‘Small Vices’ Depicts a Dystopian Mental Health Epidemic

“In 2035, everything is going to continue to get worse and the national crisis there is just like a suicide epidemic because things are so bad.” 

Musician, digital marketing specialist and filmmaker Joshiah Blevins is not forecasting the future with this statement, though it seems plausible, but encapsulating the premise of his latest video project: Small Vices. 

Independently produced as a web series and shot to fit one a viewer’s phone, Small Vices grapples with the war on drugs and America’s mental health care infrastructure. The series will premiere at VisArt Video Lounge on Dec. 5. You can view the trailer here. 

In the darkly comic dramatic series, set in 2035, the government passes the Small Vices Act, which decriminalizes all types of behavioral and chemical addictions as long as they don’t hurt anyone else. In order to gain access to those comparatively harmless vices, however, citizens must sit down with a mental health care specialist and work through a state-mandated series of questions. 

The series focuses on the counselors that process the patients who are coming through the door, either to acquire drugs or to receive permission to engage in antisocial behavior. Most of them are inadequately trained newcomers because the landmark legislation has produced an urgent need for more mental health care workers.

“The counselors can also prescribe themselves whatever they want,” Blevins adds. As patients and practitioners alike delve into a trove of pharmaceuticals, group psychoses accelerate. 

“They all start going crazy,” Blevins notes. “That’s basically the first season.”

The first four episodes of the first season will screen at VisArt, followed by a Q&A and meet-and-greet with the actors and crew. The second slate of the first season, comprising six more episodes, is slated to begin production in spring 2026.

Small Vices is inspired by Blevins’ own experiences navigating mental health care, placed within the larger context of America’s crumbling health care systems.

Raised in an evangelical Christian household in Richmond, Virginia and Fayetteville, North Carolina, Blevins reckons that his childhood and teenage mental health challenges were probably exacerbated when he was forced to seek treatment by spiritual rather than clinical means.

“As an adult, [I’ve] been on a mental health journey,” says Blevins, who has a history of depression and currently lives with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). “I’ve done years of therapy, and finding good and qualified help was a huge part of that journey.” 

That said, he also did years of unhelpful therapy with people who were essentially social workers and not clinically trained. Blevins pinpoints the genesis of Small Vices to an intake interview he did years ago at a practice that offered psychiatry and psychological help.

“This person was asking me about my personal history … like a therapist, and I was telling them about my … depression,” Blevins remembers. “They said, ‘You can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness.’” 

After the interview, Blevins realized that he had heard the supposed health professional’s words before. They were, in fact, taken verbatim from “Somebody That I Used to Know,” a 2011 ballad by Australian singer-songwriter Gotye.

“I was sharing intimate details about my past, and this person was a loose cannon,” Blevins says. 

After other off-putting encounters with the health care system, Blevins came to feel that people are not getting the care they need, that some caregivers are harming rather than helping and that the system is irrevocably broken.

Multitasking to depict a mental health meltdown

Prior to becoming a director and producer with Small Vices, Blevins created visual art and wrote and performed music with bands including Charlotte-based art-punk rockers Gasp and musical theatre group Mall Goth.

After six years developing the concepts that became the series, Blevins assembled a cast and crew and started filming the show at his house in Columbia, South Carolina. He has recently moved to Berlin, Germany but is in the Carolinas for the Small Vices screening.

“We used a bunch of vintage furniture I inherited from my grandparents,” Blevins says. “Some of it is super sentimental to me. It’s just so lovely.”

In addition to writing, producing and directing Small Vices, Blevins had had his hand in practically every other aspect of the production. He manned the camera for about 80% of the shoot, did the makeup, produced the theme music and much of the soundtrack, and edited the project’s rough cut.

“I have pretty serious ADHD, so managing 20 spinning plates is something that I can take on and not be afraid of,” Blevins says. 

Once in a while, one of those plates crashed to the ground, as it did when it came to creating sufficient sweat for certain characters.

In the world of Small Vices, the planet has continued to grow unbearably hot, so characters wear mesh and breathable fabrics. They’re also supposed to be sweating constantly. Blevins was in charge of perspiration, and regrets that he forgot to spritz cast members with water before some takes.

“I should have made everyone look more sweaty,” he laments.

Despite his multi-hyphenate role behind the scenes, no one pursues such a production alone. Blevins praises the contributions of Jake Francek, who worked on the score, as well as several friends including assistant director Sean Jones; Anthony Morabito, who did post-production color grading; A.J. Strickland who did sound production; and editor Alex Lacey, who has worked previously with Blevins on music videos for Gasp. 

