Posted on April 3, 2008
Pete Earley’s son once wrapped tin foil around his head while watching TV so the CIA couldn’t read his thoughts through the TV station.
His son once took his hands off the wheel while driving and crashed into a sedan to determine whether he was awake or dreaming.
His son broke into the neighbors’ house to take a bubble bath and was later arrested and charged with two felonies.
According to Earley, his son is no criminal; he is mentally ill.
Earley, an author, Pultizer finalist and a former reporter for The Washington Post, came to JMU
Friday morning as the keynote speaker for “Social Work Celebration 2008.” The event brought social work students and the community together in celebration of National Professional Social Work Month.
“Families go through horrific things with children who have mental disorders,” Earley said. “But the person who really suffers is the person who is sick.”
Before his son was arrested, a policeman promptly informed Earley that although his son, Mike, was clearly psychotic, he would be taken to jail unless he claimed Mike was an ‘imminent danger,’ meaning his son had threatened to kill either himself or Earley.
Earley, a Fairfax County, Va. resident, took his advice and lied. Mike’s stay at a hospital was short and Virginia laws eventually caught up to them. Mike was arrested.
The arrest of Earley’s son led the Fairfax County resident to Miami. Once there, Earley would go to Miami-Dade County Jail to investigate the ongoing trend of hiding many of the nation’s mentally ill in jails. What the former investigative reporter was going to find on Floor Nine, where they keep the mentally ill inmates, would remind him of medieval times.
“I saw terrified, angry, confused men, most of them completely naked,” Earley said of the section coined the “suicide wing.” “The air was filled with disgusting human smells and the cells were kept bone-chilling cold. Many of the men squatted in the corners of their cells, shivering. Some drank from stained toilets.”
All the while the officers, who lacked training in working with mentally ill prisoners, carried on conversations and laughed among themselves and sometimes fed inmates sandwiches to “shut them up” when they became loud.
Today there are 365,000 people with mental disorders occupying jail cells and only 55,000 in mental hospitals. Officers have no training to care for them and there is no funding in prisons to treat them.
Earley shadowed many inmates in Miami over the course of 10 months.
Earley writes about the struggles of these people and his son in his non-fiction book, “Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness.”
Senior social work major Brittany Horak jumped in line to purchase his book and thanked Earley for sharing his story.
“I was brought to tears after hearing what he went through with his son and what he witnessed on Floor Nine,” Horak said. “These people are treated like they’re less than animals.”
Pat Hostetter Martin, 65, of Harrisonburg said she could relate to having a son with a mental disorder.
“I was moved by Earley’s speech but came away not very hopeful because our society hasn’t made a commitment to treat these people,” said Hostetter, an employee of Community Creeks, a therapeutic community for people with mental illness.
“There is a large segment of society that doesn’t have any rights. We need to change our priorities politically.”
