The clinical director of the Liverpool Hospital psychiatric unit has opened his locked wards to television cameras for a ground-breaking documentary to be screened on the ABC over three nights next week.

Changing Minds follows 10 people on their journey through intensive, often involuntary, psychiatric treatment. We meet Sandra, a 63-year-old grandmother who enters the hospital in psychosis from her bipolar disorder, and Stephen, a newly engaged 44-year-old, who allows the team to film the electroconvulsive therapy he receives for his severe depression.

When Fairfax Media visits the hospital Dr Cross is thinking about the people who allowed cameras to film their most private moments.

"Without being patronising, I do feel responsible," he said. "I picked most of them for the show, and I have known them for some time."

Despite the serious illness, there is plenty of light amid the darkness in the Liverpool wards. Many were in the manic, or "high", stages of bipolar disorder and loved being on film, he said.

Others, such as Rebecca, a 39-year-old woman who has long-term severe schizophrenia that is resistant to treatment, just wanted people to understand.

"She paused, and she looked at me and said, 'I want people to know what people like me go through', and it was quite profound," Dr Cross said.

Psychiatric hospitals are the most secret parts of the health system, rarely allowing media in and governed by laws that ban involuntary patients from being identified without the consent of a body called the Mental Health Review Tribunal. About 60 per cent of the patients at Liverpool are there involuntarily.

"I do hope it is going to de-stigmatise and demystify the whole process," Dr Cross said. "Even my family, they don't understand what I do ... Until you see it I don't think you can do."

The people featured in Changing Minds were asked for their consent before filming began, and again when they recovered, and given detailed explanations about how they would be represented.

"One of the main characters withdrew consent after seeing himself," Dr Cross said. "He thought it was quite important on a personal development level, it was useful for him to see himself, but he didn't want to have it on television."

Supervising producer Alison Black, known for her work on shows such as Choir of Hard Knocks, spent three months on the ward filming the documentary. She was well-placed to understand the difficulties facing patients, having been hospitalised with mental illness herself only a year before she began developing the project with long-time friend Dr Cross.

"When I got better, that's when I started thinking through how we could do this, how I'd make it work," she said. "I had wanted to do it for 20 years, but I always thought the patient consents would be too tricky."

She wanted to show that psychiatric hospitals were not scary places.

"For my generation – I'm 52 – our reference point for mental health establishments is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," she said. "You are expecting padded cells … but it actually looks like a four-star hotel."

Changing Minds will screen on Tuesday, October 7, at 8.30pm on ABC1.