Read more: PREMIERE: Gasp Gets Ghostly in New ‘The Foe’ Video (2019)

The list of valued crew members includes production designer Lauren Fowler-Ellis and artist and production manager Calli Bloom, who also acts in the series. 

Small Vices’ cast is headed by two of Blevins’ family members: cousins Mari Salinas and Angelica Salinas-Jones. 

Small Vices’ plot follows Mandie, a small-time drug dealer who is put out of a job by The Small Vices Act. Once all addictions are decriminalized, Mandie decides to join the ranks of those answering the call for 1 million new mental health workers. 

Salinas essays the lead role of Mandie while Salinas-Jones plays Angel, one of the main counselors and a sweet and understanding mentor to Mandie. 

“Mandie is very much like myself as a teen and into my twenties — angry at the world but too jaded and burnt out to do anything to change it,” Salinas says. Like Blevins, she struggled to navigate the mental health care system, an attempt hampered by her acting out and self-medicating.  

“I thought I was really cool and profound in a cringey way that is reflected in Mandie as well,” Salinas says.

In addition to playing Angel, Salinas-Jones is a graphic designer by trade. She also developed the Small Vices’ logo, a short animated sequence that opens each episode of the show and is featured on the series’ movie posters and merch.

“I think Josiah wrote [Angel] around my own personality,” Salinas-Jones says. “When I read the character bio, it said she was a cross between the lady in the radiator from Eraserhead and Kelly Kapoor from The Office. I just found it funny to hear someone else talk about your own personality from an objective standpoint. I would say it’s accurate.”

Blevins feels fortunate to have worked with the show’s crew and cast.

“These are people I’ve known for 10, 20 years,” he says. “They’ve been the wind beneath my wings.” 

He recalls seeing the first cut with the score for the first time and crying.

“I was just like, ‘Oh my gosh, it worked out!’” he recalls.

‘Small Vices’ for a small screen

One unusual thing that attendees to the Small Vices screening will notice is that the series has been shot vertically to accommodate phones, rather than the horizontal 16×9 aspect ratio adopted by films and TV shows.

Blevins says the decision to shoot in a phone-friendly orientation is a practical consideration. Working in digital marketing for the last decade, he’d often post a video teaser on Instagram and ask people to go watch the full video on YouTube. People would rarely go there, however, presumably remaining on their phones and scrolling for more easily accessible content. 

So, he reasoned, why not tailor his content to the device that people were already looking at?

“If you make the thing fit the container that it’s going into, then you can just put it right out to people,” Blevins says. “The phone [is] like a private little theater for every person in the world. Why not make something that you can just publish directly to all these people?”

An added attraction of entertainment scaled for a phone is that, unlike traditional TV or film clips, the image doesn’t need to be shorn of visual information on the edges of the frame, nor does it have to be shrunk so small to fit that image is barely visible

Both Salinas and Salinas-Jones will be in attendance for Friday’s screening. Salinas promises that she’ll be “wearing something ridiculous and being vaguely menacing.” Blevins says he’ll bring in a chaise lounge that is prominently featured in the show.

“[People] can get pictures with the stars of the series, as if they were being counseled in the show,” he says.  

Small Vices doesn’t have an online launch date yet, but Blevins teases a surprise launch sometime before Christmas. 

“Just one day the first episode will be out on all platforms,” he says. “This is another benefit to the level of control offered by doing this myself and having no corporate overlords or masters. Making cool things with my friends outside official channels has been a way of life, and this show is a continuation of that.”

Read more: ‘Murder & Moonbeams’ Musical Transitions to the Silver Screen (2022)

In the meantime, Blevins hopes Small Vices makes some people feel understood and gets people talking about their own mental health.

“I just hope everyone enjoys it,” Salinas-Jones says. “I’m honored to be a part of it.”

“My hopes are that the audience will appreciate how fraught it is to keep going in increasingly difficult conditions,” Salinas says. ‘[I hope] they find some levity in how ridiculous it is to be expected to thrive in a system that actively does not support you.”

Even if Small Vices doesn’t have Blevins’ desired effect to spur discussion about our broken mental health care system, he will be happy if it simply makes people laugh.

After all, you can never tell what will be a catalyst for social change. It can even be something small, like a satirical web series made with care and heart that fits on your phone.