with your friends outside in Korea," says Heather Goldring, 24, an English teacher from Toronto. "Being from Canada, the highlight of my summer used to be drinking with my friends outside on a patio. And it's really nice to be able to mart here in Korea, because I miss that."

There are very few balconies in Korea, and rooftop bars are usually outrageously expensive. At the mart, you're paying less than what you'd pay at The Beer Store back home. And The Beer Store doesn't let you knock back in front of its doors.

[body_image width='1200' height='1854' path='images/content-images/2015/05/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/01/' filename='k-marting-canadian-ex-pats-really-like-to-drink-in-front-of-korean-convenience-stores-body-image-1430493810.jpg' id='51943']

"The atmosphere is different, just being outside on the sidewalk, compared to being at a bar," says Eric MacDonald, 35, an office worker from Antigonish, NS, who now lives in the posh Seoul district of Gangnam. "It's not dark, you don't have four walls and a ceiling, it's outside."

People watching is another big draw. Korean cities are famously dense, and there are always people moving about, day and night, going about their lives.

Kyle Tapper, 35, is a teacher from Newfoundland. He used to mart all the time, but he's mostly retired now. "I feel like that part of my life has passed," Tapper says. "Every time I go there's a new group of people and I feel like it's just something I shouldn't be doing anymore."

[body_image width='1200' height='758' path='images/content-images/2015/05/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/01/' filename='k-marting-canadian-ex-pats-really-like-to-drink-in-front-of-korean-convenience-stores-body-image-1430493857.jpg' id='51944']

But he remembers his marting days fondly. "Sitting outside on a nice day, it's nice to be out," Tapper says. "It could be complete strangers walking by, I like to just sit down and watch. It could be friends who walk by, they'll just sit at the table abruptly with you and then shoot the shit for the next two or three hours. It's never five minutes."

Tapper says it beats the pants off most bars he went to.

"You go to a bar, it's much more expensive," he says. "And then it's this bar sucks, this bar's great, everybody has their own opinion. Sitting outside the mart, nobody ever talked about how great it was. We just told stories and got along. And it was cheap. So very cheap."

Because it's so public, marting can often lead to more fights than in a bar. There's no need to step outside when you're already outside.

Misunderstandings, often between foreigners and Koreans, can cause friction. "Boys would often get a little too drunk and cause some ruckus," MacDonald says, thinking back to his salad days in the mid-2000s. "It was definitely embarrassing for some of us. You have to just laugh it off. But nothing major ever happened."

Sang says problems arise "when there are inter-table kerfuffles. When customers drag the tables too far out, it stops being Lexy Mart and becomes public space. Then the [city] office people will come give us shit, for having people all the way out in the middle."

But overall, the feeling is chilled. MacDonald, Goldring, and Tapper would all like to see it in Canada, but don't think it would ever happen.

"I definitely wish we could do it back home," MacDonald says, "but I don't believe Canadians are responsible enough to handle it."

Follow Dave Hazzan on Twitter.

[body_image width='950' height='633' path='images/content-images/2015/04/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/30/' filename='chernobyl-gerd-ludwig-photo-201-body-image-1430395163.jpg' id='51471']©Gerd Ludwig (Prypjat, Ukraine, 2011) 25 years later, the amusement park has turned into an attraction for tourists.

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany.

Twenty-nine years ago, when I was one year old, I lived with my parents in the small Ukrainian town of Pripyat—about 60 miles away from Kiev. This would be a fairly ordinary story, if the town I lived in wasn't under two away from the Chernobyl power plant. That and the fact that my dad worked as an engineer there, operating one of the nuclear reactors.

At the time, the average age of people living in Pripyat was about 26 years old. Every single person living there (about 50,000) had to leave within 36 hours after Reactor 4 exploded during a system test, releasing a plume of highly radioactive fallout into the atmosphere. To this day, this is the worst nuclear accident in history.

The catastrophe shaped my life, as well as the lives of thousands of other people, many of whom, including my father Constantine, are no longer alive today due to the impact the radioactivity had on their health.

Photographer Gerd Ludwig's latest series The Long Shadow of Chernobyl (Edition Lammerhuber, 2014) is the accumulated result of nine trips, spanning 20 years, to the exclusion zone surrounding the disaster site. I had the privilege to chat with him about his photography and share some of our experiences from the zone.

[body_image width='950' height='633' path='images/content-images/2015/04/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/24/' filename='gerd-ludwig-interview-der-lange-schatten-von-tschernobyl-816-body-image-1429869833.jpg' id='49358']

©Gerd Ludwig. Gerd Ludwig in protective clothing.

VICE: You work a lot in former Soviet countries. Where did that interest come from?
Gerd Ludwig: It started when I was young. During WWII, my father was drafted by the German army and was actually among the troops that invaded the Soviet Union. He battled all the way to Stalingrad. When he returned, his experiences became my bedtime stories. As I started to grow up, I began to ask questions. His explanations weren't really enough, I grew up with this incredible feeling of guilt towards Russia and the other Soviet Republics. So much so that when I shot my first assignment in Russia for Geo Magazine, I didn't allow myself to take any critical photos of Russia—a country that had suffered so terribly from the German invasion.

How did you end up photographing Chernobyl?
My second major assignment was for National Geographic in 1993—that was on pollution in the Post-Soviet republics. It was then that I felt a need to include Chernobyl. It was only supposed to be a small segment, but it ended up being a story in itself. I began to develop a deeper interest in Chernobyl as a subject, and I knew I'd have to return. It actually took me 11 years to go back. I returned in 2005, 2011 and 2013, for an extended period of time. I photographed the victims, the ghost town of Pripyat, the Exclusion Zone, the reactor itself, and the areas affected by the fallout in both Belarus and Ukraine.

[body_image width='950' height='633' path='images/content-images/2015/04/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/24/' filename='gerd-ludwig-interview-der-lange-schatten-von-tschernobyl-816-body-image-1429869544.jpg' id='49356']

©Gerd Ludwig (Vesnova, Belarus, 2005) Five-year-old Igor is physically handicapped, intellectually disabled, emotionally damaged, deaf, and dumb. Isolated and anxious, he spends most of his time hiding behind a curtain in a children's home. The institution for mentally handicapped children wouldn't exist without the support of Chernobyl Children International.

I actually went to Chernobyl to photograph my own story on several occasions. The accident drastically altered our lives. In many ways, all of my desires and passions sprung from the ruins of Chernobyl. I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if the accident hadn't happened. I'd probably still live there, have a husband and a couple of kids and maybe even be a nuclear physicist myself.
So you were there when the whole thing happened?

Yeah, we lived in Pripyat and my father operated Reactor 2 . He had the late shift the night of the accident. His friends were working in the control room of Reactor 4. He told me how he saw them running to fix the situation—even though there was nothing they could have done. My father called my mom after his shift and told her to close the windows and stay inside; he couldn't say why. I know they had to sign some sort of nondisclosure agreement. My mom once told me about her friends going to the beach that day despite her warning them: They hadn't a clue about the danger.

Were you afraid the first time you went there? Did you feel like you were risking your health?
I was quite prepared for my first trip, I did about four weeks of research. I traveled with a whole case of protective gear, which included Geiger counters, gas masks, dosimeters, boot covers, and protective overalls. But when I showed up in Chernobyl, officials asked me not to wear any of my protective gear, so as not to scare people who worked there without any. When I visited the graveyard of Pripyat—a highly contaminated area—or returnees at their homes, I wasn't wearing any protection. As a photographer, you walk a fine line, and you need people's cooperation to get the job done. In Chernobyl, I ate eggs, fish, and potatoes that were all produced in the contaminated zone. I was concerned, but I wasn't really scared.

Do you think that getting a good photograph is worth these risks?
As journalists, we often put ourselves into risky environments. But we do this on behalf of the innocent victims—to get their story, which otherwise wouldn't be heard. To be with these people, to eat and drink with them is to hear their pain and to see their soul.

[body_image width='950' height='633' path='images/content-images/2015/04/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/24/' filename='gerd-ludwig-interview-der-lange-schatten-von-tschernobyl-816-body-image-1429868885.jpg' id='49351']

©Gerd Ludwig (Oktjabrsky, Belarus, 2005) Classrooms and administrative offices were turned into makeshift clinics. The incidence of thyroid abnormalities and cancer is the undisputed result of the cesium precipitation.

Was anyone hostile towards you?
Regardless of where you are, you'll always find the occasional hostile person. Generally speaking, the people I've photographed have been appreciative. When I am on an assignment for National Geographic, I'm not just there for a few hours. I don't just walk into people's lives as a body with a camera instead of a head. I meet each of them as a person firstly. It's only after talking with them and sharing my story, that I expect them to open up to me. That's when I start unpacking my camera. I consider these people heroic for sharing their stories. I have to be aware that by pointing my camera at suffering people, I increase their sorrow and momentarily make their memories more painful.

You spent a lot of time photographing the impact of radiation on people's health. The photographs of the disabled children probably affected me the most.
The consequences of the Chernobyl accident on people's health are quite controversial in the scientific community. But there's statistics that can't be disputed—the level of leukemia and other cancers is far higher in the affected areas than outside. In Gomel—a Southern region of Belarus heavily affected by the disaster—I met young women from the contaminated zone who were extremely worried for the wellbeing of their future children. Just that fear and stress alone can be detrimental to ones health. While I am aware that due to the heritage of the Soviet system, parents often give up disabled children more easily than in Western countries, I found that the Belarusian government is really downplaying the role of Chernobyl in the occurrence of developmental disabilities. The few people who dare to speak openly about this see a clear connection between the increasing health problems and the radioactivity released by the disaster.

