Customer Reviews

Crazy

5 star:		(53)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

For anyone who has either "been there" himself or has watched a loved one descend into madness, this book will seem heartbreakingly familiar. But I fear that only the people who know and understand what Pete Earley and his son, Mike, have been through will buy and read this book. And it's not those people who need to understand just how "crazy" the treatment of the mentally ill in our country is in the 21st century. Until you've seen it from the inside, most people will have no idea that a parent has no power to help a sick child who happens to be 19 years old. That the person who is "crazy" is given the responsibility of making decisions about his care when he is as divorced from reality as he has ever been. That the only way of getting any sort of treatment is to first assault someone or try to kill onesself or another person. The average person has no idea of the hopeless, helpless position someone with a mental illness and their family are put in by the very people who we hope will HELP. As Mr. Earley points out in the book, who among us, particularly those in the medical profession, would walk by a person in pain, dying of cancer, without attempting to help? Who would send that person to jail to be locked up with murderers and rapists instead of to a hospital, where he would be given the medical treatment he needed? Who would suggest that no help could be given to him until he tried to kill himself or someone else? This is what happens to someone's son, daughter, mother, husband every day in this country. Mr. Earley has come to understand mental illness and the horrible state of care and treatment in the United States in a very personal and tragic way, as many, many of us have. He has graciously invited us to travel with him as he tries to understand how a First World country like ours could treat a beloved son as if he were a criminal, just because mental illness struck unexpectedly. mental illness is an uninvited guest. It is the cruelest of diseases. And it could happen to your son or daughter. It's then that you will completely understand where Pete Earley and Mike have been and are. Where so many hundreds of thousands of families are. Alone, without help from the medical profession, the legislatures, the law.

In the book, "Crazy: A Father's Search through America's Mental Health Madness," Pete Earley tells a story that is all too familiar to NAMI members. As an award-winning journalist for over thirty years, Mr. Earley has effectively captured the absurdities of the mental health system in our country through his investigative journalism and his personal understanding of mental illness.

Mr. Earley's son, Mike, has a psychotic episode while in college and breaks into a stranger's home, takes a bubble bath and causes significant damage. Thus begins their long journey into the broken mental health system that so many of us confront everyday in this country. Mr. Earley learns all too quickly just how difficult it is to receive necessary treatment for his son's mental illness. He uses his frustration to launch a personal and professional inquiry into a confusing mental health system coupled with an irrational criminal justice system.

Mr. Earley is granted full access to the Miami-Dade County Jail's "forgotten floor"--the jail's primary psychiatric unit where prisoners are housed without treatment. He can see firsthand that, indeed, our jails and prisons have become the repository for persons with serious mental illness. The prisoners have committed both felonies and petty misdemeanors, all because of their untreated brain disorder. Yet there is no chance at rehabilitation in jails. The prisoners linger in their psychoses for months at a time, only to await a bus ride to a psychiatric facility where they receive minimal treatment in order to have a competency hearing and then are brought back to the jail to await a hearing that will probably never happen.

"Crazy" is a book that NAMI members can use as an advocacy tool to improve mental health care in their communities. When jails become a part of the continuum of care for persons with a serious mental illness, we must speak up and demand change.

Mr. Earley provides the history of deinstitutionalization and the changes in America's civil rights laws to give us a full perspective on why our mental health system is broken. As mental health advocates, it is important for us to know why our mental health system is so shattered. Knowing the history of mental health laws can teach us, not only why consumers cannot receive appropriate treatment for their mental illness, but also provide us with the information necessary to become effective advocates.

In the eight years that I have been involved with NAMI, I continually see how difficult it is for us to educate the uneducated about mental illness. As a person who has lived with schizoaffective disorder for over 20 years, I have a personal understanding of stigma. It is natural for me to talk about mental illness with my NAMI family. I am comfortable because I know that they understand and that I am not judged. It is quite another story to discuss my mental illness and subsequent suffering with those who are not aware of the unique issues that we confront on a daily basis. Yet, if we want positive changes in our mental health delivery system, we must be the ones to speak up and tell our stories. Yes, it can be difficult and often scary to disclose our personal experiences with mental illness. There is always that threat of stigma. This is why it is important to band together as NAMI advocates and show our force in numbers.

