Emotionally disturbed children and teenagers fill American public mental institutions in the early 1980s, and Richard Kotuk and Ara Chekmayan's camera goes inside to show what passes for treatment. Kids from poor and comfortably middle-class households alike end up warehoused together once insurance runs out and savings dwindle, a detail the film uses to puncture the assumption that this is only a problem of poverty. Staff at the public facilities are shown relying on medication as the default response to schizophrenia, autism, and severe emotional disorders, with drugs used less to heal patients than to keep them manageable. The film sets these institutions against a private treatment center handling similarly troubled kids, letting the contrast in resources and approach speak for itself. No narrator softens the conditions on view: overcrowded wards, underqualified staff, and children who arrived in crisis and left more isolated than before. The film was nominated for an Academy Award, recognition for a piece of reporting that treats institutional failure as a policy problem, not an isolated scandal.