What was your most striking experience in the zone?
In 2005, I was able to venture deeper into Reactor 4 than any other Western photographer. I photographed areas where workers were only able to work 15 minutes a day—despite wearing all the protective gear. The adrenaline level was incredible. In 2013, I went back to the reactor and was able to go even further than before. Deep inside a dark hallway, the engineer accompanying me pried open a heavy metal door.

I was only able to fire off a few quick flashes before he pulled me out, but I captured the clock on the wall. It stood frozen at 1:23 AM—the moment when the reactor exploded and time in Chernobyl stood still forever.

[body_image width='950' height='633' path='images/content-images/2015/04/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/24/' filename='gerd-ludwig-interview-der-lange-schatten-von-tschernobyl-816-body-image-1429869254.jpg' id='49353']

©Gerd Ludwig. The radiation is still so high in Reactor 4 that Gerd only had a few seconds to take pictures of the clock. On 26 April 1986, at exactly 1:23:58 AM, the clocks stopped forever.

How do you feel about nuclear power, and what do you want to tell people with your pictures?
I don't like to label myself or walk around with some sort of anti-nuclear badge pinned to my jacket. People assume far too quickly that I'm prejudiced. I want my pictures to speak for themselves. I photograph what I see and want the viewer to draw their own conclusions. But I doubt that after looking at my photographs, anyone could still consider nuclear power to be safe.

Are you planning to return to Chernobyl or is it a closed page for you? And what about other nuclear accidents, like Fukushima?
I have no plans to go to Fukushima. I'm not going to chase every nuclear disaster in the world. I am, however, planning to publish another book on Chernobyl for the 30th anniversary—a smaller collection of still-lives. I know my work there is not done. The current book is a cesura—a pause, in order to look back and then continue on further.

You can see more of Gerd Ludwig's work and buy signed copies of his book The Long Shadow of Chernobyl on his website gerdludwig.com.

See more photos below

[body_image width='950' height='633' path='images/content-images/2015/04/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/24/' filename='gerd-ludwig-interview-der-lange-schatten-von-tschernobyl-816-body-image-1429863986.jpg' id='49285']

©Gerd Ludwig (Close to Prypjat, Ukraine, 2011) A road sign warns of the danger of radioactive contamination.

[body_image width='950' height='639' path='images/content-images/2015/04/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/24/' filename='gerd-ludwig-interview-der-lange-schatten-von-tschernobyl-816-body-image-1429864239.jpg' id='49288']

©Gerd Ludwig (Prypjat, Ukraine, 1993) Scientists regularly measure the radioactivity in the area of the so-called Red Forest, one of most contaminated areas in the reactor's vicinity. Its name comes from the ginger-brown color of the trees. They died as a result of the enormous dose of radiation emitted immediately after the accident. Much of the Red Forest was burned, its remains buried in "waste graveyards."

[body_image width='950' height='635' path='images/content-images/2015/04/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/24/' filename='gerd-ludwig-interview-der-lange-schatten-von-tschernobyl-816-body-image-1429864151.jpg' id='49287']

©Gerd Ludwig (Kiev, Ukraine, 1993) The children born near Chernobyl have to pay the price for the ignorance of their parents' generation. In this clinic, a boy is treated for dermatitis. He's just one of many examples of the massive increase in allergic diseases in the area.

[body_image width='633' height='950' path='images/content-images/2015/04/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/24/' filename='gerd-ludwig-interview-der-lange-schatten-von-tschernobyl-816-body-image-1429864282.jpg' id='49289']

©Gerd Ludwig (Kiev, Ukraine, 1993) While her peers and friends enjoy their first parties, this girl spends painful weeks in the hospital, being treated for dermatitis by injection.

[body_image width='2500' height='1667' path='images/content-images/2015/04/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/24/' filename='gerd-ludwig-interview-der-lange-schatten-von-tschernobyl-816-body-image-1429864412.jpg' id='49291']

©Gerd Ludwig (Minsk, Belarus, 2005) Oleg Shapiro, 54, and Dima Bogdanovich, 13, both suffer from thyroid cancer. They are treated in a hospital in Minsk. This was Shapiro's third thyroid surgery. Dima's mother blames the nuclear fallout for her sons condition, but his doctors are more cautious: "The government in Belarus does not like such openness."

[body_image width='950' height='639' path='images/content-images/2015/04/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/24/' filename='gerd-ludwig-interview-der-lange-schatten-von-tschernobyl-816-body-image-1429864363.jpg' id='49290']

©Gerd Ludwig (Rossokha, Ukraine, 1993) Thousands of highly contaminated vehicles, such as trucks, helicopters, tanks and bulldozers that were used during the cleanup are still waiting for their long overdue burial in "graveyards for radioactive material."

[body_image width='950' height='633' path='images/content-images/2015/04/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/24/' filename='gerd-ludwig-interview-der-lange-schatten-von-tschernobyl-816-body-image-1429864468.jpg' id='49292']

©Gerd Ludwig (Prypjat, Ukraine, 2011) It took 36 hours before the authorities began to evacuate the inhabitants of Pripyat. They were told that the evacuation was only temporary and they should only take their documents and a few key personal items.

[body_image width='950' height='633' path='images/content-images/2015/04/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/24/' filename='gerd-ludwig-interview-der-lange-schatten-von-tschernobyl-816-body-image-1429864528.jpg' id='49294']

©Gerd Ludwig (Paryshev, Ukraine, 2011) Vines have overgrown a farmhouse within the exclusion zone.

[body_image width='950' height='633' path='images/content-images/2015/04/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/24/' filename='gerd-ludwig-interview-der-lange-schatten-von-tschernobyl-816-body-image-1429864549.jpg' id='49295']

©Gerd Ludwig (Lubjanka, Ukraine, 2011) Only 54 years old, the skin of returnee Vladimir Bychkovsky gives an insight into the worrying state of his health, which doctors can only explain by the high levels of radiation. Since his wife's death in 2006, he lives lonely and alone in the exclusion zone.

[body_image width='950' height='622' path='images/content-images/2015/04/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/24/' filename='gerd-ludwig-interview-der-lange-schatten-von-tschernobyl-816-body-image-1429864570.jpg' id='49296']

©Gerd Ludwig (Prypjat, Ukraine, 2005) Dogs searching for food in the exclusion zone. Because of their wild appearance, it's often falsely claimed that they are a cross between wolves and sheep dogs.

[body_image width='950' height='633' path='images/content-images/2015/04/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/24/' filename='gerd-ludwig-interview-der-lange-schatten-von-tschernobyl-816-body-image-1429864580.jpg' id='49297']

©Gerd Ludwig (Chernobyl, Ukraine, 2005) Every year in Chernobyl, on the anniversary of the disaster, the shift workers congregate by candlelight for a vigil.

Rachel Mason is a prolific and multifaceted artist. In the course of her career she's released ten full-length records and shown her artworks, which range from sculpture to video performance, at esteemed art institutions around the country.

Her latest project is a 21-song cycle titled The Lives of Hamilton Fish, which Mason performs live, accompanying a feature-length film of the same name. The paired performance is equally indebted to the Who's Quadrophenia and the Steve Reich opera The Cave, with video and music interacting in fluid, complex ways—but the tunes themselves lean more towards the American folk tradition of John Prine.

The plot chronicles the true story of two men named Hamilton Fish who died on the same day but led vastly different lives. Mason is about to start a tour of performances—catch it at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on June 23 and listen to the songs from the opera exclusively on VICE today.

[body_image width='700' height='420' path='images/content-images/2015/05/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/01/' filename='when-are-we-going-to-stop-marginalising-black-and-bme-mental-health-patients-181-body-image-1430480513.jpg' id='51878']

David "Rocky" Bennet, who famously spoke of being treated as "a lesser being" during his inpatient care for schizophrenia, prior to his death by restraint on a psychiatric ward in 1998.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

My dad has worked in NHS mental healthcare for as long as I can remember. It wasn't really something I paid any attention to until he started working in one of London's most notorious psychiatric intensive care units, the ones often gloomily known as "punishment wards" and associated with the extreme levels of "mad" that movies are made from. Over time, I went from not really understanding what his job was, to being quite affected by his anonymous night-shift stories of patients who had fed their cats crushed glass or had been admitted convinced they were the Messiah.

My dad's bad days at the office weren't because of annoying colleagues or shitty, overpriced lunches. No, they were because someone had been so determined not to deal with the chaos in their head that they'd managed to find a way to take their life in one of the most monitored environments the NHS can offer. Overwhelmingly, the most seriously mentally ill patients in his stories seemed to be from ethnic minorities.

Everyone, everywhere can experience a mental health condition at some point in their lives. One in four in the UK will over the course of a single year. But what happens when race, discrimination, and profound cultural misunderstandings mean mental health care provisions aren't there to catch your fall? Or if the stigma and lack of understanding of mental illness within your community means you don't get the right help until you're very unwell?

There's no conclusive evidence to tell us that black and minority ethnic or BM groups have a biological predisposition to serious mental illness, yet they are startlingly over-represented in the UK's long-term psychiatric care, and nearly always at the point of severe crisis. Why?

Jamie*, from London, was 26 when he was sectioned and detained in a psychiatric intensive care unit during an acute episode of schizophrenia. He said the delay in addressing his issues stemmed from an ingrained sense of shame surrounding mental illness. "There's a stigma within the black community around mental illness which I think is a fear of looking weak," he explains. "As a black man, on one hand you've got all this pride around not asking for anyone's help, but then you've got a big pressure to make something of yourself, to not be the stereotype." He says that "paths to traditional help" were "never on the table. You'd turn to the church or you'd turn to family before you think, Ahh, I need therapy."

