This week the Seattle True International Film Festival (STIFF) is featuring Seattle physician Delaney Ruston’s Unlisted: A Story of Schizophrenia, a film about her father, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia shortly after she was born. At the time, Richard Ruston was a graduate student in English at Berkeley. During his wife’s pregnancy the couple was evicted from apartments five times because among other things he’d climb telephone poles and scream at people from his perch. Her parents divorced when Delaney was a baby.
Still, this father adored his daughter and tried to stay in touch with her. Richard’s parents told her that he depended on her presence in his life to give him a sense of stability, but Delaney never knew whether he’d quietly play chess with her during one of her visits or pace around his apartment fuming that CIA agents were spying on him. Sometimes he’d show up at her school crying and calling her name through the fence, humiliating her and scaring her classmates, until staff emerged to quiet him down.
... (Continued at Crosscut)