Mike Earley gave his father permission to use his name and his experiences in "Crazy" with the hope that his story would help someone else. This was a very brave step and I hope that it aids in Mike's recovery. I know that telling my story, my trials with my illness, the treatment that I did or did not receive, my endless search for the right medications, my experiences with mental health deputies (now known as CIT's) and all my entrances and exits into and out of mental hospitals, has been an integral part of the success of my recovery. I am a mental health advocate because I want others with a serious mental illness to have what I have now. I want consumers to know that they matter in this big world and with treatment they can live a fulfilling and meaningful life. I want consumers and their families to know that there is hope.

Mr. Earley concludes the book with a chapter titled, "Solutions". He stresses the necessity of CIT training in every community. CIT saves lives and changes attitudes. He asks us to rethink the closings of the state mental hospitals through his explanation of unintended consequences in the civil rights laws of persons with mental illness. He also asks us to reexamine commitment laws. "Eighty percent of persons with mental illness can be helped with antipsychotic medication, yet civil rights laws are used daily to prevent patients from getting help."

As a person with a serious psychotic disorder, I am glad that medication was forced on me and saved my life and continues to fix my broken brain.

Diana Kern
NAMI Texas

This is a must read for anyone in the mental health profession, as I am. I think its critical for practitioners to be reminded every now and then about why we got into the profession in the first place, and most importantly what it feels like to be on the receiving end of our services. This book is an intensely personal work, aside from being a fine example of the muckraking tradition that is journalism at its best. I truly admire Mr. Eareley's willingness to tell his own story. Psychosis is not pretty, as any of us who have had a friend or loved one suffer with it know, and its very hard to watch someone loose their mind. The only thing worse would be to watch it happen to your precious child and be powerless to help. I highly recommend this book to parents, practitioners and most strongly to politicians.

i have been going crazy trying to get the help my son needs and deserves so he can lead a productive life. he's been in and out of the hospital for the last 3 1/2 yrs, and i dont think the meds are right yet. it is amazing that he has to be "homeless" in order to get the right therapy that he needs in order to make him a productive person later on. i also understand the courts not "getting it". we went through hell when he got arrested for what turned out to be nothing but a clerical error. he spent 9 days in 23 hour lockup without his meds. the police who arrested him, stormed the house he was living in with 27 other mentally ill people, threw him down and cuffed him. i was at his arraignment and on top of the mental health dept at the jail. i was able to get him 1 days worth of medication. there's so much more to this story. the police (and i work with them as a dispatcher) are not trained with mental illness. and i know that for a fact where i work. neither are the 911 operators... something needs to be done. i am in the process of suggesting seminars to my commissioner of police so these things dont happen. good luck to anyone going through this nightmare. it's overwhelming for me. even families dont quite understand it.

This is an important piece of journalistic work. It has a message that every American needs to know. Earley chronicles the disastrous state of the handling of mentally ill patients in America. He starts from his own personal experiences/frustrations trying to get help for his mentally ill son. This has prompted him to do an indepth study of how the mentally ill are denied treatment, made criminals because our system has no other way of getting them off the streets. It is a heart-rending account of an issue that SHOULD be of concern to all of us but unfortunately is of little concern to most.

Margaret R. Watanabe, M.D., Ph.D.

I have mixed feelings about this book. Mr. Earley does a good job of describing the pain of having a child over 18 with mental illness and some of the flaws of the system. On the other hand, his view of mental illness seems extremely over-simplified. He makes a number of dangerous assumptions: that biology is destiny, that there are clear lines separating the mentally ill from the mentally healthy, that all people with mental illness should be treated the same way. A close reading will indicate that Mr. Earley's son is nowhere near as sick as the people portrayed in the book. (e.g., Mr. Earley describes the difficulties his son has gaining and keeping a job with his past. None of the other people with mental illness in this book is anywhere close to being able to gain and hold a job. Freddie Gilbert, even on medication, could not answer questions appropriately. Mike, off meds, could.) He frequently mentions parents stepping in as their children's legal guardians. Ask yourself: If guardianship would allow Mr. Earley to force his son to take medication, why did Mr. Earley not seek it? Guardianship is actually a rare and extreme procedure which could harm his son's future at least as much as a felony conviction.

Mr. Earley also quickly dismisses any possibility that the treatments themselves may cause harm. He ignores the controversial ECT (electroshock) treatments. Lobotomies are described as a "dangerous" procedure of the past but not a harmful one. He also ignores the dangers of treating people who are not genuinely mentally ill. The history of mental illness is rife with stories of people being forced into treatment with symptoms that are actually caused by a generation gap, poverty, cultural differences, etc. The truth is that without blood tests for mental illness or other clear symptoms, there are going to be mistakes made in some direction (either people being treated unnecessarily or people needing treatment going without). Being forced into psychiatric treatment one doesn't need can and has ruined lives.