Our NHS has inevitably struggled to accommodate the nuances and cultural needs of an ever-changing British population—particularly within the mental health sector, which has always been chronically underfunded, despite mental illness now being the single largest source of burden of disease in the UK—but an already complicated navigation of mental health care in the UK seems to be more difficult for people from BME communities, who are overwhelmingly being treated at the sharp end of mental illness, through detainment in a hospital under the Mental Health Act or under a Crisis Resolution Home Treatment (CRHT) team.

Even when they are under the care of a mental health team, though, many people from BME groups report feeling like they're not getting the specific care they should be. Again, it's worth remembering that they may be feeling the most desperate and frightened they have in their entire lives. There is a lack of care that is individually-focused, with a view to making communication as clear as possible and ensuring that any cultural or religious differences are addressed in the process—particularly for people like Jamie, who will be carrying the weight of immense shame as well as everything else.

In their 2013 briefing for Clinical Commissioning Groups, the charity Mind reported that after a year-long independent inquiry and a stream of FOI requests, they'd found stark inequalities in the way people from BME groups are treated when they are in crisis.

Thirty-three trusts gave Mind a breakdown of ethnicity for their CRHT teams' activities. In most areas, there was a lower proportion of white people admitted to hospital by CRHT teams and a higher proportion of other ethnic groups—particularly Black Caribbean. In the briefing, several patients spoke of serious problems with the quality of life on mental health wards and the lack of therapeutic interventions for inpatients. Concerns were expressed around the use of medication at very high doses, and also, most sadly of all, around difficulties in communication—a critical part of mental health treatment.

If you can't speak honestly and openly, how can you hope to be truly heard? How can you be reassured that you're getting the right treatment?

The investigation heard overwhelming complaints about a "lack of interpreters, or interpreters being available only once a week, as well as a lack of psychological therapy in the person's own language." Mind also didn't get a strong sense from mental health services of a strategic drive to overcome ethnic inequalities—"examples of inspiring practice were very few"—suggesting that it reflects wider concerns that race equality has come down the agenda in recent years.

It's two years since this unsettling report was released, so I gave Rezina Hakim, Policy and Campaigns Officer at Mind, a call to get a sense of where things are now. Basically, BME mental health issues are still being swept under the carpet.

"All areas of our healthcare have been stretched with the cuts," she says, "but we can assume that in times of pressure it's highly unlikely that specialist services tailored towards the BME community will be continued."

Does the General Election—just days away at the time of writing—hold any glimmer of hope for an overhaul of BME mental healthcare provisions?

"At this time in the last election there was hardly any mention of mental health. Now it is prioritized and that, at least, is a fantastic step forward," Hakim continues. "However, there's been a dearth of conversation around BME mental healthcare."

Mind's biggest worry moving forward, she says, is that we still don't have enough detail to understand how proposed improved services would affect people from those backgrounds who are often at a crisis stage once they reach care, as well as being subject to dual discrimination. "It's an uphill battle, but we're confident we can make headway in the same way we have with people talking openly about mental health."

A stand out part of Mind's report was a criticism of the number of community treatment orders (CTOs) among some BME groups, and also how black men are disproportionately diagnosed with schizophrenia. This is, of course, one of the most enduring and divisive debates on mental illness within ethnic minorities—the erroneous medical "phenomena" of schizophrenia in young black men that, unless you actually research it, at face value, could be easily viewed as a "black" disease.

Jonathan M. Metzel's book, the notorious The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease, warned us how anxieties continue to impact doctor-patient relations in a seemingly post-racial America, in light of how associations between schizophrenia and blackness emerged during the 60s and 70s, and it feels like we're crying out for something similar here in the UK, now. Why? Because we have been hearing about an "epidemic" of schizophrenia among African Caribbeans for a while now, but there is still no absolute indication that those from Black African or Caribbean backgrounds have a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia.

A major study conducted in 2009 (named Aesop, Aetiology and Ethnicity in Schizophrenia and other Psychoses) found that people from the African Caribbean community are nine times more likely to suffer from schizophrenia than people in the white community. The study involved 500 patients with mental health problems from various ethnic groups, comparing them with a control group of 350 healthy subjects. It concluded that the root causes of this epidemic were due to a wide range of social factors that lead to severe social isolation. An isolation that will almost certainly be compounded by a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

In 1998, the case of schizophrenia sufferer David "Rocky" Bennett brought to light the effects of sustained discrimination on mental health. Bennett died after being restrained in a Norwich psychiatric ward.

Bennett's death was the catastrophic end to a day of his temper being flared by a flurry of racist slurs from a fellow patient. The inquest that followed his death levied damning criticisms of "festering" institutional racism at the NHS, stating that staff were oblivious to the "corrosive and cumulative effect of racist abuse upon a black patient."

Over the two decades he spent in and out of NHS care, Bennett was vocal about the kindness and emotional investment of individual carers but also, conversely, of a collective ignorance that his needs were different to those that could be understood by a largely white establishment. It's a sentiment echoed by Sri Lankan-born psychiatrist Suman Fernando, a champion of cross-cultural psychiatric care and long-term critic of government policies on BME mental health, who said in 2012 of the coalition's attitude to addressing racial disparities in mental health diagnosis and treatment: "They have walked away from it completely."

Fernando also said that mental health professionals at the NHS still had "inherited" ideas of racial stereotypes, and further attacked the coalition.

"There are one or two brown-skinned people who always get to chair something but not to actually say anything," he explained. "Tokenism is counter-productive. It prevents change... there is the fear [among politicians] that it is a can of worms and that the right will accuse them of pandering to [black people]."

But surely this all goes way beyond the "institution" and is, rather, another product of the cyclical nature of discrimination? When you habitually treat someone as anything but an individual, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Before any kind of significant change manifests in a system that is clearly some way from offering a case-by-case, individual-focused level of care, we need to realize that awareness and greater education surrounding mental health issues is needed at a formative level—at schools, in youth centers (ones that haven't been closed because of local authority cuts), in youth media.

"I still have never really talked to friends of even my mum about my illness," says Jamie, suggesting an endemic lack of communication surrounding mental illness, echoing the Aesop report's conclusions about social isolation. I asked Jamie what he would suggest now to a black boy going through anything similar to what he did? "Talk," he says, matter-of-factly. "To anyone."

* Name has been changed

Follow Joanna on Twitter.

[body_image width='621' height='412' path='images/content-images/2015/04/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/27/' filename='ukip-voting-dad-immigrant-body-image-1430155166.png' id='50229']Photo by Nicholas Pomeroy

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Dad left Iran in a hurry. See, in 1979 the Iranian Revolution happened, and everyone associated with the Shah—like Dad's family—had to leave. At first Dad thought he could go home soon. But Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic extremists had other plans for the country. So Dad settled here, an immigrant with hooded dark eyes and an endlessly mispronounced name—it's "Kayvan," not "Kevin"... definitely not "Kevin."

Thirty years passed. Dad raised a family and worked as a doctor. He kept wearing the same 1980s purple-and-green Adidas shell-suit, though.

Recently, Dad told me that he's planning on voting for UKIP in the General Election. This will be the first time he votes for them (he doesn't vote in local or European elections). He's even invited Nigel Farage down to the hospital he works at, although sadly for Dad there's been no response as yet.

My first reaction was, of course, to assume that the Old Man was having another midlife crisis, and wonder whether pics of my dad glad-handing Nigel Farage on Facebook would be more or less offensive than those ones of him in a tie-dye Full Moon Party T-shirt, joint in hand, that I've spent years trying to un-see.

My second reaction was more conflicted. See, I'm pretty sure my dad's not senile (yet), so I started to question my own understanding of the party. I always thought that you were about as likely to get an immigrant voting UKIP as a turkey voting for Christmas. UKIP hates immigrants, right? As a first generation immigrant, there are several essential facts you learn growing up. The only acceptable career paths are: doctor, dentist, lawyer. Skipping PE to revise is fine. And you don't vote for parties that hate you. But now my immigrant dad was breaking the rules—and it threw everything else into question.

UKIP has attracted some high-profile ethnic minority supporters, such as Sanya-Jeet Thandi, former UKIP Youth Chair. However, it has a problem holding onto these people: Sanya-Jeet subsequently defected, citing racism within the party. Sushil Patel, father of junior Tory Minister Priti Patel, made headlines back in 2013 when he announced he was standing, although he U-turned when the controversy threatened to damage his daughter's political career. When UKIP won the crucial Heywood by-election, black and Asian people were seen cheering in the crowd. And in Croydon last year, UKIP fielded nine black candidates for the local council elections.

Related: We Went to UKIP's Insane Party Conference.

So, although my dad's definitely not your conventional UKIP voter, he's not quite the only gay in the village, either. I asked the Head of Polling at a major polling institute if he could tell me how many ethnic minorities are voting UKIP. He told me that the size of BME groups in the UK is small enough that they can't be analyzed in national voting intention polls as standard practice. Which is kind of ironic. There are so few British immigrants that they they don't show up in standard polling systems (Although Operation Black Vote reckons that ethnic minority voters could wing the result in 168 marginal seats). It's almost enough to make you choke on your halal pork scratchings.

Undeterred, I phoned Dad to find out why he was voting UKIP. He told me it was because the Tories were a "bunch of posh-boy tosspot wankers" who'd never had real jobs in their lives, and that he'd never trust Labour after the colostomy bag number they did on Iraq. When I pointed out he could still vote Lib Dem he laughed mirthlessly.

[body_image width='625' height='414' path='images/content-images/2015/04/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/27/' filename='ukip-voting-dad-immigrant-body-image-1430155214.png' id='50230']Photo by Nicholas Pomeroy

His response made me realize I'd been looking at this all wrong. Dad's decision to vote UKIP had nothing to do with the color of his skin or the fact that he's an ethnic minority immigrant to the UK. Rather, it has everything to do with the failure of establishment politics in the UK. My Dad's voting UKIP because he's pissed off with traditional politics. UKIP's gelatinous purple blob has embraced both disaffected Tory and Labour voters. With support this diverse, is it that surprising that members of ethnic minorities are searching for a protest vote too?

