How is therapeutic activism? It remains to be developed, but by challenging the psychiatric consensus around depression's etiology, symptomatology, and therapy, filmmakers like Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Kanakan Balintagos, Kelly Reichardt and Angela Schanelec create the intellectual conditions for its proliferation, and legitimize the sorts of grassroots practices that have historically grown in response to pandemics.

In response to the cataclysmic events of the 1980s, Paula A. Treichler turned to visual culture and art to protest the hegemonic discourse of “scientists, physicians and public health authorities who argued repeatedly that AIDS represented ‘an epidemic of infectious disease and nothing more’” (1999: 1). Defying their authoritative consensus on the matter, she asserts, “AIDS is more than an epidemic disease, it is an epidemic of meanings” (1999: 1). Once the authority of the disease model was contested through recourse to visual culture, it became possible to reimagine the nature of the pandemic and initiate ways of acting in and on the crisis. In the 1980s-90s, HIV/AIDS activists seized the opportunity offered by the crisis in which they lived and loved to prompt a collective reimagining of modes of relationality. Much of the activism that arose utilized the media of the time, especially VHS tapes, but independently published magazines as well, to change the narrow set of meanings that network television's fear mongering stapled onto the pandemic. New images and perspectives that constructed the subjective cartography of life with HIV/AIDS in a much different light than either science or the mainstream media vacated a role for non-professional involvement.

Acting therapeutically in the grips of the AIDS crisis came to imply a multiplicity of relational practices, such as collective quilting, gatherings and vigils to mourn the mounting deaths, caring for the sick, sharing knowledge about different treatment methods and their side effects, and promoting overall health. These collective acts ultimately became as indispensible for well-being as going to the doctor or taking one's medication.