Pete Earley

Watch this short clip from Minds on the Edge

(3-29-19) FROM MY FILES FRIDAY: Shortly after my book, CRAZY: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness, was published, I was asked to participate in a PBS special program about involuntary commitment.

It used a scenario inspired by what had happened to my son and me after we were refused treatment at a hospital emergency room and he ended up breaking into a stranger’s house to take a bubble bath.

MINDS ON THE EDGE  proved to be compelling television, so much so, that many local mental health groups began using it to discuss the “danger to self and others” standard.

I wrote this blog in 2010 about how one NAMI chapter had cleverly modified the show.

MINDS ON THE EDGE: Pete Earley Confronts Pete Earley

(2010) A funny thing happened recently. A man approached me after I delivered a speech and said: “Hi, I’m Pete Earley.”

I wasn’t certain what he was talking about until he explained that his local mental health group had used Minds on the Edge to discuss involuntary commitment. Members in his group had played the roles of those of us who actually were in the Fred Friendly Seminars broadcast.

He had been me — an angry and frustrated parent who couldn’t get help after his son became psychotic.

Because my “double” was familiar with conditions in his local community, he was able to tailor his comments to what actually happened in his own neighborhood when someone had a psychotic break. That made the issues surrounding commitment germane to him and local officials, and helped both see holes in the system.

I’d encourage you to watch Minds on the Edge . It affords you the opportunity to see and hear how a Nobel Prize laureate, a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, an ethicist, the father of Housing First, Author Elyn Saks, Judge Steven Liefman, Dr. Fred Frese, Dr. Tracey Skale, and other top mental health advocates grapple with a fictional scenario that remains all too familiar for many of us.

The program won awards from the National Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health America, and I doubt the discussion that it spotlights will be resolved anytime soon.

 

(3-26-19) I’ll be speaking April 2nd at the National Alliance on Mental Illness Dane County 2019 Awards Banquet and Gala in Madison, Wisconsin. Please support NAMI by attending if you live in the Madison area. 

The 2019 book season is upon us. Here’s a few that have caught my eye. If you have one that you’d like to recommend, please do so on my Facebook page.

Surviving Schizophrenia, 7th Edition, by Dr. E. Fuller Torrey.

Long considered the most comprehensive and authoritative book written about schizophrenia, an updated Surviving Schizophrenia is being released today. It was groundbreaking when it was first published in the early 1980s.  Here’s how my former colleague at the Washington Post, Peter Carlson, described the book’s impact in a 2001 article that documents how this important work helped NAMI become a national organization. If you have schizophrenia, know someone who does, or want to educate yourself about this serious mental illness, this is a must read.

When Laurie Flynn walked into the office of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill for her first day as executive director in 1984, she found a pile of mailbags, each of them stuffed with letters. It was all because of E. Fuller Torrey. 

Torrey had just published “Surviving Schizophrenia,” a guide for patients and their families. When he appeared on Phil Donahue’s TV show to promote it, he urged people seeking help to contact the alliance, which was then a fledgling organization with fewer than 50,000 members, most of them the parents of mental patients. The result was this avalanche of mail.  

“Nobody had ever said the word schizophrenia on popular television, and people came out of the woodwork seeking help,” Flynn recalls. “For many years, mothers were told they were the cause of the problem, and here comes Fuller Torrey saying, ‘Wait a minute, this isn’t the family’s fault. These are brain diseases.’ Here was a psychiatrist saying, ‘I know what you’re going through because my sister has the problem.’ It’s hard to overemphasize what a hero he was back in the early days.” 

Torrey donated the royalties of “Surviving Schizophrenia” to the alliance and he hit the hustings to organize, helping to build the group into a powerful lobbying organization with more than 220,000 members.

“Weekend after weekend,” Flynn says, “he went out to states where members were organizing chapters and he rallied the troops. Nobody did it better.”

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(3-22-19) From My Files Friday – Nearly seven years ago, I posted a blog about whether anosognosia (commonly referred to as ‘lack of insight’ ) was applicable to serious mental illnesses.

I featured a video narrated by Dr. E. Fuller Torrey and produced by the Treatment Advocacy Center. Both argue that anosognosia explains why individuals who are in the midst of psychosis  often don’t believe they are ill or need help.

The four minute long video includes a snippet of a disturbing interview with Eugene Weston Jr., who entered the U.S. Capitol on July 24, 1998, and fatally shot two U.S. Capitol Police Officers: Jacob Chestnut and Detective John Gibson.

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(3-18-19) Reader comments and questions.

Dear Pete: Your photo essay on the state hospital in Georgia was well done and thoughtful. However, the dubious distinction of largest of its type actually goes to a facility that was near my home town in New York – according to Wikipedia.  See below.

Pilgrim Psychiatric Center, formerly known as Pilgrim State Hospital, is a state-run psychiatric hospital  located in Brentwood, New York. At the time it opened, it was the largest hospital of any kind in the world. At its peak in 1954 it had 13,875 patients. Its size has never been exceeded by any other facility, though it’s now far smaller than it once was. “Pilgrim Psychiatric Center”. 

We were also told, if we misbehaved as children that we would go to Pilgrim State. 

My reply:  My information also came from Wikipedia, which noted that Georgia’s Central State Hospital’s rival was Pilgrim State Hospital. I should’ve cited that too! Here’s that Wikipedia reference:

Central State Hospital. By the 1960s the facility had grown into the largest mental hospital in the world (contending with Pilgrim Psychiatric Center in New York). 

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Photos by Pete Earley

(3-15-19) I recently spoke at a nursing symposium at Georgia College in Milledgeville. I took advantage of my trip to visit Central State Hospital on the edge of that community. During the 1960s, it was the largest state mental hospital in the world with more than 12,000 residents.

It is difficult to walk its largely deserted grounds and read its history without feeling an abiding sadness. While there were periodic efforts to treat patients humanely, the hospital never received sufficient state funding or had adequate staff to care for those confined there. Nor did its doctors know how to help most patients. Thousands died and were buried in unmarked graves. The state announced it would close the hospital in 2010, but instead now uses parts of it to house forensic patients.

The asylums are nearly gone, replaced by jails and prisons. Is this progress?

 

 

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Ray, Connie and Andrew Neil Maternick  (Family photo used with permission)

(3-11-19)

Dear Pete,

I’d like to tell you about how far our family has come since a hot July day in 2013 when our middle son, Andrew Neil, experienced a psychotic episode and thrust a kitchen paring knife into his younger brother, Kyle’s forearm.

Andrew was committed into Virginia’s state hospital system for three years. The long term and quality treatment that our son received made a positive and transformative difference in his life and in ours.

It has not been all roses. But in the end, consistent treatment and therapy worked for our son.

Our son’s recovery story is one that I want to share to give others hope and document what worked.

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