Still, I wondered if my immigrant dad was a hypocrite for being anti-immigration. After all, if it wasn't for the UK, my dad would be in Iran, without freedom of religion or speech. It seemed kind of unfair that he was against other people having the chance to make a new life he had enjoyed. Never one to shy away from asking my dad a difficult question (although at least this time I'm not an eight-year-old asking what a condom is), I put this to him: Does voting UKIP make you a hypocrite, Dad?

To his credit, he was genuinely gutted that I would think him xenophobic, or anti-immigration generally. "It's about uncontrolled immigration," he told me (more than once—we love to repeat ourselves in my family). "Uncontrolled immigration is ruining the social fabric of this country—people aren't integrating into communities anymore."

For him, it's not hypocritical to be anti-immigration when you feel that new immigrants aren't taking the same pains you took to integrate into society. And I kind of get this. Dad made a massive effort to integrate when he came over, and he's pissed off that the next generation of immigrants don't appear to him, at least, to be doing the same. Growing up, his idea of integrated is us piling into my mom's battered old Nissan Micra to make the dutiful trek to National Trust houses in the summer holidays. Dad insisting English was spoken at home, apart from swearing (it's so much easier to swear in your native tongue). It meant my parents squashing the objections of the more conservative members of our family about how we girls dressed. It meant letting us be friends with and go out drinking with boys, even though that sort of thing would never pass muster where they came from.

And, as a doctor, he told me that he saw the effects of immigration on the over-burdened NHS daily. He told me of the amount of patients he treated from abroad on a daily basis, and of waiting lists and waiting rooms where none of the people spoke English as a first language. He's worked in the NHS for over two decades, so I understood where he was coming from, and how frustrating it must be to feel like you can't provide a decent quality of care because of the sheer volume of people you have to treat. And it's ironic that the NHS—even as it struggles to cope—is totally reliant on migrant workers. In the last year alone, it's hired up to 3,000 foreign doctors to deal with a serious staffing shortfall. I remembered that my grandparents often come over from abroad to see doctors on the NHS, even though they're not permanent residents here, and I bit my lip. His views were kind of understandable, although I told him that I didn't agree with them, more than once.

When I dug deeper, asking him how he could be a member of a party that, whichever way you look at it, contains an awful lot of members who are racists and bigots by anyone's estimation, Dad got defensive—"it's just the media portraying things like that. It's not really like that."

Later as I thought about it I realized that, in my determination to get my dad to agree with my principles, I'd been a hypocrite too. Insisting that someone agree with your tolerant, enlightened, pro-immigration views—well, it's not that tolerant or enlightened. Isn't the whole point of this country that you can think whatever you want about immigration and it doesn't matter what you believe or what the color of your skin is? Me insisting that Dad vote for a nice brown people-friendly party isn't very democratic. It's like saying all black people have to join the NAACP. So if the Old Man wants to vote UKIP next week, I won't stop him. I just pray those photos of him with Nigel don't show up on Facebook any time soon.

Follow Sirin on Twitter.

[body_image width='2000' height='1333' path='images/content-images/2015/04/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/30/' filename='the-poltergeist-that-plagued-a-north-london-house-904-body-image-1430415133.jpg' id='51718']

A scene from 'The Enfield Haunting'

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Enfield is not a place often associated with excitement. Unless the fact that it was the location of Britain's first-ever ATM back in 1967 whips you into a frenzy, it is a town largely devoid of rapture.

But in 1977, the north London borough—and, in particular, the house of 284 Green Street—was the subject of one of the freakiest and most fascinating paranormal investigations in British history. Flying objects, random combustion, levitation, and child possession were just some of the entires in a huge catalogue of supernatural activity that allegedly took place.

Focused on the semidetached house belonging to the Hodgson family, the phantom onslaught sparked media headlines, intense national debate, and a grueling 14-month investigation led by psychic investigator Maurice Grosse and journalist Guy Lyon Playfair.

Despite the presence of startling photographic imagery, demonic-sounding tape recordings, and a generous smattering of witness statements claiming paranormal activity, the case polarized popular opinion. Some thought it was the most obvious example of poltergeist spookery to have ever hit our shores, while others thought it was a load of deluded nonsense and the mischievous trickery of attention-seeking girls.

Thirty-seven years later, the debate has been resurrected with the arrival of Sky Living's new mini-series, The Enfield Haunting. Directed by Kristoffer Nyholm (The Killing), and starring Timothy Spall and Matthew MacFadyen, the three-parter is loosely based on Playfair's Enfield memoirs, This House Is Haunted, before flipping into a relentless Exorcist-style horror.

But what really happened in that house in 1977? And do the witnesses still think the poltergeist was real?

[body_image width='849' height='527' path='images/content-images/2015/04/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/30/' filename='the-poltergeist-that-plagued-a-north-london-house-904-body-image-1430414757.png' id='51717']

Guy Lyon Playfair. Screen shot via Youtube

"Oh yes, it was all absolutely one hundred percent genuine," Playfair tells me. "Something extremely odd was going on. The first night I went to the house I was really struck by the atmosphere of fear. The family were scared out of their wits because of what had happened the night before when the chest of drawers slid across the room. They didn't know what the hell was going on, and that's something you can't fake. And why the hell would you? What would be the point?"

The night in question was the August 31, 1977. The previous day had brought some eerie and unexplained knocking sounds, but the next night 11-year-old Janet and her younger brother Jonny were in their bedroom when a strange rattling began to sound. Irked at the kids' late-night mischief, mother-of-four Peggy burst in to tell them to "pack it in" when a chest of drawers inexplicably shot across the room. Instinctively, Peggy tried to shove it back into place but was unable to, an apparent supernatural force pushing back.

The police were called, and despite WPC Heaps swearing on record that she saw a chair move unaided, no further action was taken. Maurice Grosse, a member of the Society for Psychical Research, and Playfair, who had spent three years investigating poltergeists in São Paulo, came to the house to monitor the activity. In the next few months, according to Playfair, the paranormal floodgates opened.

"It's difficult to separate any single incident because there were so many," he says. "The whole case was full of incidents which were completely inexplicable, like the builder who saw a cushion suddenly appear on the roof, or the lollipop lady who was crossing the road opposite the bedroom window and saw Janet floating around in midair."

[body_image width='1023' height='776' path='images/content-images/2015/05/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/01/' filename='the-poltergeist-that-plagued-a-north-london-house-904-body-image-1430474824.png' id='51860']

A headline from the time of the haunting

Levitation and moving objects were two of the most documented happenings in the house, and when the Daily Mirror sent a team to try to capture some of the activity, they didn't leave empty-handed. "When the children were brought in, suddenly things were bouncing off walls and flying around," photographer Graham Morris explains in the documentary The Enfield Poltergeist. "Suddenly a Lego brick whacked me in the eyebrow."

Morris set up a special camera that enabled him to take remote photo sequences of the girls' bedroom, and the results were alarming. In one particularly striking sequence, Janet is seen in a blood-red nightdress supposedly lifted from her bed and thrown across the room. The pictures, though far from conclusive, certainly make for a highly unsettling montage.

A second photograph from a different night shows Janet lying comatose on the top of a bedroom dresser, her uncle's concerned face staring hauntingly back at the camera. Just a couple of hours earlier, Janet had allegedly been put to bed on the other side of the room after being given enough sedative to "put an elephant out."

However, these two incidents, according to Janet, were not the worst. "The most frightening thing was when a curtain wrapped itself around my neck," she told This Morning in a rare interview in 2012. "I felt cold hands, and there was a force that sort of pulled me out of bed."

Photographs of this incident—a scene that's dramatically recreated in The Enfield Haunting—indicate that the window was closed and appear to show the curtain behaving in a peculiar way. "You can see the curtain twisting itself into a spiral quite clearly and nobody's hands anywhere near it," Playfair asserts. "It was absolutely one hundred percent real."

Janet can be heard, in a demonic rasp, saying, "I went blind and had a hemorrhage and then I fell asleep and I died in a chair in a corner downstairs."

Skeptics disagree, citing camera trickery, with magician Milbourne Christopher and several others suggesting it was "the antics of a little girl who wanted to cause trouble and who was very, very clever." This latter point is a reasonable one, bearing in mind both Janet and her sister Margaret admitted to playing a few tricks during the 14-month period. They hid Playfair's camera, for example, claiming the ghost had taken it and invented a few fibs for a media they knew were clawing for juicy poltergeist titbits. So what did Playfair actually see? And how can he be sure it wasn't the work of the shifty sisters?

"Janet was sitting in the armchair, a very solid one which didn't have any legs," he recalls. "It went right down to the floor so you couldn't kick it over. It was really difficult to get it to turn over at all. She was sitting in the living room and when she got up, the chair started to slide after her and then it shot over backwards. It went over with quite a bang and it was not easy to lift it up again. By this time, Janet was in the kitchen by the sink. You can hear me on the tape recorder, saying, 'Well, you didn't do that one!'"

Janet's role in the case was ever-increasing, up to the point where everything that seemed to happen centered around her. The culmination of this apparent poltergeist fixation was when strange and terrifying voices began to pour from the 11-year-old's mouth. The girl, it seemed, was possessed. A torrent of subconscious gobbledygook was interspersed with coherent messages from an array of different characters. Playfair says, "It was rather like that scene in Ghost with Whoopi Goldberg as the medium and all the spirits fighting to get through."

