About the Film

An Astrological Diagnosis is a personal experimental film exploring the intersections of Black motherhood, mental health, and spirituality. Seeking answers outside of psychiatry, filmmaker Nadia Naomi Mbonde turns to astrology and altered states of consciousness—dreams, visions, delusions, and intuitive knowings—as portals of meaning. These “otherworldly experiences” become a counter-language to psychiatry, offering tools of survival and self-understanding in the face of stigma. Guided by the voice of an astrologer, the audience moves between celestial landscapes and intimate, everyday rituals of mothering, as Nadia reveals how the rhythms of the stars, her artistic practice, and embodied rituals create pathways to healing and liberation. Through dance, self-portraiture, digital collage, and archival family footage, the film resists pathologizing language and reframes Black maternal mental health through creativity, spirituality, and lived experience—inviting audiences to reimagine mental illness not as a deficit, but as a portal into deeper ways of knowing and mothering.

This film was supported by the Society for Visual Anthropology/Robert Lemelson Foundation Fellowship, made possible by a generous donation from the Robert Lemelson Foundation.

Why An Astrological Diagnosis?

Reimagining mental health: Challenges psychiatry’s narrow frameworks by centering Black maternal mental health as expansive, spiritual, and creative.

Confronting stigma: Exposes how psychiatry has historically pathologized mothers of color and reinforced harmful “bad mother” stereotypes.

Astrology as counter-language: Uses astrology and altered states—dreams, visions, delusions, intuitive knowings—as alternative ways of making meaning.

Valuing otherworldly experiences: Reframes altered states not as deficits, but as portals to resilience, insight, and transformation.

Creative survival: Shows how art, ritual, and cosmic connection serve as technologies of survival and healing.

Centering Black women: Affirms the need for Black women to claim new forms of care, on their own terms, outside of systems that have erased or silenced them.

Collective invitation: Expands one mother’s story into a call to reimagine Black maternal mental health as complex, deeply human, and worthy of honor.

Screenings

An Astrological Diagnosis has been screened at the American Anthropological Association Annual Conference in Seattle, at the immersive 9+ Months exhibit hosted by the Postpartum Mothers Mobile Study (PMOMS) at the University of Pittsburgh, and at academic and artistic venues including the University of Florida, Rice University, and the Screening Scholarship Media Festival at the University of Pennsylvania.

Each screening created opportunities for dialogue around Black maternal mental health, mental illness, and creative survival, allowing audiences to engage with the work as both art and research. Sharing the film in these spaces also helped me build trust and establish relationships with interlocutors for my dissertation.

Many participants connected with the themes of astrology, altered states, and motherhood reflected in the film, and their resonance with the work opened pathways for deeper ethnographic collaboration. In this way, the film became not only an artistic practice but also a methodological tool—bridging scholarship, community, and creative expression.