Troubled Minds

With the help of such suave know-it-alls as John J. Anthony, radio has for years made a sideshow out of people in trouble. More like a lecture than a sideshow, What's On Your Mind? (Tues. 8 p.m., ABC-TV) is one television show that seriously considers the neuroses of troubled people. Twenty of its 30 minutes are given to the filmed story of a mental-health problem; the remaining ten minutes show a panel discussion by Moderator Isabel Leighton and her guests: a psychiatrist and two laymen.

The films, cut down from U.S., British and Canadian documentaries, are expertly cast and thoroughly realistic. Last week's film, Why Won't Tommy Eat?, suggested that capricious appetite is more likely to come from family tensions than from a dislike of certain foods. In Emotional Health, a young man discovered that his heart pains could be traced to his feeling of insecurity at being separated from his parents. In This Charming Couple, a pair of newlyweds were shown to be in love, not with each other, but with the image of what each wanted the other to be.

The discussion period following the films suffers from the common TV complaint of too many participants, too little time, too much simplification. But the experts are uncommonly successful at stripping away some of the witch-doctor illusions about psychiatry, and at blasting psychoanalytic cliches ("Oddly enough, children from happy homes are sometimes the most unfit; they take their parents' happiness for granted and don't learn what hard work goes into it") Blonde, 43-year-old Isabel Leighton, who edited a 1949 bestseller, The Aspirin Age, is an ex-war correspondent and actress who first took up psychiatry as a hobby six years ago. Now a board member of the Menninger Foundation, and the National Association for Mental Health, she aims to keep What's On Your Mind? on a non-technical plane that any troubled layman can understand.

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