The production of these weird, gravelly sounds was explained by speech therapists as coming from the false vocal chords at the back of the neck. These chords are often used by actors who want to put on a throaty voice, but producing the sound for more than a few moments usually results in a sore throat. Janet could allegedly keep it up for hours, which helped counter the ventriloquist arguments and also convinced Playfair and others that the poltergeist was speaking through her.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/_OY8CAVNAnA' width='640' height='480']

A recording of Janet speaking in a gravelly voice can be heard at the beginning of this clip.

The most unsettling voice of all was one of an old man apparently named Bill. In a recording carried out by investigator Maurice Grosse, Janet can be heard, in a demonic rasp, saying, "I went blind and had a hemorrhage and then I fell asleep and I died in a chair in a corner downstairs."

This disclosure appeared to be just random, until a man came forward later claiming to be the son of Bill Wilkins, a man who had lived in the house, gone blind, had a hemorrhage, and died in the exact same chair that Janet spoke from.

"It's something that Janet couldn't possibly have known," explains Playfair. "Mixed up with all the swearing and the mischief-making that a poltergeist does, there are some apparent signs that you really are getting through to dead people—spirits, or whatever you want to call them."

Recalling the experience on This Morning, Janet appears clearly troubled. With a ghostly visage, and speaking in a slow tremble, she explains, "I felt like it was behind me, not within me. At one point Maurice Grosse taped my mouth up and he filled my mouth with water—and it still spoke."

Grosse—who died in 2006—said, "It was absolutely terrifying to hear a girl speak in an old man's gruff voice," adding that this and the rest of the case convinced him that there "is something beyond the realm that we normally physically understand."

For more on the supernatural, watch our doc "The Real 'True Blood'?":

Whatever it was that happened in that house, it did eventually stop.

"It was a tremendous anticlimax," says Playfair. "This mysterious Dutch medium came over and did almost nothing that I could see. He went up to the bedroom on his own, and after a quarter of an hour or so, he came down and said, 'It's gone.' I didn't believe him, but sure enough, it was the end of it. Whatever it was he did, it worked."

The strange activity in 284 Green Street ceased, and the family eventually got back on with their lives. At 16, Janet left home and, though still clearly traumatized, has long since married and had kids of her own.

Though cynics continue to ridicule and deride the case, comments on YouTube show that a new army of believers are converted daily, with viewers by-and-large freaked out by the footage.

And what of staunch poltergeist advocate Playfair? Is he still running around the globe in search of mysterious spooks?

"No, no, I don't want to do any more poltergeists," he laughs. "For the last ten years I've been investigating identical twins. The way twins communicate is fascinating. It's a lot more peaceful. They tend to keep still."

The Enfield Haunting premieres at 9 PM on Sunday the May 3 on Sky Living and Sky on demand.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Somewhere between Labour's ill-fated "Barbie bus" and Nicola Sturgeon's Twitter smackdowns, the female vote has, yet again, become a hot topic at election time, with parties scrabbling to engage the 9 million women who failed to vote in 2010.

Now, amid heated debate that the coalition's welfare reforms have hit women harder than anyone else, there's one government tax that has taken centre stage as a symbol for a gendered austerity.

We speak to the female public about the "tampon tax"—a 5 percent VAT on all women's sanitary products, which classes them as "non-essential luxury items"—and ask just how luxurious their time of the month is.

The state's attorney of Baltimore on Friday said she had probable cause to pursue criminal charges against six cops over the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray.

Gray, who died in police custody on April 19 after being arrested a week earlier, was yelling for help before he was loaded into a police van. When he arrived at the station, he was unconscious. His subsequent death has sparked protests around the nation and a riot in Baltimore on Monday. As the local state's attorney, Marilyn Mosby, announced her plans in a news conference, people cheered, the New York Times reports.

What's more, Mosby argued the officers didn't have probable cause to arrest Gray in the first place. Technically, when a person in a high-crime area takes off upon spotting police, the cops have the legal justification to pursue them. However, according to a charging document, he was arrested for carrying a spring-assisted knife. "The knife was not a switchblade, and it is lawful," Mosby said at the press conference. She added that by the time he was removed from the police van, "Mr. Gray was no longer breathing at all."

Warrants have been issued for officers Caesar R. Goodson, Jr., William G. Porter, Lieutenant Brian W. Rice, Edward M. Nero, Garrett E. Miller and Sergeant Alicia D. White. Goodson, the driver of the van, is charged with "depraved heart murder," a legal term for second-degree murder that stems from the callous disregard for human life. It can be punished with up to 30 years in prison. All the officers have been charged with assault and misconduct.

On Thursday, Baltimore police completed an investigation into Gray's death. They also appeared to have leaked a document to the Washington Post suggesting Gray had— improbably—been trying to injure himself. His spinal cord was 80 percent severed, according to his attorney.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

[body_image width='1149' height='752' path='images/content-images/2015/05/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/01/' filename='i-shrugged-off-other-peoples-anxiety-until-it-happened-to-me-body-image-1430498415.jpg' id='51951']

Photo via Flickr user Christopher Paquette

I saunter down Adelaide Street in Toronto's financial district. It's midsummer. I've just had my hair done: it's longer than it's been in years, and blonder now than before. I feel like Gracie Hart in the periwinkle bodycon dress just after she emerges from her makeover (and before she trips).

Half an hour later, I'm sitting on the hard, sticky vinyl chair in my doctor's office answering a series of questions.

"Have you been feeling afraid, as if something awful might happen? Are you having trouble concentrating on things, such as reading the newspaper or watching TV?"

She pelts the questions at me one after the other before pronouncing my fate: "You have severe anxiety and moderate depression." I cry. Hard. Like, mouth-stretched-open bawling. Because I know it.

The reason I was in that doctor's office in the first place was so that I could finally hear it said aloud and begin to deal with it. This was the first doctor to take my complaints seriously. I wanted to sit on the floor of her office for the rest of the day and bury my face in her shoulder and have someone listen to me. But that costs money, and it's not her job. I asked her for a prescription for Ativan, so I could stop the more aggressive symptoms and still focus on my work. She gave me one, along with a box of Kleenex, a link to some therapists, and a blue Post-it with the name of a book on it.

I left feeling worse than I had going in. I thought I would feel relieved, but I felt like a failure. I felt broken into two: there was the beautiful, healthy, capable me, who seemed to have deserted sick, ugly, helpless me. I felt like there was no gluing us together again.

So I unravelled some more. I prescribed to my depression. I stopped getting things done. I stopped pitching stories. I felt anxious about it. There were days last summer when I didn't leave the house. I was self-medicating. I would smoke a joint and come out of it tingling with paranoia. It felt like rolling on Molly but without the pleasure: the energy was all-consuming, but the thoughts were all bad. I wanted to slaughter, in the messiest kind of way, people who blasted Pharrell's "Happy." Happy people, clearly, were intentionally trying to annoy me. But I still bought into the cultural demand that we need to be happy if we expect to be loved. Because I couldn't be happy, I stayed in the house.

My phone didn't help. It was a diseased appendage. I'd wake up to its alarm and spend an hour scrolling, burning with envy over other people's accomplishments. People, as we know, lose their manners entirely on the internet and outwardly brag about their every triumph. I mean, I do it too, but it's excruciating to look at when you're mentally suffering and don't feel capable of producing anything worthwhile. "Fuck, that person I can't stand got to be on TV. That basic-ass person got a book deal. That person is so much skinnier than me." You tell yourself you'll never be smart enough or worthy enough, so you might as well just give up.

But I couldn't look away. The anxiety kept me glued to the screen for hours at a time, afraid I'd miss out on something crucial.

This irritability was compounded by the fact that I could never get enough sleep. Even if I slept for ten or 12 hours, I woke up feeling exhausted. I was writing, but a lot of it made no sense. I couldn't bear to edit it because I had convinced myself that I wasn't a real writer.

I know I'm not alone in these feelings. About 12 percent of Canadians deal with anxiety. According to the Canadian Mental Health Association, one in every ten of us deals with anxiety disorders, like phobias and panic disorders. (I would say that's actually on the low end, as it takes a certain amount of financial privilege to be able to access medical care).

Despite the fact that it's such a common illness, I didn't always know what people felt when they described having anxiety. In my experience, most people don't. When I was in university, a friend in her final year decided not to finish her degree. She had only a few credits left. She said she couldn't deal with the anxiety school was causing, and described feeling sick to her stomach, crying, and being unable to finish papers. I listened and nodded where appropriate, but privately, I felt she should really just suck it up and finish the last few credits.

I felt the same thing later, when another friend would describe her dating-related anxiety. Again, I listened... but sort of thought she should get a grip.

Anxiousness wasn't a foreign feeling to me, but when I felt it, it was always mild. It was also always about something, so it was short-lived: I was going to miss a deadline, I was fighting with a friend. I would get through whatever was bothering me and my panic would subside. I wasn't a constant sufferer.

The severe anxiousness came a few years ago. Here's what happens: my editor emails to say they need me to call them. I immediately jump to the conclusion that they've discovered I'm actually a horrible writer and they never want to hear from me again. That, or I'm being sued. It's emotional pandemonium.

The illness isn't just worries on loop, either. There are physical symptoms too, and those are often what makes it so difficult to function. My hands shake and go clammy, my heart crawls up into my throat, it becomes hard to breathe, and I spend every minute catastrophizing until the phone call is over and done with.

These feelings take me over in various situations, but it's mostly work-related. When I first realized I had anxiety, I worked for a media company at the time, and my boss was an asshole. He was always trying to intimidate me into doing more work than was possible in the run of a day, even a 12-hour-plus one. I had a quota of articles I had to write each month and no contract. The guy was deliberately intimidating, and the subtext each time we had a meeting was that I could be fired at any moment.

