From the Medical Post, Vol 36, issue 9 March 7, 2000

Psychiatrist, author, filmmaker and artist, Dr. Dawson leaves few stones unturned

Double Blind, Hamilton psychiatrist Dr. David Laing Dawson's mystery novel, was described by Publisher's Weekly as "a medical mindblower" while Dr. Dawson himself was described as "a sure-handed competitor of Robin Cook."

Today, Dr. Dawson, novelist, filmmaker, artist and gallery owner, outlined his new passion: "to raise funds to produce a commercially viable, entertaining drama with an accurate depiction of schizophrenia. A depiction that counters the misleading material that we see from Hollywood."

His original screenplay, Drummer Boy, is ready and he has formed a production company called Nexus Media in partnership with former National Film Board filmmaker Don Duchene. The film project is endorsed by both the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario and the Hamilton Program for Schizophrenia, a treatment agency, as well as Canadian actor and Gemini Award nominee Ron White. White appeared in a previous film that Dr. Dawson wrote and starred in the Dan Akroyd TV movie on the Avro Arrow.

Dr. Dawson is presently raising money for the production and exploring the possibility of turning this into an investment opportunity for interested people. Low budget, independent films, while risky, do have the potential to return a considerable amount.

Dr. Dawson used as one example My Left Foot, the movie that dealt with a person struggling with cerebral palsy. The film cost $2.5 million to make and earned $14.7 million. His own film, he said in an interview, can be done for about $100,000 as a digital video or as a proper feature film for about $500,000 to $700,000.

Neither Dr. Dawson nor the production company will get paid in order to keep costs to a minimum.

"Dramatic, entertaining movies," he said, "have depicted Down's syndrome and autism in an accurate and responsible way, albeit with some poetic license. They have made major contributions to the public acceptance and then treatment of people with these disorders.

"Unfortunately, people suffering from schizophrenia are usually depicted as deranged psycho killers, clever frauds seeking a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity verdict, or eccentrics touched by angels. These films leave the public with the impression that schizophrenics should be locked up in maximum security hospitals, prisons or simply left alone."

Drummer Boy will depict schizophrenia in an accurate manner but will also be "an entertaining visually alluring and suspenseful thriller." He said the movie Shine, depicting the life of Australian pianist David Helfgot, "missed an opportunity to show schizophrenia in a realistic fashion." Helfgot was presented as someone with an overbearing father who helped precipitate the breakdown and thus prevented his son from playing for many years. Dr. Dawson suspects that Helfgot did continue to play while in hospital and that his discharge and the resumption of his career resulted from the improved medications that came into use for schizophrenia. He was able to get his illness under control.

Not surprisingly, Dr. Dawson's psychiatric area of expertise is schizophrenia as well as the treatment of borderline personality disorder. Until 1995, he was psychiatrist-in-chief and clinical director of the Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital. Since then, he has remained active in psychiatry on a part-time basis. He served as a consultant to the Nova Scotia Hospital Forensic Service in Dartmouth and is presently a consultant to the Cape Breton Health Care Complex in Sidney. He also conducts workshops on treating patients with borderline personality and is currently helping out in Cambridge, Ont. where they recently lost one of their psychiatrists.

When he left the psychiatric hospital in 1995, Dr. Dawson and his wife purchased an old industrial building in the rundown north end of Hamilton. The building had originally been a small steel company headquarters but had been transformed into a school and then union offices. Dr. Dawson renovated the building into a combination art gallery, art studio for himself, and home for his family along with commercial space. The Gallery on the Bay, located on Bay St. N. and with a view of the Hamilton Bay from the windows in Dr. Dawson's writing office, is one of the premiere art galleries in Hamilton. It showcases the works of a number of local artists and, on occasion, Dr. Dawson's own work as well.

Dr. Dawson said he was taught how to draw and paint by his mother at the family's dining room table in Victoria where he grew up. Art was not something that was cool for a heterosexual teenage male in those days, he said, so he painted privately and drew cartoons publicly.

"It was OK to be a cartoonist," he said, and he did that for school papers in both high school and university. He continued to paint over the years, mainly in oils.

His work has been shown in both Toronto and Hamilton galleries prior to the opening of his own gallery.

Dr. Dawson does watercolour sketches of landscapes while on holiday and then turns them into large oils on his return.

Dr. Dawson has also been writing for many years and has had four mysteries published. Last Rights and Double Blind have been released in the U.S. and throughout Europe and Essondale has been published in Germany and Canada.

Interestingly, more copies of Last Rights have sold in Iceland than in Canada, he said. The locale forDouble Blindwas set in Baltimore in order to make it of more interest to U.S. audiences and he did extensive research in that city.