Reporter Pete Earley felt that he was standing on the outside looking in when he interviewed people for his articles and books about crime.
Combining the perspectives of the detached reporter and an affected party, he tells in Crazy about his frustrating search for care for his son and in addition about the fate of prisoners who are mentally ill.
Mike, became psychotic, Pete found himself on the inside looking out, when his son. Needless to say, what a difference, Mike’s dad notes, between the precise medical diagnosis and treatment of, say, a broken leg and the impressionistic, trialanderror labeling and treatment of mental illness. Over time he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and schizoaffective disorder, every diagnosis bringing in its wake different drugs and different therapies. Mike Earley suffered his first psychotic breakdown during his last year at college in Brooklyn. Eventually, we’ll end up taking him to jail, and you don’t look for that to happen. Mike and his family found it ugh to access mental health care. Nevertheless, even when your son has broken into a house, listen, one police officer ld Pete, unless you tell the medical personnel inside that he’s threatened to kill you, they aren’t intending to treat him.
You don’t seek for him in jail in his mental condition.
If he did not seek for to be there, the lawyer appointed to represent Mike at a commitment hearing ld Pete that she should work to get Mike released from the hospital, psychotic or not.
Even after admission into the hospital, Mike could not be medicated against his will, pete ld lies to get treatment for his son. By the book’s end Mike has reentered the community as a productive young adult albeit one dependent on psychotropic medication. Now please pay attention. As Pete makes plain, still many mentally ill Americans who run afoul of the legal system fare considerably worse. Ok, and now one of the most important parts. In time he accepted medication, stabilized, and found work. Now look. He was lucky, and a felony was averted, Mike’s charges in connection with the break in threatened to ruin his lifetime. Eventually, while providing the historical ‘background the’ efforts of reformer Dorothea Dix, the emergence of psychopharmacology in the 1950s, and the movement to eliminate state mental hospitals in favor of community mental health centers starting in the early 1960s for what he found there, for his portrait of disturbed prisoners, Pete Earley went to Miami.
Earley reminds us, hundreds of thousands of troubled people poured onto the streets, where few resources awaited them, with deinstitutionalization.
Into prisons and jails, over time. These disturbed people shifted, not back into treatment facilities.
Community mental health centers were simply not equipped to treat the severely and chronically mentally ill. Others, charged with a felony, were sent to a hospital to be made competent and shipped back to prison, where they decompensated in the course of the wait for trial until they needed to be returned to the hospital. Even day people, arrested for a minor crime, were held for a few days and released only to be arrested again and placed in jail. That said, he also spoke with a court social worker and two seasoned advocates.
He listened to family members describe the anguished deaths of kin who succumbed to drugs and crime when health care proved inaccessible.
He pondered the good fortune that had so far spared his son a similar fate.
He learned about a pioneering facility that gives participants in its program a feeling of community. Earley followed a couple of inmates through the system, onto the streets, and back into prison. Crazy not only describes the distressed person’s ordeal and that of the family members watching helplessly but also looks at the big picture. Notice, in so doing, it highlights questions about public policy and the priorities of contemporary American society at a critical moment in history.
So here’s the question. Which point should prevail on the many problems raised by Earley’s narrative?
Who must decide?
Whichever way we turn, we face fundamental questions about our national values. As a result, with its need for prescriptive laws to balance competing interests, that of the surrounding society? Nonetheless, what basic rights must a citizen have? That of the sick person and those who love him?