Since being diagnosed, I've spent a lot of time listening to myself and trying to pinpoint the root of this disorder on my own. I now realize my anxiety mostly has to do with fear of failure. I hate even the word anxiety. To me it sounds like giving up, like weakness. Like being unable to handle yourself. My Scottish family's pull-up-your-bootstraps mentality has a lot to do with this train of thought. My family doesn't believe in therapy. They don't believe in anxiety disorders, either. My grandfather was a counsellor in a prison, and my stepdad has a military background. He's famous for saying people with mental health issues just need "coping skills." Let's just say there was no room for anything less than a B+ and being home exactly at curfew in my house. Fucking up was not an option.

Since developing more severe anxiety, I've tried to explain to people what it is I've been dealing with. I find people react much the same way my family does: they either think I'm being theatrical, or they ask what is causing the anxiety. People will usually immediately ask "why," as though if you could only identify the reason, you'd be all better! There. Is. Usually. No. Why. This question is maddening. Everything is the reason. There are triggers sometimes, but usually, you wake up and know that day is going to be a write-off because your own mind has betrayed you and the reason is wholly unclear. As Eleanor Morgan wrote this week for VICE UK, "Anxiety is the 'what if disease.'"

It's actually really offensive to suggest that if a person would just get out of their own way and just identify what is causing such a complicated condition, and then tell simply choose to think happy thoughts, they would be cured. If I can't identify what's making me worry, it just makes me all the more anxious because a) that thing is hiding in the dark and b) I must be more of a failure than I thought if I can't identify my own emotions.

But the hardest aspects of this illness, for me, have been the lack of understanding from others and the feeling that I don't actually deserve to be suffering from these afflictions.

My employers didn't get it. Against my better judgment, I've told several of them because I felt like my illness was affecting my work. I told one publisher I needed a raise because my pay barely covered rent and basic necessities, and that I was sick and needed meds. He said I'd have to work longer hours (I was already expected to be available at all hours). I told another I was sick, and could really use the odd day working from home. She said I was a lazy journalist, and unproductive.

Doctors didn't get it, either. I went to see my family doctor when I was about 19 and first realized I probably had depression. She was out on mat leave. I told the woman standing in for her that I thought about killing myself. "Honey," she said, "you need more sleep." About two years ago, I went to a walk-in to see if I could get some meds to help me deal with the anxiety. The doctor there said tough, we all deal with feelings like this at some point. Work less. Get more sleep. (I was a grad student, and I had to work full time.)

My partners also failed to hear what I was saying. That same year, I spent a crisp fall afternoon in Toronto crying, face down, on the kitchen floor of my basement apartment. I called my boyfriend at the time and told him I thought about killing myself a lot. He told me that he had a party to plan, and that he thought I was being melodramatic.

I scraped myself off the floor, put some makeup on, and went out to party. I told myself I needed to get a grip. What cause did I have to be feeling so wretched? I've benefited from just about every privilege there is, and so many others have greater cause to be anxious and depressive than I do. I rationalized that I would be wasting a mental healthcare provider's time by coming to them with my concerns.

Because of the responses I've received when I "confessed" these conditions, I was terrified to write this piece for the longest time. I didn't want to be stigmatized by future employers as someone who "couldn't cope." But then I realized, actually, fuck it, I don't want to work for someone who doesn't have compassion for people with mental illness. I wanted to share this because we present only our best selves to the outside world, but we all struggle in some way. No matter how happy I may seem, I have dark days where all I can do is grapple with myself. If you're in the same boat, you are not alone.

I've also decided to deal with this on my own for the time being. At the time I was diagnosed, I couldn't afford therapy, and I wasn't ready for it. And now, I'm making progress at managing these issues. I've been working hard to figure out what my triggers are. I've been sitting with the experiences that have made me feel like I'm falling apart and writing about them. I've given up recreational drug use (mostly). I've stopped taking the pill, which I felt was exacerbating my symptoms. I've recommitted to meditating, and to yoga. Mostly, I've learned to be compassionate with myself. I'll never be without these conditions—there is no cure. But there is management, and I'm making progress.

These tactics won't work for everyone. And therapy isn't out of the question for me. But right now, learning to show up for myself is the most important thing.

And I find I no longer feel the need to disembowel happy people—on a good day, at least.

If you are worried about the mental health of you or someone you know, visit the Canadian Mental Health Association website.

Follow Sarah Ratchford on Twitter.

Like many countries, Australia calls the governmental departments in charge of its prisons "Corrective" or "Correctional" services. Also like other countries, this framing of their purpose, the idea of prison being a place where men and women are reformed ("corrected") for a successful reintroduction into society, is a bad joke everyone is in on. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, more than half of the people in prison have been imprisoned before. Clearly it's not working.

Given such a poor success rate of fulfilling their stated function it's not surprising that prisons fail to provide adequate care to inmates who suffer from a psychiatric disability. This is important because, as a 2012 study by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) revealed, 44 percent of male and 56 percent of female prison dischargees have been told by a professional that they have a mental disorder. In other words, roughly half of all Australian prisoners require some sort of mental health care.

By law they're entitled to "reasonable access within the prison or, with the Governor's approval, outside a prison to such special care and treatment as the medical officer considers necessary or desirable in the circumstances." In reality such care and treatment is haphazardly achieved. Some get it and some don't. In the AIHW survey almost half of the female respondents and 35 percent of the male ones reported no change in their mental health after their time in prison. Seven percent of women and 9 percent of men said it got a little or a lot worse.

Roughly half of all Australian prisoners require some sort of mental health care.

Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders constitute a disproportionate percentage of the prison population (27 percent compared to 3 percent of the general population) and Indigenous Australians who aren't in prison lack access to adequate or appropriate mental health services. So what you have here is a "correctional" system that fails even to accomplish it's purported purpose saddled with the responsibility of being, too frequently, the first place of treatment for disabled Indigenous Australians.

Recent research in Victoria had 72 percent of male Aboriginal prisoners and 92 percent of female Aboriginal prisoners meeting the criteria for a diagnosis of a major mental illness. As reported on theconversation.com, other states had similar findings.

This is a huge problem. Especially give even the first step to treatment—the diagnosis of the individual—is riddled with issues.

For instance the AIHW report on prisoner health found that 21 percent of the Indigenous people entering prison expressed high or very high levels of distress. Meanwhile, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 2012-13 survey on the health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders found that almost one third (30 percent) of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples aged 18+ reported high/very high psychological distress while outside of prison.

Now, a blank reading of that would lead you to the bizarre (and incorrect) conclusion that Indigenous Australians entering prison are less mentally distressed than those living at home.

VICE spoke to Patrick McGee, co-chair of the Aboriginal disability justice campaign, about this discrepancy.

"There's a significant gulf between white Australia and the cultural specificity of the way we ask and answer questions, and Indigenous Australia, which has a completely different cultural response to these things," McGee told VICE.

72 percent of male Aboriginal prisoners and 92 percent of female Aboriginal prisoners meet the criteria for a diagnosis of a major mental illness.

"We have a culturally bound definition of what 'distress' means. To an Indigenous Australian from a remote community who doesn't have English as their primary language, who may have only come into contact with government services at the time of their arrest—their concept of distress might be very different from what you or I would imagine," McGee added.

A member of the AIHW who agreed to speak off the record but said it was OK to pass on their analysis told VICE the first reason for the difference was that the ABS used a different questionnaire ( the Kessler Scale was used for both but the ABS used the K5, which has five questions, and not the K10, which has ten). Secondly, the member said, as a rule prisons vary in terms of the culturally appropriate systems they have available to Indigenous inmates. Without the correct sort of intermediary it can be difficult to overcome cultural misunderstandings as to what constitutes a mental illness.

The opinions of both Patrick and the AIHW fall in line with those expressed in a 2012 study published in the Medical Journal of Australia. "Indigenous concepts of mental health tend to be broader than psychological distress and behavior problems, and are usually described using the term 'social and emotional wellbeing,'" the study states. "This term acknowledges the importance of factors beyond the individual, such as cultural identification, spirituality and the community."

But even if prisons were to overcome all cultural barriers to mental health assessment, the meager resources devoted to mental health care for Australia's prisoners are chronically overburdened. Prisoners are not serviced under Medicare (Australia's system of universal healthcare) but rather by the Justice system in each state. In Victoria and Western Australia (WA) mental health beds for prisoners typically operate at full capacity, meaning there are long waits for treatment. This is particularly problematic when there are emergencies involving the simultaneous admittance of multiple patients requiring acute psychiatric care.

In WA these events are called "Code Yellows" and Australian Medical Association WA psychiatry spokesman Paul Skerritt told the West Australian that when they happen, the directive to find space in full wards meant unit administrators were "encouraged to kick people out who aren't ready to go."

But it's not just beds. VICE spoke with Jonathon Hunyor, the principal legal officer with the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency, about the ability of staff at prisons to assess symptoms related to mental illness. "There's undoubtedly quite a lot of low-level mental illness, particularly things like depression, that are not routinely picked up," he said.

Without the correct sort of intermediary it can be difficult to overcome cultural misunderstandings as to what constitutes a mental illness.

Prisoners are given an initial assessment of mental wellbeing upon entrance, he said, but there isn't regular screening. "It's not always that it's being missed but that it almost isn't looked for."

An alarming case of this from three years ago was detailed in a Sydney Morning Herald story. New South Wales (NSW) barrister Tania Evans reported that one of her clients was "a complete psychotic" but that he managed to spend months in jail with no visit from a psychiatrist because he didn't request one, and inexperienced staff didn't identify the signs of his condition.

And with regards to treatment there are often mistakes. A common misunderstanding when talking about prisoners with a disability is the difference between a psychiatric disability and a cognitive one. As Patrick McGee explains it, "Psychiatric disabilities are a medical illness that can be treated—cured in some cases—but can always be more or less managed with both medication and psycho-social activities."

