Crazy: A Father's Search through America's Mental Health Madness Book

When I heard that my city was going to read this book (One Book, One Community), gosh, I got all excited. People with chronic mental illness suffer so much, and are so poorly understood, and their options are so pitifully few: I thought Earley's book would be a great way for people to learn more about the problems they face. Unfortunately, I was less than a chapter in before I wanted to take Pete Earley and shake him until his teeth rattled.

Basically, Earley's problem is this: he is too close to the problem to have the slightest objectivity about the legal or medical issues involved. To Pete Earley, every person with mental illness is his son Mike (who suffers from schizo-affective disorder, and won't take his meds.) Mike breaks into a family's home, pees on the carpet, bathes in the daughter's bathtub, and is arrested. Earley goes to "apologize" to the family - and by "apologize," I mean "talk them into dropping charges." He drips contempt for the mother of the family, who was terrified by the home invasion and is extremely frightened that Mike may repeat the offense, perhaps with violence, a fear that Earley mocks as trivial - "Mike had no history of violence." (Yes, and no history of home invasions, either, until this happened.) Hello, Mr. Earley? This family has now been victimized twice by your family: once by a guy who has the excuse of suffering from a major mental illness, and once, IN PRINT, by his father, who has no excuse whatsoever for treating a crime victim with so little compassion. Earley's solution to Mike's problems is simple: Mike should be remanded to his custody, and Pete should be allowed to force Mike to take his meds.

There are so many problems with this book, I don't even know where to begin. Earley wants law enforcement to be able to compel the mentally ill to take medications, and doesn't seem even slightly interested in the enormous civil rights issues this policy would raise. By Pete's admission, Mike has already been diagnosed (by different doctors) with three separate major mental illnesses (a situation that is extremely common) - should he be treated for diagnosis A, diagnosis B, or all three? Are we really going to say that the mentally ill don't get any say over their treatment? Wait, let me offer an example. A small one. A tiny example of WHAT CAN GO WRONG with relying on a system that has barely scratched the surface of adequate treatment for diseases of the brain.

I personally know a young woman who was hospitalized for depression due to a reaction to her medication. The reaction passed fairly rapidly, but the staff didn't believe her. One day, while eating breakfast, she picked up a packet marked "butter," and checked the ingredients, none of which had any relationship to dairy animals. She laughed and said aloud, "This butter has never even met milk!" and holding her "butter" to her milk glass, said, "Butter, meet milk." A nurse overheard her, and basing her diagnosis on a joke she didn't get, told the psychiatrist that the patient was psychotic - she talks to food! Without any further information, the doctor was immediately ready to prescribe her a heavy-duty anti-psychotic, one that frequently causes permanent neurological damage. The patient was 15.

So, really, Pete Earley? We should trust families and psychiatrists enough to strip people of their civil rights? I cannot agree.

Earley does bring to light some of the devastating effects of mental illnesses on families and on society. So that's good. He rightly points out the tragic lack of public resources available to treat victims of these much-misunderstood illnesses, and some of the obstacles they face in trying to live lives of worth and dignity. It would have been a whole lot better if he could have grappled honestly with the legal dilemmas posed by mental illness - or if he had retained a thread of objectivity.