The solutions toward the end of the book strike me as grossly over-simplified. Mr. Earley devotes countless pages to describing the horrors of mental institutions, suggests that we bring them back saying "They don't have to be that way," and offers no solutions how to prevent them from becoming snake pits. Without safeguards, some of these institutions will quickly become nightmares for the patients. Not all of them, and probably not immediately, but some will eventually become very bad. The imbalance of power between staff and patients is just too great. Similarly, he says commitment laws need to be changed but offers no tangible solutions to do so while still protecting people's civil rights. Then he turns the attention back to his son. I just couldn't figure out how Mike's situation related to the stories seen here.

In short, releasing people from hospitals without appropriate services (appropriate housing, day treatment or job training programs) presents an unfair, unrealistic burden to both the person and his family. But keeping those people contained in hospitals without much better protections leaves them vulnerable to torture. Mr. Earley says again and again that the mentally ill are not a priority. Why does anyone assume they will automatically become a priority if we reinstate long-term hospitalization?

We would like to believe that we can create and maintain facilities for long-term hospitalization that, at the very least, offer a safe and hygienic living space, nutritious food, and nursing care, but that idea flies in the face of historical evidence. The Quakers discovered that attentive institutions could be beneficial to the mentally ill, but that level of care could not be maintained in the budget-conscious state facilities. Mr. Earley himself says that states preferred to close their mental hospitals rather than fix them. Facilities may start with the very best of intentions, but when they are dealing with repeated budget cuts, political indifference, and patient behavior that genuinely is obnoxious at times, the quality of care can deteriorate.

Despite all these caveats, this book does provide an important discussion of some of the ways mentally ill people suffer in our criminal justice system. Mr. Earley chronicles some of the people working very diligently to provide appropriate treatment and the obstacles they face. I appreciate his detailed discussion of prison life on the psych floors, as well as the visits to court and with CIT-trained cops. There are some good suggestions to improve treatment there. The major flaw in the book is the one-size-fits-all approach to the mentally ill.

This well-researched, thoughtful book, is both a chronicle of one father's struggle to get help for his son from a system seemingly built to bar it, and an investigative look at what happens in our jails and prisons to people so lost to symptoms of mental illnesses. Earley's passion for reform and compassion for people like his son who desperately need and deserve treatment is a refreshing perspective on one of America's biggest failures - the abysmal way we treat people who are too ill to help themselves.

I've worked 11 years in corrections and I am a Social Worker by profession. This book shows the real crime was when we stopped helping the mentally ill. How hard it is to explain to a family I cannot help them with the problems of their son or daughter and we ALL must endure their illness together. Families of SPMI (Seriously and Persistently Mentally Ill), lawyers, judges, LAW MAKERS, and those that work with this population, should read this book.

As a psychiatrist reading this book, I feel ashamed. I'm ashamed I can't help people because the laws prevent it, and ashamed I have to tell family members that I can do nothing for their loved one who is an adult and has the right to refuse treatment that could treat his or her illness. That's when I can talk to family members; most of the time I can't because of HIPAA. If we took just a few days of funds from the war in Iraq and put them into our nation's mental health system, think of the lives that could be saved. Instead we put the mentally ill in jails or leave them on the streets, and chuckle to our friends when we see somebody acting in an odd or bizarre fashion. But by the grace of god it could be you.

Pete Earley's writing is earnest and intelligent, and remains unbiased when writing about the mental health system. I appreciate that he clearly indicates when the book is about his son versus reporting, because the parts regarding his son are emotional and biased by his experiences, as they should be. I learned about the history and restrctions of the mental health system in the United States and plan to learn more about it. Kudos to Mr. Earley, both for exploring his feeling as a parent, and as a reporter for finding out why the system failed his son and so many others.

When I first heard about this book and it's title, I assumed "Crazy" referred to the author's son's mental illness. It actually refers to how mental health services are delivered in the United States. As an experienced journalist, the author writes an actual account of the realities of coping with mental health care in a compelling and very understandable style.
There is no one who does not know someone who has had a mental illness, but many do not understand how today's delivery "system" (so-called 'system') mitigates against the effective treatment of conditions which respond well to drug and behavioral therapies. The fact that jails and prisons have become bigger providers of mental health care than hospitals is something about which we should all be ashamed and want to do something about! Mr. Early's experiences and excellent writing make this totally evident to the reader.
I have recommended "Crazy" to relatives of people with mental illness and to those engaged in providing better care and all have been moved and motivated by reading it.