But the same is not true for people with cognitive impairment. These are people with intellectual disabilities like acquired brain injuries and fetal alcohol syndrome. In cases such as these, care and monitoring are helpful, but there are limits to what they are able to achieve in terms of looking after themselves and behaving within cultural norms.

For them the kind of outpatient mental health treatment offered by the best prisons (where psychiatric professionals case plan a prisoner's medication, therapy, and follow up on crisis calls) is simply not enough.

An example of someone with cognitive impairment receiving inadequate treatment in prison is the 23-year-old Aboriginal man identified as Mr. KA in the Australian Human Rights Commission 2014 report into inhumane detention and the rights of people with disabilities. Diagnosed with epilepsy and brain injury at 13 months, and intellectual impairment at around six years old, his violent tendencies escalated from aggressive behavior with other children to the alleged dismembering of a puppy and, finally, to the crime that sent him to prison—the stabbing death of his uncle.

Even though he was found unfit to stand trial due to mental impairment, and was returned a qualified verdict (a special acquittal on the grounds of insanity) the report says he was "committed to custody in the Alice Springs Correctional Centre, because there was no practicable alternative considering his circumstances."

On October 6, 2012 Mr. KA bashed his head into the wall of his cell until it bled. Six officers were required to restrain him. His guardian noted in November 2013 that there were 16 occasions where he had been tied to a chair for at least an hour and injected with a tranquilizer. On an average day he spent 16 hours a day in isolation in max security, and was frequently shackled when he was outside his cell.

They effectively got the full-blown mental-asylum treatment—Victorian-madhouse-style.

The Human Rights Commission's report details three other cases . All of them involve Aboriginal men staying in correctional services for longer than their sentences called for because there was no safe way to release them into the community and, because the Northern Territory doesn't have a proper forensic mental health service, nowhere more appropriate to place them. So rather than being held in a prison where they could receive "reasonable access" to "special care" in regards to a cognitive disability, they effectively got the full-blown mental-asylum treatment—Victorian-madhouse-style.

Those cases might seem like the sharp end of the issue but the problem is ongoing—particularly in the Northern Territory, Queensland, and Western Australia.

"One of the saddest things is dealing with the families and the mothers of some of the young men who are in prison," Jonathon Hunyor said. "And they obviously love their son or their brother. And they recognize that that person needs more help than they can give. And it's tragic—the family feels they are failing."

Hunyor said this extends into people who suffer from something that other than a cognitive impairment, who could respond to treatment. "A client [of mine] with schizophrenia spent much longer in prison than he would've on a regular sentence. And there were real concerns raised about the extent of mental health care he was provided over those years in prison, and the lack of things like a proper psycho-education regime for him."

The Aboriginal Disability Justice Campaign is dedicated to stamping out the use of prisons as asylums, releasing a statement, which reads, "There are practical alternatives. In Victoria and NSW, disability services operate specialist accommodation and support programs backed by a wide body of international research."

It's been argued the way forward for criminals suffering from both cognitive and psychiatric issues is community diversion, screening people when they first encounter the justice system, improving access to out-of-prison care for prisoners, and providing better care-on-release services.

And indeed many organizations are dedicated to just that: covering all issues from prisoner welfare to sentencing reform. But there is a relentless back and forth. Tough on crime remains an effective political position and in the past this has resulted in the rolling back of successful policies that diverted the mentally ill from prison, like when Queensland ditched its successful Drug, Murri, and Special Circumstances Courts or when the Northern Territory cut funding for Aboriginal legal services.

Australia's prison population, and the number of prisoners per adult in the population, are both at a ten-year high. Western Australia is on the brink of introducing one of Australia's toughest sentencing laws yet, involving a three strikes rule and yet more punishing mandatory sentences. Earlier this year former Prime Minister Kevin Ruddwarned Australia it was "facing an Indigenous incarceration epidemic."

Given the lay of the land prisons in Australia will remain and perhaps even gain greater significance as the de facto mental health clinics of Australia — already overburdened, this a dangerous future. There is some hope; all the people we spoke to all referred to the justice reinvestment scheme, which "involves the redirection of resources from Corrections budgets to various forms of community provision". It has some popularity overseas.

Hunyor described the tension between law and order and treatment like this, "There's a genuine need to balance community safety with the rights of the individual."

However, "When we want to get serious about trying to make the community safer we will have to start dealing with the causes of offending. And recognize that where people have mental illness and cognitive impairment, that is contributing to their offending, that treatment is going to be a lot cheaper and more effective than just locking people up."

Follow Girard on Twitter.

[body_image width='640' height='480' path='images/content-images/2015/04/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/30/' filename='did-the-american-psychological-association-help-legitimize-cia-torture-430-body-image-1430435582.jpg' id='51828']

A protest against the CIA's torture program that took place in the UK in 2008. Photo via Flickr user Val Kerry

A new report by rogue psychologists and mental health experts alleges that the American Psychological Association (APA) helped justify the Bush administration's torture of detainees in the years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

As the New York Times reported Thursday, dissident members of the professional mental health community allege that a government researcher contributed language to a 2005 APA policy regarding interrogations. And despite tons of communication back and forth, the authors of the report found "there is no evidence that any APA official expressed concern over mounting reports of psychologist involvement in detainee abuse during four years of direct email communications with senior members of the US intelligence community."

The report, called "All the President's Psychologists," is based in large part on the emails of a behavioral researcher named Scott Gerwehr, who died in a motorcycle crash in 2008. On Thursday morning, it was published in full by New York Times reporter James Risen, who had previously referenced some of the correspondences in his 2014 book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War.

In November, the APA said it was lawyering up in response to Risen's book, which claimed the group colluded with senior Bush administration officials to justify its "enhanced interrogation program." The full text of 16 emails that appear in the report's appendix suggests those attorneys have their work cut out for them. (Some 638 total emails informed the report's conclusions.)

One particularly chilling missive came from Geoffrey Mumford, then the director of science policy for the APA, in 2003. "You won't get any feedback from Mitchell or Jessen" he wrote in reference to so-called architects of the torture program. "They are doing special things to special people in special places, and generally are not available."

That year, the Associated Press published now famous photographs detailing sexual and psychological abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In 2004, the US Senate started investigating, and pretty much ever since, the APA has denied any wrongdoing or involvement. But a 2005 email by Mumford makes the coordination of the White House and the APA more explicit:

I was pleased to help staff the Task Force and [former Bush White House official Dr.] Susan [Brandon] serving as an Observer (note she has returned to NIMH, at least temporarily) helped craft some language related to research and I hope we can take advantage of the reorganization of the National Intelligence Program, with its new emphasis on human intelligence, to find a welcoming home for more psychological science.

President Obama formally halted enhanced interrogation in 2009, but it was only this December, when the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a 500-page executive summary on "enhanced interrogation," that the public found out about atrocities like "rectal feeding" and interrogators threatening to kill detainees' families.

In the meantime, rumors of collusion between America's premier psychological organization and the feds persisted—so much so that last November, the APA launched an independent investigation into the matter. The author's note for "All the President's Psychologists" expresses hope that these emails will inform that probe, which is expected to be released by Chicago attorney David Hoffman sometime this spring.

Until then, at least, the APA is sticking to its guns, with a spokeswoman insisting to the Times that there "has never been any coordination between APA and the Bush administration on how APA responded to the controversies about the role of psychologists in the interrogations program."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/05/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/01/' filename='sitting-down-with-the-godfather-of-chilean-documentary-film-body-image-1430506934.jpg' id='51973']

Patricio Guzmán's landmark documentary, The Battle of Chile, blew my mind when I first saw it a few years ago. As a first-generation Chilean-Canadian and member of a family deeply affected by the country's military coup and dictatorship, it was a revelation. Just like so many people in Chile who either didn't talk about the coup and the atrocities that followed or were willfully blind to them, seeing The Battle of Chile felt as important as unlocking the history and memory of an entire country—it's as intimate as hearing my aunts and uncles tell their stories around the dinner table. That's the power of Guzmán. He can take a massive topic, like how Chilean politics and society spiraled into chaos in the years leading up to the coup, and turn it into an epic you can't take your eyes off.

It's no wonder, then, that The Battle of Chile has been called one of the greatest documentaries ever made and is shown in film classes around the world.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/0VEIeAa6DiM' width='500' height='281']

I thought it couldn't get any better until I watched Guzmán's 2010 film, Nostalgia for the Light. You've got the tireless, sombre hope of mothers looking for the remains of their disappeared children in Chile's Atacama Desert. Then there's the man who learned astronomy in a desert concentration camp, along with the incredible visuals of the desert and the telescopic views of space. They all culminate in the story of one woman who works in one of the many international observatories in the Atacama. She's trained to look for truth and life in the stars. But the work mirrors her own yearning for the truth about what happened to her disappeared parents.

At 73, Guzmán just won a silver bear from the Berlin International Film Festival for his new film, The Pearl Button. It's coming to TIFF in September and Guzmán is already busy working on his next doc. He's also the founder of Chile's international doc festival, FIDOCS. I sat down with the godfather of Chilean documentary film to talk about his love for Canada, his disappeared friend, and the deadly and famous cameraman scene in The Battle of Chile.

VICE: Two of your documentaries were Canadian co-productions: Chile, Obstinate Memory and My Jules Verne. How has Canada informed your work?
Patricio Guzmán: Many things tie me to Canada from a cinematographic point of view. One of the institutions I admired most when I was young was the National Film Board because NFB films came to Chile at that time. There were a lot of Canadian documentaries that educated us. I remember the experimental films of [Norman] McLaren that played an important role for us. We didn't know anything about those types of films. I remember seeing a film about Paul Anka that we young Chileans watched at that time.

