Time to Get It Right: A Reader Reflects On Crazy
- by Aubrey Williams, Avalon Housing Property Manager
Crazy accurately scrutinizes our mental health system in both a historical and current context. Earley’s account of the treatment of our most vulnerable mentally ill in this country lead me to one conclusion: we have yet to get it right.
He juxtaposes his son’s journey through mental illness from his first psychotic episode with the appalling conditions of our current mental health system. Specifically, Earley takes a good look at how we criminalize the mentally ill and the “preventable tragedies” that often govern the lives of those with severe mental illness. His account goes beyond the “worried well” who receive the majority of the media’s attention, and addresses the vast and unforgiving needs of our most critical population: chronically mentally ill individuals who cycle from the streets into jails or prisons in the midst of their untreated illness. Earley recognizes that our involuntary treatment system is flawed, and blames misjudgements in the name of civil rights that allow our most vulnerable to “die with their rights.”
A critical solution to providing stability to the chronically mentally ill population is moving them into permanent supportive housing. In our culture we know the ease of focusing on tangible “things” - things we can fix or create or find use for - and knowing this, we avoid the intangible - the thing we know is real and yet we cannot touch. And in this intangible category lies mental illness, a most frightening place to be for many.
In this most disheartening memoir, Earley portrays the tremendous need for ongoing treatment and housing of the mentally ill. In the absence of shelter, the fulfillment of basic needs, clinical support, and medication, preventing inhumane treatment of the mentally ill is nearly impossible. As a result of this and the system’s failure to monitor ongoing treatment and medication management, the mentally ill further plunge into their illness, receiving care only in the most crisis-oriented situations and often with the disdain of the emergency room workers responsible for the triage of their care. Culturally, our medical system places higher priority on treatment of the physically, rather than the mentally, ill.
Reading the memoir I found myself both comforted in Earley’s investigative efforts and enraged at a system that allows such atrocities to continue. This memoir highlights the need for permanent supportive housing, street outreach, crisis intervention, medication management, community support, ongoing treatment, an improved involuntary treatment system, and eviction prevention.
In reality, the homeless comprise individuals of the most resilient kind, as evidenced by their ability to survive amidst the most daunting mental and physical suffering. It is a suffering compounded by society’s “failure to notice.” It is a failure of the most horrendous kind. It is a failure of compassion that directly results from the refusal of a community to see, acknowledge, and assist another in need. This same community, still silently marching on, finds it impossible to ignore the gore of an auto accident and yet barely sees the suffering of the mentally ill lying directly at its feet. Meanwhile, mentally ill citizens continue to survive rather than thrive, displaying the most profound resiliency of the human spirit. Many portrayed in Earley’s memoir are no exception.