By Olga Agafanova
Some years ago, I used to see a woman on a
street corner who bore an uncanny resemblance to a former professor of
mine. The two had similar physical
characteristics and they were close in age: it would have been difficult to
tell them apart from a distance. It is unlikely, however, that they will ever
cross paths: the professor was a promising scholar, a rising star in her field;
the homeless woman had the absent gaze of someone with a profound mental illness.
Without intervention from some entity willing to provide long-term care, this
person is likely to spend her life shuttling between psychiatric emergency
rooms and homeless shelters, never becoming stable for long enough to start
rebuilding her life.
Pete Earley’s Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness is a good place to
start exploring the plight of the mentally ill in America. The book is not
academic in its approach: Earley gives us enough historical and contextual
information so that we understand why things functions so poorly but his tone
is intimate and his outrage is genuine.
For example, we discover the magnitude of the
jail problem as he begins to visit the Miami-Dade detention center. While the
jail has an entire floor dedicated to housing psychotic prisoners, we find out
that they receive little treatment except for cheap alternatives to the drugs
they are prescribed. If they refuse to take the medicine, the prisoners may
spend months in isolation cells, often naked (ostensibly for their own good)
and raving mad. Although Early spends
relatively little time discussing policy choices, we can understand exactly how
the existing mental health system fails when Early shadows several men as they
bounce to and from the streets and detention centers.
Early is at his most compelling when he talks
about the hopes and dreams he had for his son and how he had to make
adjustments to them when the scope of the son’s illness became clear. Reading the perspectives from “the other
side”, that is, the views of the police officers who confront mentally ill
offenders and the attorneys who passionately argue for a crazy’s person right
to remain crazy was illuminating.
I find it
interesting that as a society, we happily treat people with advanced dementia,
even though they may claim they are feeling great, but equally delusional
people with diagnoses like schizophrenia are left to struggle on their own.
Both categories of illness are outside of an individual’s control and yet we
draw a distinction between them in our mental health and justice systems. If we could care enough to align our laws
with the science of mental illness, we might be on our way to becoming a more
compassionate society where people like the homeless woman on that street
corner may get another shot at life.
Crazy: A Father’s Search Through
America’s Mental Health Madness
By Pete Earley
I would like to read this book because I see a lot of mental illness in my work as an attorney -- not to mention my everyday life! There is a program for the mentally ill in Richland County that actually works -- even with the chronically mentally ill and the drug-addicted. I work with those counselors all the time and wonder why other places do not try this all-encompassing approach.
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