Pete Earley > Quotes

“There was however, a group of 507 individuals who were permanent street dwellers [in Miami.] These 507 were not indigent, down-on-their-luck families. They were single people and every one of them was mentally ill. ”
― Pete Earley, Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness

“If you ask most people today where the mentally ill are in our society, they will tell you they’re in state mental hospitals. They’re wrong. . . . They are in our jails and prisons. —Judge Steven Leifman Eleventh Judicial Circuit Miami, Florida”
― Pete Earley, Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness

“We insist no one be compelled to take antipsychotic drugs until he becomes so deranged that he is in 'imminent danger' and a judge has to intervene to save his life. If we really believed that forced treatment was an injustice and forced medication was cruel, then why would we allow a judge to impose it as a last resort to save a life? ”
― Pete Earley, Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness

“The actor playing Lee got really irritated. He tried to escape by turning, running, or twisting and talking or yelling above the voice of the illness, but the illness didn't sit quietly.”
― Pete Earley, Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness

“Mental illness is a cruel disease.”
― Pete Earley, Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness

“We lock up the mentally ill because they terrify us. We are afraid of them and even more frightened of what they symbolize. We want to believe they did something that”
― Pete Earley, Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness

“caused their insanity. That is why we can justify housing them in inhumane conditions and punishing rather than treating them. The federal government says mental illness is a chemical imbalance, and because of that it’s a sickness and not something, as Rachel Diaz said, that anyone seeks or wants or deserves to get any more than he seeks, wants, or deserves to get a cold.”
― Pete Earley, Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness

“This led NIMH to conclude that excess dopamine is one of the reasons people’s brains malfunction.”
― Pete Earley, Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness

“Condensing him to simply being a killer takes away from everything else that he was,”
― Pete Earley, No Human Contact: Solitary Confinement, Maximum Security, and Two Inmates Who Changed the System

“of the Shadows, a powerful exposé that documented how deinstitutionalization and failed government policies had created a “mental health crisis” in America.”
― Pete Earley, Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness

“psychiatrists would eventually decide that most mental disorders were caused by faulty chemistry in the brain, not bad parenting, bad morals, or horrible childhoods.”
― Pete Earley, Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness

“I’ve never had one person whom I’ve helped say, ‘Doc, I wish you would have left me crazy on the streets.”
― Pete Earley, Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness

“On February 1, 1906, Leavenworth received its first inmate, John Grindstone, a Native American convicted of murder. He was paroled a few years later, but returned to the Hot House within months for killing another man. He eventually died of tuberculosis at the prison and achieved another first by being buried in the first plot of a new pauper cemetery on a hill a half mile from the penitentiary. Officially called Mount Hope, the prison’s cemetery is still used today, although it is better known as Peckerwood Hill, the tag given it by convicts and guards. By the early 1900s, the government had”
― Pete Earley, The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

“(Schizoaffective disorder bridges the gap between bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Bipolar disorder causes mood shifts. Schizophrenia is a thought disorder that makes its victims hallucinate. Schizoaffective is both a mood disorder and a thought disorder.)”
― Pete Earley, Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness

“Any who say they are not willing to shoot an inmate are not hired.”
― Pete Earley, The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

“There are two ways public defenders can represent the mentally ill, he explained. The attorney can decide that he is going to do what he thinks is in the best interest of his client, and if he decides that a defendant needs to be hospitalized, then that is what he tells a judge. The second approach is to act as the client’s lawyer, not as his guardian, or his parent, or his doctor. And as his lawyer, he does whatever the accused wishes, regardless of how preposterous it might seem. This is the route that he personally follows, because he believes his clients have a constitutional right to due process and to have their feelings, even if they are crazy, presented to a judge.”
― Pete Earley, Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness

“with the Baker Act commitment process, I decided to contact Dr. Morton Birnbaum. Most historians credit him with being the father of the civil rights movement for the mentally”
― Pete Earley, Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness

“You are not who you were yesterday. Not who you are to be tomorrow. Even when you are dead living to eternity you never are who you are yet to be.”
― Pete Earley, No Human Contact: Solitary Confinement, Maximum Security, and Two Inmates Who Changed the System

“when your own goddamn brain starts fucking with you, you’re not just fucked up a little bit, you’re totally fucked up.”
― Pete Earley, Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness