‘Crazy People’: A devastating look at mental illness
Journalist shares family’s ordeals, laced with anger
Ron Powers, a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist and noted author ( Flags of Our Fathers), became an expert on schizophrenia the hard way.
Both of his sons developed the devastating and disabling mental disorder. One of them, Kevin, took his own life before he turned 21. The older son, Dean, went through torturous periods of psychosis, refusing counseling or medications, as well as hospitalizations, recovery-center rehab and suicide attempts before reaching the point that Powers describes as “functioning well.”
Powers lived it, and then he dug much deeper. No One Cares About Crazy Peo
ple (Hachette, 348 pp., is a history of how mentally ill people have been regarded and treated from early times (not well) to current times (also not well).
Powers gives a raw account of the public and medical response to mental illness through the ages: burning the insane at the stake; chaining them to underground walls and conducting tours through asylums so paying guests could watch and taunt them; the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s and ’70s that resulted in hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people being shoved onto the streets.
Embroidered onto that canvas is Powers’ own captivatingly told story of his two sons — the pastoral Vermont upbringing filled with books and music, the early signs that something might be amiss and the struggles to get de- cent care and treatment.
This is no easy-stroll primer. Well-researched, it is a deep dive into the horrors of how the mentally ill have been treated over the centuries, told with a decided point of view — one that rarely entertains the notion that others might see things differently.
Powers is angry and relentless. He is in turns frustrated with and contemptuous of public sentiment, the medical profession, government, public policy, the pharmaceutical industry and, it is quite clear, a people (us) who ignored for centuries the problem of mental illness and focused at- tention on other matters.
The criticisms are not without merit. And families who have endured traumas, indignities and roadblocks similar to those that Powers and his family have endured will no doubt agree with his message and, most important, tone. Powers writes, for example, that societies and governments have never spent money to “sustain their mad people. The mad don’t vote; the mad don’t do anything to generate wealth. ... why toss good money at them …”
He writes about the “rounding up” of the mentally ill, adding “if rounding up is too much of a challenge to law enforcement they can then simply be shot dead on the street. Or in their homes.”
Powers states in the preface: “I hope you do not ‘enjoy’ this book. I hope you are wounded … wounded to act, to intervene.”
One wonders if in this era of harsh discourse, when many are growing weary of us-and-them arguments and pronouncements that allow for no middle ground, this level of tenacious condescension will help secure the allies Powers seeks in his somewhat encouraging final chapter.