Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness

I am writing this review as a mother of a now young 22yr old son, who was officially and ultimately properly diagnosed at age 17. This book is by far one of the best books I’ve ever read. As I read this book, I finally felt that someone else does “get it”, someone else is and/or has gone through the same things as us. It was as if someone had taken my journal and written a story from it. Even now in 2024, with what some people believe to be a world with ‘Less Stigma’ (and everyone should open their eyes to the fact that there is absolutely not less stigma attached to or surrounding Serious Mental Illness). Anyone with a child, a family member, a friend, a student or someone that they love and care about that suffers and I would really like to put emphasis on the word suffers, should be reading this book! We are not alone. Yes, it feels like we are alone, we are sometimes very confused, we are mislead, we are lonely, we are misunderstood, we are lost searching for help and answers in a world where too many people are blinded by the so called mental health reform, that they have been unflinchingly convinced is happening. We need to stop focusing so much on Mental Health and start focusing more on Mental Illness. Mental Health is certainly very important but we cannot successfully help those in need the most. Serious Mental Illnesses such as Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia, Schizoaffective and other psychotic disorders are often overlooked, pushed to the side, ignored and far too often only heard of when something terrible is the news that involves individuals with these types of disorders. The families of those affected, suffer with them or walk away from them with ignorance in their pockets. For those of that cannot and will not walk away, we are most often gaslight by those who we are told will help us. This book is informative, relatable, relevant and most importantly honest.

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.

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

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.

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.