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'Crazy' looks at mental illness from all sides

Date published: 5/14/2006

By NATASHA ALTAMIRANO

Some of the country's mentally ill are criminals.

Some are homeless, and some are substance abusers.

They live on the government's tab and cost society billions of dollars every year.

But they're also daughters, brothers, mothers and sons.

And they're trapped in a costly cycle created by the very government that shuns them.

In "Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness," Pete Earley explores the ins and outs of the mental-health care system in the U.S.

Earley spent more than 30 years as a journalist striving to report both sides of every story.

But he didn't fully grasp the other side until his son, Mike, was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder--a combination of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

Earley tells his son's story: hallucinations, paranoia and drastic mood swings during his senior year at a Brooklyn college, denial of any mental-health problems and refusal to take medication or enter a treatment program, breaking into a home in a wealthy Washington suburb and facing two felony charges.

Earley also tells the story of mental-health care in the U.S.: lax criteria allowing anyone and everyone to be committed to asylums in the mid-20th century.

Exposes of the abhorrent conditions in state mental hospitals.

The resulting "anti-asylum" push in the 1960s during deinstitutionalization.

Civil rights activists fought and won the battle to free the mentally ill (and wrongly committed) from the torture chambers of state asylums.

Earley poignantly contrasts this so-called civil rights victory with the same civil rights push to protect today's mentally ill.

In an ironic twist, stringent civil rights laws ban psychiatrists from coercing a mentally ill adult to take medication or enter a treatment program--despite the fact that the patient is mentally ill and clearly not lucid enough to make that decision.

Family members can't compel a mentally ill adult to take medication or seek treatment unless the person hurts himself or someone else.

So those who need treatment--people like Mike--are left without until a psychotic episode causes them to commit a violent crime or attempt suicide.

After committing a crime, the mentally ill are shuffled back and forth between jail and state mental hospitals.

And the conditions in the jails aren't any better than the state asylums of the 1940s and '50s.

The author quotes a 1946 Life magazine article about the inhumane conditions of state asylums: "Hundreds are confined in 'lodges'--bare, bedless rooms reeking with filth and feces--by day lit only through half-inch holes in steel-plated windows.'"

He contrasts that description with the ninth floor of the Miami-Dade County jail, where mentally ill inmates are locked--many of them naked--in frigid cells with no mattress, pillow, blanket or other comforts.

Like a film director, Earley pans in and out between the bigger picture of the mental-health care system and Mike's story.

He juxtaposes his research--his findings in the Miami-Dade jail, interviews with mentally ill people and their families, psychiatrists, lawmakers, activists and others--with his own personal struggle to help his son.

His investigation will leave readers shocked--even outraged. The battle for his son will leave them sympathetic.

Earley sometimes walks a fine line between objective nonfiction writing and opinionated accusations. He clearly has an agenda.

Whether that agenda is to restructure the mental-health care system or save his son's life, it's a worthy one.

To reach NATASHA ALTAMIRANO:540/368-5036
Email: naltamirano@freelancestar.com

Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness By Pete Earley (Putnam, 384 pages, $25.95)

Date published: 5/14/2006