What about Lonely Boy?
I think so, yes. I don't remember the name of the director. So the National Film Board along with Film Division in India, that were founded by [John] Grierson are part of the history of documentary film, so it's fundamental for us [in Chile].

Later, I was able to come here for six months to Montreal to edit and complete a film for ARTE in France called Chile: Obstinate Memory. So that gave me the opportunity to get to know the NFB, to walk its halls like I had dreamed about, to see the photo of McLaren in the entrance and that was a beautiful moment.

Didn't the cold bother you in Montreal?
No, not really, because remember, it also gets cold in Chile and there are cloudy climates. We know that darkness, too, but it's not like here where it's much worse. But a friend lent me a huge parka as well as his car, so I could drive to the National Film Board at 20 km/h because the snow was treacherous. I hadn't had that experience. I liked it there and I even thought about moving here. My wife came to visit for a month from Paris and she brought our cat that had never seen the snow before. We had a good time.

I want to ask you now about The Battle of Chile. At the end of Part One, we witness the death of the Argentinian cameraman Leonardo Henrichsen, through his own lens. Why did you choose to use that footage?
Because it's an extraordinary image to end a film with. I mean, the first part ends with a failed coup attempt and you see the arrival of tanks. You start to see people fleeing and the presidential palace is coming under siege. And then, all of a sudden, you see a military truck and soldiers firing and the person filming falls, it's a very strong way to end the film. It seemed legitimate to me to use it.

The scene has a big impact, as you know. What would you say to someone seeing that scene for the first time?
I would say something very simple. There are some military officers and soldiers in all parts of the world who are fascists, unjust, and inhuman, who are capable of killing a simple cameraman, who are capable of torturing and oppressing an entire society. You have to keep that in mind, always. I am not an enemy of soldiers in principle, but I confess that each time I come across one, I don't look at him because what they did in Chile cannot be forgotten.

My parents are Chilean. They lived the coup and the dictatorship in Santiago. A friend of my dad's was one of the people disappeared by the Chilean armed forces. Your friend and colleague Jorge Müller Silva disappeared 41 years ago. In all these years, has anything been discovered about what happened to him?
No, in fact. We don't know what happened to Jorge. It's likely that his body was thrown into the ocean. In my latest film, The Pearl Button, I talk about the 1,400 people that were thrown into the ocean. It's possible that he was buried in the yard of an army regiment and that his body is still there in a mass grave. But we don't know for sure. And if you can believe the turns of life, Jorge's father came to Chile to escape the Nazis in Germany because he was Jewish. And then his son becomes a victim of Latin American fascism.

There are a couple of themes developed in The Battle of Chile, that of resistance and that of revolution. Here in Canada, there are different movements taking shape, including a student movement in Quebec and resistance to the oil industry and pipelines. What do you make of those movements? What do you think they can learn from Chile's history?
I believe that those movements are the ones we can learn from, like the Indignados in Spain, or [the student movement] in Chile. I'm talking about informal movements, without formal political parties behind them, but groups, archipelagos of people with concerns who unite or break apart, but that walk together. And taking politics into your own hands like that seems like a legitimate path to me.

It's like in documentary film. Don't wait for television companies to give you money. Grab a camera, make your film, and send it to festivals because TV won't listen to you. They keep making stereotyped programs that we already know. They don't dare take on essential issues. But we do.

So, the students and the protesters here are within their legitimate rights to form a human river of opposition to conventional politics. We've had it up to here with conventional politics and we have to change it, at least a bit.

Thank you very much for your time and for being here with us.
Thank you and I celebrate that this channel exists [VICE] and hope that it keeps fighting for these popular struggles wherever intelligent people live.

Patricio Guzmán's Chile, Obstinate Memory plays at Hot Docs International Documentary Festival on May 2.

Four days after Maryland Governor Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency, and three nights into the citywide 10 PM to 5 AM curfew, Baltimore lawyers and activists are beginning to grapple with exactly how the official response to unrest over the death of Freddie Gray has impacted protesters' constitutionally protected legal rights.

Perhaps the most controversial decision of the past few days came on Tuesday, when Hogan suspended a state rule that requires an individual to be brought before a judicial officer or released from jail within 24 hours following their arrest. The decree paved the way for arrestees to languish in jail for up to 47 hours without charges. The Maryland Public Defender's Office issued a statement Wednesday challenging Hogan's legal authority to tell the judiciary what to do.

That night, 101 of the 201 arrested protesters were released from jail without charges. At a press conference earlier Wednesday, Baltimore Police Captain Eric Kowalczyk said his department had struggled to file formal charges against the protesters because officers were so busy responding to emergencies elsewhere; he insisted that charges would still be filed at a later date.

"On a normal day, if I'm a patrol officer and I was filing a charge, it could take upwards of two hours," Sarah Connolly, a Baltimore Police spokeswoman, told VICE. "But when you're having multitudes of arrests, and when you are working to ensure the preservation of life and property, which was paramount, it just wasn't possible [to file all the charges.]"

Natalie Finegar, the Baltimore Deputy District Public Defender, told VICE that Hogan's order is a clear instance of the executive branch overstepping its legal bounds. She notes that there is already a judicial provision within the Court of Appeals to change the 24-hour detention rule in the case of an emergency. Hogan's executive order, Finegar contends, demonstrates disregard for the checks and balances of the legal system.

Other experts point out that holding uncharged people in jail is simply bad policy regardless of the legality, especially in this fraught political moment. "If the citizens of Baltimore are reacting [on the streets] to longstanding systemic issues, then dealing with arrestees in a systematically unfair manner, like leaving people in jail without charges, doesn't really seem to be an effective response," said Cherise Fanno Burdeen, the executive director of the Pretrial Justice Institute, a nonprofit committed to pretrial justice reform.

Another reason few charges were filed this week is because Baltimore's district courts closed after Monday's riots. In Baltimore City, courts close fairly frequently for all sorts of reasons, including snow days; the judiciary decides when to close the courts. On Tuesday, none were open, and on Wednesday just one out of four was operational—creating a serious backlog for cases that would have normally been divvied up. (By Thursday, all four district courts had reopened.)

"Courts are not supposed to shut down, especially when you're arresting hundreds of people in a moment of crisis," said Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. "If people are being arrested, courts should be open to handle the cases. The wheels of justice should continue to spin equally for everyone at all times."

In light of Hogan suspending the 24-hour rule, Finegar told VICE that her office filed 82 habeas corpus petitions on behalf of detained arrestees. (The Guardian had previously reported that Hogan had effectively suspended the state's habeas corpus law, but this is misleading, as state and federal habeas corpus laws—which gives detainees the ability to seek relief from unlawful imprisonment—are unchanged.) However, before those habeas corpus petitions could be ruled upon, the city released the remaining uncharged protesters in a nod to the fact that they no longer had the authority to detain them. Finegar believes that many who were released on Wednesday were illegally held in the first place.

Another issue is that many arrested protesters were given extraordinarily high bail amounts. Some were apparently even asked to pay their bail all at once, in cash—which is notable given that detainees usually have the option to pay deposits or to take out loans from bondsmen.

"For my clients, a $50,000 cash-only bail is tantamount to no bail," said Finegar. "I'm a nice middle-class public servant and even I couldn't post something like that."

"What is unconstitutional is using money to detain and deprive an individual of due process," Burdeen added. "And yet that is essentially what is happening here." The Guardian reported on one case where a 19-year-old had bail set at half a million dollars. The defendant, who failed to produce the money, was then sent to jail. Generally speaking, if a detainee cannot make bail and cannot take out a loan, then they will essentially serve a jail sentence before even being found guilty of a crime. According to Finegar, that could mean sitting in jail for anywhere from 30 days to a year.

"We have to look beyond the law if we want to really reform the criminal justice system." –Alexandra Natapoff

On Thursday afternoon, ACLU-Maryland's legal director Deborah A. Jeon sent a letter to Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake calling for an end to the citywide curfew. "We have a right to demand policy changes of our government.... and we have a constitutionally protected right to do so on the streets and sidewalks of Baltimore." Jeon added that at this point the curfew's "unnecessary restrictions" seemed to do more to stoke community resentment than to ensure public safety.

The curfew is a First Amendment issue more so than a criminal one. And First Amendment decisions are often seen as balancing acts between the need for public safety and to protect one's right to protest, move, and assemble. "It has to be a reasonable balance, and whether this curfew is a reasonable one is subject to debate," said Eve Brensike Primus, a University of Michigan law professor.

In a Thursday evening press conference, Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said that despite the city's relative calm, they would not be lifting the curfew this weekend because there are large protests planned. "We have a lot more protests that are popping up by the minute, and even if we didn't, we have other cities that have large protests and their activities impact our city too," said Batts.

The argument that Baltimoreans should be kept under curfew because protests are happening in other cities certainly raises some serious constitutional questions.

Activist groups are responding to these issues; the Ferguson Legal Defense Committee is operating a jail support hotline. On Wednesday night, the Public Justice Center (PJC), a Baltimore-based legal advocacy organization, held an event to train lawyers, law students, and legal experts in jail support and legal observing for demonstrations. Nearly 50 people showed up, which, according to PJC attorney Zafar Shah, was beyond the group's expectations. "There wasn't enough seating," he said. In addition, Maryland Public Defender Paul B. DeWolfe issued a call for private lawyers to help represent the 201 protesters arrested on Monday night. DeWolfe told the Daily Record that many private attorneys have offered their services.

Of course, it's safe to say a few well-intentioned lawyers are unlikely to change the game here.

"Yes there will be lawsuits, and appropriately so, but we can't rely on them to fix the underlying problem," said Natapoff. "We have to look beyond the law if we want to really reform the criminal justice system. That's why these protests all over the country are so important."

Follow Rachel M. Cohen on Twitter.