FROM THE NAMI Book Shelf: Crazy: A Father’s
Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness
March 2006
Pete Earley is an award-winning investigative
reporter whose previous books have been about spies, prisons, and
the witness protection program. To some degree, this background
may have prepared him to write Crazy: A Father’s Search Through
America’s Mental Health Madness, which will be released April
20, but as NAMI consumers, families, and friends know, nothing ever
prepares a person for the shock of mental illness.
“I had no idea,” Earley begins.
Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Earley’s
son, Mike, recently out of college, broke into a stranger’s
house to take a bubble bath and vandalized the premises. Frustration
with an inability to get Mike into treatment—including his
son’s periodic refusals to take medication—as well as
the legal procedures surrounding mental illness, caused Earley to
use his journalism skills to explore the rapid cycling that exists
today between hospitals, courthouses, and jails.
The result is a unique book—one of
the best—that presents “criminalization of the mentally
ill” not as an abstract concept, but as one drawn in vivid,
human dimensions, accompanied by objective and pained reflection.
The book alternates between his son’s story in Northern Virginia
and Miami-Dade County, where he was able to gain unprecedented access
to one of the nation’s largest jails and its psychiatric ward,
where guards freely admit to beating patients because, said one,
“They’re criminals first, mentally ill second.”
Earley will participate
in NAMI’s annual convention, June 28-July 2, 2006, in Washington,
D.C., to discuss criminal justice reform issues, along with Judge
Steven Leifman of Miami, who arranged his access.
Earley follows the lives of individual consumers,
and talks with them and their families, both inside and outside
the jail.
At one point, he interviews the parents of
Robbie Sherman, a former Boy Scout, whom police had shot and killed
during a manic episode. Robbie’s mother showed him a photograph
of her son in a 5”x7” frame. “I loved my son.
Why did this have to happen,” she cried. “Why did they
have to shoot him? Why wouldn’t anyone listen to me when I
told them he was sick?”
“I looked at the photograph of Robbie
in the gold frame,” Earley writes. “The teenager smiling
at me could have been anyone’s son…He could have been
Mike.” Indeed, that is one of two key points Earley hopes
to make with the book to educate the public: that mental illness
can and does strike anyone.
Earley’s other point is that jails
have not only become our “new asylums,” but in fact
are becoming “institutionalized” as part of a “continuum
of care.” No metaphor seems terrible enough to convey what
that means. Consumers who run afoul of the law may face an endless
maze of cruel choices or dead ends. They may be sent to state or
county psychiatric facilities to be “made competent,”
with minimal treatment, to stand trial. By the time they are shuttled
back to jail and appear in court, they may have de-compensated to
a state of incompetence again and therefore be sent back for more
“treatment.” Treatment in jail may occur in name only.
From both hospitals and jails, there often is little, if any, realistic
discharge planning, and the community services which discharged
consumers need too often are inadequate or non-existent.
Other obstacles to recovery exist, even when
a consumer is relatively lucky.
In the case of Earley’s son, the owner
of the house he broke into initially insisted that Mike plead guilty
to a felony—which would have ruined any chance he might have
had for getting a professional license to pursue his career. Even
after being convicted only of a misdemeanor, Mike loses a job because
his employer discovers that he is on probation. Never mind the fact
that he had disclosed the conviction on his job application.
A principal focus in Earley’s discussion
is the tension between the consumer’s right to treatment,
the right to refuse treatment, and the frustration of family members
or mental health professionals who want to insist on treatment.
Introducing Earley to Freddie Gilbert, one
of the consumers whose cases he decides to follow, a doctor observes:
“He’s been in this jail before and we know he responds
well to medication. The last time he was here, we got him into treatment
and he thanked us later…But now the law is forcing us to stand
back and do nothing while he continues to get worse. If this man’s
arm was fractured, we’d be accused of negligence and cruelty
if we didn’t help him. But because he’s mentally ill,
we’re not supposed to interfere until he asks.”
Read the first chapter
of Crazy at: www.peteearley.com.
Comments about the book
also can be posted on the Web site, which Earley personally reads,
even though he may not be able to respond to every message.
As a father, Earley’s sentiments on
requiring treatment are clear, but he pursues the issue objectively
in posing questions and establishing historical perspective that
can inform all points of view. He also is supported by his son’s
insistence that he write the book and use his real name, “if
it would help other people understand,” despite their differences
over medication.
Earley also investigates the fate of Deidra
Sanbourne, whose class action lawsuit against the State of Florida
caused her to be released from a state hospital after 20 years,
and uncovers “an ugly truth.” After being warehoused
for 20 years in a state hospital, Sanbourne ended up warehoused
in a squalid boarding home, where her condition only worsened, until
her death. It is that truth to which the book speaks.
In addition to Earley’s non-fiction
works, his third novel, The Apocalypse Stone will be published in
June 2006.
|