Success is a journey.

Dec 17, 2023

You don’t often see a judge cry.

But Cook County Circuit Court Judge Lauren Edidin was repeatedly brushing away tears on Thursday — though she would be quick to point out it was not in her own courtroom but at a decidedly emotional event: the latest graduation ceremony of the Skokie Mental Health Court.

“I’m really going to try not to cry,” she told those gathered at the 2nd Municipal District courthouse in Skokie.

Mental Health Court is one of three types of Cook County’s 20 “problem-solving courts.” The other two are veterans court and drug court. Rather than trying to punish non-violent offenders — the accused must plead guilty to participate — these courts try to address the problems that pave the way for criminality.

“We help participants learn how to live and succeed with their illness,” Edidin said. “This program exists to help participants find long-term housing, set up treatment plans, receive job training, obtain insurance and Social Security benefits. The program formulates individual plans, based on participants’ specific needs.

Also present was Margaret Byrne, a filmmaker whose “Any Given Day” is a documentary on three mentally ill Chicagoans and featuring Edidin and the Mental Health Court.

“It was used as professional development for Cook County judges,” Byrne said. “That was something I was really proud of.”

The movie won the Chicago Award at the 2021 Chicago International Film Festival. It’s available for the next month on PBS World Channel and is well worth watching.

Mental illness can be a bleak subject, but Byrne’s film gets viewers past that.

First, it’s just beautiful to look at — the way she frames scenes, diving the screen in interesting ways, projecting the passage of time, which is an essential quality experienced by those trying to escape the chutes and ladders maze of mental illness.

Second, how she builds interest in her three subjects, tracking their peaks and valleys.

Daniel Brown, who was present in the courtroom, having turned his life around, gone to culinary school and now hoping to open a food truck.

“I been on the bottom,” Brown says in the movie. “Now, I feel I’m a part of the human race.”

Byrne is now working on a film about a string of wrongful convictions tied to retired CPD Det. Reynaldo Guevara.

In “Any Given Day,” she folds herself in among the mentally ill whose lives she chronicles.

“I figured out that the things I worked so hard to hide, don’t need to be hidden,” she says. “That there’s power in connecting ... Success does not just look like one thing. Success is a journey.”