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

Not at all a bad overview of the politics of mental health, and specifically moving factions of patients' rights vs. families' right to get a person labeled incapable of making medical decisions for themselves, as well as where we physically put the chronically (and criminally) mentally ill in this country. Earley is extremely thorough... to the point where I thought, perhaps, he'd made this same point (deinstitutionalization ultimately hurt far more people than it helped, we have no viable replacement of social services in place) persuasively a hundred pages ago. But if you're interested in investigating every angle of that through four different, if somewhat repetitive, case studies, this book is great.

My main gripe is the author's attempt to balance memoir with investigative journalism: the story of his own son, a young man deemed an adult by our legal system who was charged with felonies committed while he was very sick (despite his family trying desperately to get him help), is featured as a sort of prologue, epilogue, and a few intercalary chapters along the way. While the story is humanizing and it's nice to have all the details of a complete case study, it ultimately isn't effective as memoir. We see Earley's interaction with the system mainly in hindsight, rather than really feeling we're experiencing the story in real time with him. And the narrative has no conclusion. Again, I get that this is a form/content thing where maybe you could justify the fact that the story doesn't have a satisfying ending because mental illness is for life, and being stable or functional for 30 years doesn't guarantee being ok tomorrow. But I need some sort of closure. Call me a selfish reader.