Edition: U.S. / Global

Review/Television; 'Broken Minds,' on Schizophrenia

Published: October 30, 1990

"Broken Minds," tonight's strong offering from "Frontline," is in part an effort to enter the delusional world of the schizophrenic. Given the mysteries that surround this profoundly disabling disease, which continues to challenge diagnosis and defy cure, it is a remarkably creditable attempt. The hour program, which also deals provocatively with theories about the disease and its social cost, can be seen at 9 o'clock on Channels 13 and 49.

The producer, DeWitt L. Sage, managed to win enough confidence from David Taggert, one of the thousands of mentally disturbed people who now drift through the streets, railway stations and parks of New York City, to photograph him and tape his ramblings. Mr. Taggert, described here as a paranoid schizophrenic, is eluding the efforts of Project Reachout, a private agency that tries to draw in some of the mentally ill for shelter and treatment.

Mr. Taggert's plausible tone and implausible notions offer a glimpse into one schizophrenic's mind. Fast-talking and oddly articulate, he explains as he rushes around Penn Station searching trash cans, "I'm attempting to secure newspapers. My income doesn't permit me to buy them."

He maintains that he is under constant surveillance by Federal, local and private investigators and that a transmitter has been planted in the frames of his eyeglasses. He has trouble sleeping, he says, unless he has "something resembling a security perimeter between me and the other guy" -- not an irrational comment perhaps on city shelters. In time, he becomes suspicious of the "Frontline" crew, too. His language sometimes sounds like a parody of television talk-show and press-conference officialese: "When I say no comment, no follow up, now the discussion on that subject is ended."

Until the 1950's, the program recalls, most people with symptoms like David's would have found themselves in large mental hospitals, where some were subjected to dubious treatments including, as a last resort, lobotomies. One man, who was lobotomized at Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island in 1949 to subdue his violent tendencies, now speaks disjointedly about a "planet of head-breakers" that is attacking the earth. But at moments, he seems only too coherent, as when he says, "I know this isn't a joke, to have to wear two holes in your head." The narrator calls the now abandoned Pilgrim State "a monument to the ineffectiveness of any known treatment for schizophrenia."

Today, as a result of lawsuits by civil liberties organizations, the mental hospitals that once kept the out-of-mind out of sight have been virtually emptied. Since they have not been replaced by other facilities, scores of thousands of mentally ill people roam America's cities. Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, of the National Institute of Mental Health, calls the situation "a disgrace of a magnitude that we haven't seen in this century."

Dr. Torrey is in charge of a study of 17 sets of identical twins, one in each pair a schizophrenic, the other normal. Such tests, he says, have shown that schizophrenia is not a purely genetic disease. The program focuses on a young woman who became acutely ill in 1982 but whose twin did not. A researcher reports that "subtle anatomical deviations" can be found in the brain of the ill twin, although no one is certain how or why they should have occurred. The hour captures the sisters' relationship, which remains close despite the difficulties of communicating; it is deeply affecting.

Dr. Torrey expresses confidence that schizophrenia is a disease like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's: "We know that something gets in the brain and changes the chemistry in the brain." He calls a psychoanalytic approach harmful because it implies that the illness stems from the way the patient was treated in childhood. "If someone comes in with Alzheimer's disease or multiple sclerosis," he observes, "you don't say, 'How did your mother treat you when you were little?' "

Some analysts disagree. (The theory advanced here by one analyst could have been written by Woody Allen.) Talk therapy is still used, and even those who attribute the illness to some defect in the brain are left with questions. Why, asks Dr. Daniel Weinberger, chief of the Clinical Disorders Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health, does a person with a brain abnormality walk around for 20 years before it shows itself as a disease?

For now, the program reports, the main treatment of schizophrenia consists of medications that reduce psychotic symptoms. But the schizophrenic also seems to need a safe environment. Since, as the narrator concludes, there are now twice as many severely mentally ill people on the nation's streets as in state mental hospitals, that is in visibly short supply. Frontline Broken Minds Directed and produced by DeWitt L. Sage for KCTS (Seattle), WGBH (Boston), WNET (New York), WPBT (Miami) and WTVS (Detroit); David Fanning, executive producer for Frontline. Tonight at 9 P.M. on Channels 13 and 49.

Photo: Marge Murphy, right, a schizophrenic, and her identical twin, Sharon, are discussed on "Broken Minds," a "Frontline" presentation. (WNET)