Helen (2008).  

Drawing inspiration from the suicide of a childhood friend, the writer and director, Sandra Nettelbeck, orchestrates a story that somehow avoids punishing the audience as much as its heroine. Demanding patience but not blood, the film keenly conveys the profound isolation of mental illness and the futility of searching for someone, or something, to blame. In roles that could have devolved into arias of melodrama, the cast never overplays its hand, fighting the omnipresent melancholy in small ways rather than large.

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It's Kind of a Funny Story

A depressed teenager checks himself into a mental ward, sees how crazy everybody else is - "My bed's on fire!" - and feels suddenly cured. But he finds out that, no, sorry, he cannot leave. He must stay for a legally mandated five days.
When he is told this, he is understandably crestfallen, and so are we in the audience. We know: If he's not getting out, we're not either, and at first the prospect of a long stretch doesn't seem promising. How on earth will he fill the time? How will the filmmakers? How will the audience? And then gradually, what seems awful becomes human, what seems foreign becomes familiar, and about halfway into this sincere and surprisingly lovable movie, a vacation feeling sets in. He doesn't want to leave, and neither do we.

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Wristcutters: A Love Story

Suicide is very much a laughing matter in "Wristcutters: A Love Story," a genially warped road-trip comedy that imagines a special purgatory for those who have willfully departed the land of the living. Though its absurdist inventions occasionally border on twee, this affectionate slow-blooming romance mines an understated vein of comic melancholy that the actors' wistful performances perfectly capture. Prime specialty fare is sure to find passionate admirers in limited release and marks an auspicious feature debut for helmer Goran Dukic.

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People Say I'm Crazy

A rare look at mental illness from the point of view of the afflicted, ''People Say I'm Crazy'' is a diarylike documentary that records several years in the life of John Cadigan, a young man who, he says, experienced his first psychotic break with reality as a 21-year-old art student in Pittsburgh. The film . . . is made up of video clips, some shot by Mr. Cadigan and others by his older sister, Katie, who emerges as his strongest pillar of support during his prolonged illness. As Mr. Cadigan, in a voice-over narration, describes the ups and downs of his disease, he illustrates his points with scenes from his own life of quiet desperation. He moves from depression and paranoia to full-blown psychotic episodes, eventually somewhat softened by new medications that come on the market.

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