Time for our next film Nobody’s Child. This made-for-TV film stars Marlo Thomas in a superb dramatization of the real life story of Marie Balter. At age 16, she first attempted suicide and spent the next 20 years in and out of the institutions. At last, a caring doctor started treating her for extreme depression and panic disorder. Balter rose from chronically institutionalized mental patient to become a noteworthy champion of the mentally ill and founder of the Balter Institute in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a well regarded psychiatric rehabilitation center north of Boston, near Danvers, site of the Danvers State Hospital where she was hospitalized for many years.
Miss Thomas gives a excellent performance as the woman who was written off for years as an incurable schizophrenic, a serious misdiagnosis as it turned out, an all too typical fate for many persons warehoused in state institutions of the era without the benefit of proper diagnostic or therapeutic interventions.