A review by mesy_mark
Crazy a fathers search through americas mental health madness by Pete Earley

dark emotional informative sad medium-paced

3.75

I liked this way of looking at the mental health system as it collides with the new state hospitals, I mean jails.  The mentally ill have been left to die sick versus get help with forced treatment.  I see both sides to the controversy of forcing a medicating a mentally ill person and having the right to refuse medication.  I come at this as a consumer.  This book shows that the people in jails for crimes while mentally ill get no help.  All that matters is being competent to stand trial, and that is hard enough since many mentally ill inmates go through years-long cycles of treatment in hospitals to jail only to decompensate and return to the hospital and on trepeaat.    This book shows where the lack of treatment turns some cases into lost souls as prolonged lack of treatment has damaged them.  

We also have the journalist's son who enters the system when a psychotic breaks into a home and takes a bubble bath.  How even though clearly seen as mentally ill and unaware that he did anything wrong (or could even identify the location he broke into) he faces court as if he did it in a sane mind.

It really shows the broken system.

Overall, the facts were presented well, and in the audiobook version, the narration was clear and listen-sble.  The way he presented the cases he followed and his son was about the same, like a journal article.  I did not feel overtly emotional in his memoir parts, more like a more in-depth study of the system it just happened to be from his son.