At that age I would imagine some of the teens would ostracize and mock Lisa while considering her some sort of ‘freak’ and the film would’ve been better balanced had at least shown briefly some of that, which it doesn’t.

Seeing how sympathetic Lisa’s classmates are to her condition is nice, but not realistic. I would think they would be just as confused and frightened of Lisa’s behavior as the adults and maybe try to stay away from her completely. I found it strange how enlightened Lisa’s teen friends were about mental illness and wasn’t quite sure that I bought into it. The sappy songs by Rod McKuen are abysmal and enough to drive the viewer as batty as the main character.

I applaud the effort at trying to destigmatize the myth of psychiatry, but the drama often times comes off as strained and unintentionally funny. This film, which aired on NBC in November of 1973 as a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation, was critically acclaimed at the time, but it has not aged well. Her friends (Debralee Scott, Jamie Smith-Jackson, and Anne Lockhart) think differently and try to get her the help that she needs, but when that fails they then read up on psychotherapy themselves and try to help Lisa with their own brand of therapy. She feels that she is suffering from some sort of mental illness and asks her parents (John Forsythe, Anne Baxter) if she can see a psychiatrist, but they refuse as they were raised in an era where mental illness was considered a ‘character flaw’ that didn’t occur to ‘respectable’ people and psychiatry was still thought of as a ‘new-age’ type of practice. Read by Kay Lenz, (who starred in 'Breezy' with William Holden) who played as Lisa Shilling in the Hallmark Hall of Fame movie version (1973).Based on the acclaimed novel by John Neufeld the story centers on Lisa (Kay Lenz) a teenage girl who begins behaving in strange ways. This classic novel of a teenager’s descent into madness, in the tradition of Go Ask Alice and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, has remained a best seller for close to thirty years. They are the only ones who listen - and they dive in where adults fear to tread. Her teachers seem oblivious to what is happening to Lisa. On good days, and everything is normal but on her bad days, everything is dark.

She has everything going for her - and she is losing her mind.

Lisa bright and dark by john neufeld