In Denmark, there are 100,000 children whose parents are either hospitalized or outpatients in psychiatry, in addition there are 200,000 children whose parents are in regular contact with a psychologist or other help. That is 300,000 Danish children - or four children in each class - who has parents that struggle with mental illness. We know that carrots, vitamin pills and milk keep the body going, but we have a harder time figuring out what to do if our emotions become uncontrollable.
In conversation with Anne Thorup, senior physician at the Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Center, she tells me that a large part of the problem lies in the media.
This project is about my relationship with my father, and his two illnesses - Bi-polar disorder and prostate cancer.

a love that never runs out2022-23

Here my father is wearing his suit jacket, which he got from his father, my grandfather. He has worn the jacket to many parties and danced a lot with it on. On the wall my father has screwed a plastic chair and hung a barbie doll on top, I don't know why.In his hands he holds a painting he found in a rubbish bin, on the painting he has taped a receipt. The receipt on the painting dates from an evening when he had bad pain in his arms and feet. He was lying on the floor crying out in pain, he said I should cycle down for pills. A few days later I had planned to move into my own apartment, that I had been allowed to rent, the plan was for my father to drive the moving van. But then this happened. "I can't drive that car, I can't press the accelerator with this pain." he said while lying on the floor... that same evening, after he had recovered but was still in pain, he said he had to go to a dance event in Frederiksberg, he ordered a taxi, and drove off.

My father was allowed to leave the hospital unaccompanied, so we went to our old apartment, which was otherwise empty of people. Before my father was hospitalized, he had bad pain in the palms of his hands and on the soles of his feet, due to his cancer. The doctors said there was nothing that could help it, but he had tried reflexology for another problem, and thought it might help now. So even though I got hot water when my father offered me coffee, because coffee was too expensive, he had now rented a massage chair with reflexology worth 50,000.

This device will monitor my father's heart and whether it is pumping properly. Doctors have discovered problems with his heart after he took medication for his mental illness.

I visited my father at the Glostrup psychiatric outpatient clinic in Glostrup, he does not look like himself, his eyelids are heavy and he drags his feet along the floor when he walks.Excerpt from my diary:
"Did you just wake up, you look really tired." I ask
"No, I just went for a walk".
“Ok, where to?” I ask
"Just around here" replies my father.
It's 6 p.m. He must have been walking all day. "Yes... the highlights of the day in here are actually breakfast and lunch and dinner... otherwise not much else happens."
We talk a bit about technology, which we are both interested in, but my father doesn't have the same enthusiasm as he used to.
"I had my heart rate checked yesterday and my heart is beating too slowly..." says my father. "Ok... I'm sorry to hear that."... "is that something you feel?" I ask, "no, not really," he replies."Well, but I'm going to dinner here soon." He says
My father's heart beats too slowly, the doctors said it might be because of the medication he takes for his bi-polar disorder…

The door to my old room in my father's apartment, when I lived there it said "Tim Bertrams Kammer" but since I moved out something has been added: "You made me complete, you made me come to me"

From a trip to town. My father is wearing my old trousers, shoes he got from the commune and a shirt he got from the hospital.

Every wall in my father's apartment is drawn, written or painted on. This one is a kind of status about my father's life. It presents the different options my father has. It has the KnækCancer logo on it, from the logo starts an arrow that seems to point towards his death on the cross, the date he has determined based on the doctors' assessment of his estimated lifespan. Then it says -Li, it stands for -Lithium, meaning that he refrains from taking lithium. Lithium is the medicine you take for bi-polar disorder, and if he doesn't take lithium, he becomes bi-polar, and that leads (according to him ) to him being forced into hospital and being forced to take lithium anyway. And in case he is hospitalized, he sets up 4 disadvantages and a potential quality of life maintenance. The four disadvantages are lack of trust in his ex-wife (my mother), lack of job opportunities, poor finances and lack of an enriching life (The triangle on the left is Maslow's pyramid of needs). The one advantage there is, on the other hand, is me, his son. Next to "son" he writes "(self-choice)", which means if I still want to invest in our time together.

This is a portrait I took of my father, it was taken about 2 years before this project, he looks much better than he does now. The second picture is an old picture of my father riding his motorcycle, he had a welder make a support wheel so he could ride and subsequently photoshop the support wheel out of the picture.

My father has had a problem with his eyes in recent years, they close by themselves and cannot open again. No one knows why, he is trying to find connections between the times his eyes close, it has not been possible to conclude anything completely yet.

The fourth time I visited my father in the hospital where he lived, I was allowed to see his room. The other three times I had visited he had said that I was not allowed to see his room, but it dawned on him that he did not know why he said that. I entered a small room with a single bed, a small toilet with a bath and a chest of drawers. On the wall hung a whiteboard with a matching marker, on the whiteboard was sparsely written "be positive" it was my father's handwriting.

The first time I visited my father in the hospital I hadn't seen him for a long time, I was nervous. The last time we said goodbye, it was in conflict. I hadn't spoken to him for a few months after he was admitted. I wrote him a message:
“Can I come and visit you on Sunday or Monday?”
"Yes, that would be nice"
The building was large but uniform and difficult to find around, there were many long corridors. Close to the hospital was a large water tower. The buildings were a yellow color and the flowers were overgrown.

We are lifting my father's sofa down the stairs because my father has been kicked out of his flat, he has had too many complaints for loud music. he has difficulty lifting the sofa, he has become weaker after he started taking chemo treatment for his cancer. After the move, my father gets huge bills for new paint for the walls, and movers for the sofa and other furniture he has put in the wrong place.

This machine gave my father radiation treatment.

Here my father is getting chemo chemicals pumped into his veins.

When my father was manic his eyes would change, they would flicker and look insistent.

This mask was formed after my fathers face, it's used for holding his head still when he would get radiation treatment. The cancer had spread far into all of his body.

All the medicine made my father weak, im helping him pick up a small refrigerator even though he lived 50 meters from the store.

This is the night when my dad had sharp pains in his hands and feet, because of the medicin. He's screaming for help from a doctor in the other end of the phone call, that says there's really nothing to do.

My father's sat in the taxi on the way to the dancing event, minutes after the pains in his hands and feet. This kind of thoughtlessness was prominent, when he was manic.

Because of the cancer treatment, my fathers immune system was in a bad state, this ment that one among many symptoms was that his mouth couldn't fight bacteria. His tastebuds became disrupted, and food started tasting horrible. He found out that milk was the only thing he could stand tasting, so it became the only nutrients he got.

A couple of days after christmas eve 2023, i was at my grandma's when my phone started ringing. i didn't think anything of it until my mother told me to call back. My father had stayed at the hospital for some time, It was the nurse, in the phone, that told me that he was not well. He had most likely had a blod clot in the brain over the night.
I hugged my grandparents, they were both crying, and me and my mother hurried to the hospital. The nurse told us that he died half an hour ago.
She showed us to his room, i tread carefully. Im nervous, and trying not to show it. In the bed around the corner lies a wax doll of him, or that's what it looks like...His skin is pale, and it looks heavy, like its been pulled back on his face. The absence of life in his body is scary, im tense.I touch his cold hand, talk a bit to him, and go home.

When we're heading out the nurse tells us that the doctors found out just before he died, that he was lactose intolerant. But recently the only thing he was able to consume was milk. He would've laughed at that.
He showed me many times that if he said his full name into a recorder and reversed the audio, it would say "slemme tilfælde" (bad coincidence).

My mother

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