Airdate: Louis Theroux: By Reason of Insanity

Next week ABC2 will air a new Louis Theroux documentary, By Reason of Insanity.

This is a two part special, filmed in 2015, as Theroux explores how US society treats those who have committed crimes while in the grip of severe mental illness.

Over the course of these two episodes, Louis Theroux explores the nature of mental illness and spends time with some sufferers in the USA who have found themselves on the wrong side of the law. Visiting Ohio’s State Psychiatric Hospitals, he meets patients who have been found not guilty by reason of insanity and ordered by the courts to receive treatment in secure psychiatric facilities in the hope of their eventual reintegration back into society.

He also meets patients with a diagnosis of ‘personality disorder’, such as anti-social, borderline and narcissistic, and attempts to understand where mental illness ends and the person begins.

In the first episode, Louis talks to patients attempting to come to terms with their crimes as well as the clinicians entrusted with helping to make them safe. And he investigates the difficult question – when is a patient with a serious crime in their past ready to be returned to the outside world?

Part two sees Louis spend time with patients whose personalities are so intertwined with their illness it makes them more difficult to treat. In doing so he examines the grey area between criminal actions and medical symptoms, and investigates how we define insanity.

Monday, February 29 at 8.30pm, ABC2.