Pete Earley Crazy Summary

I chose the book Crazy: A Father’s Search through America’s Mental Health Madness by Pete Earley. Earley had been an award-winning journalist for thirty years and written about America’s criminal justice system but always from the “outside looking in” (p. 1). That all changed, however, when his son Mike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
The central theme of Crazy is chronicling Earley’s year-long investigation into the de-institutionalization and ensuing criminalization of the mentally ill in America along with his son’s and others’ stories weaved throughout. Starting with Mike’s first psychotic breakdown, it is his story that becomes the genesis and nexus for this book. Earley first realized that his son could be mentally ill when Mike was a senior in college. Mike began having difficulty distinguishing between reality and fantasy and having trouble eating. As a concerned father, Earley was concerned that his son may be on drugs and persuaded Mike to go …show more content…
When Mike discovered what his dad had been doing, he was furious and insisted that he be taken to his mother’s house. Shortly thereafter, Earley received a phone call from the Fairfax Police stating that Mike was being taken to the Woodburn Center for Community Mental Health with no further explanation.
According to the police officer who met Earley when he arrived at the center, Mike had gotten up early and walked to a nearby Starbucks. He then “removed a glass water bottle from the shelf there, hoisted it up into the air, and announced to the store’s customers that it wouldn’t break if he dropped it because he had supernatural powers. He had let the bottle fall, and it had shattered at his feet. Mike had bolted from the store” (p. 21). After fleeing Starbucks, Mike ran into a residential neighborhood and broke into a house by throwing a chair through the glass door, setting off the alarm