TV REVIEW : ‘Frontline’ Coolly Looks at ‘Madness’

Questions, questions and more questions bombard us in “A Place for Madness,” a new “Frontline” report on the deinstitutionalizing of the mentally ill (at 8 tonight,KCET-TV Channel 28). A good deal of the questions, however, seem to have no good answers.

The real head-scratching is going on in Northampton, Mass., where the state psychiatric hospital by court order has permanently closed its doors and released patients--with few exceptions--to non-institutional settings. The town, as the report coolly terms it, has become “a national laboratory” as former patients try to integrate into life beyond the hospital.

Not only is the place a lab but a debating center on the issue, and “A Place for Madness” airs every side. Attorney Stephen Schwartz, who engineered the court order known as “the Northampton consent decree,” is an unflinching advocate and harsh critic of those who would treat the mentally ill as criminals.

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Schwartz doesn’t even blink at what appear to be very real problems in Northampton. The violent cases are rare, but they still shake up the townspeople. They especially shook up the Rev. Leroy Moser and his wife, Jane, whose mentally ill son, David, is legally free although he once violently assaulted his parents. Massachusetts judges must be shown beyond a reasonable doubt that a mentally ill defendant is not a threat to himself or others: David’s judge viewed him as ill, but not a threat, and granted him freedom.

As the Mosers reel from this decision, they wonder about a system that prevents them from getting treatment for David, who denies his illness. The balance of public safety and individual liberty is unsure in “A Place for Madness”; the only certain thing is that the old system of closeting the mentally ill is a thing of the past.