The best books about mental illness, drug use, trauma, and crime

More than anything else I have read, this book helped me understand the relationship between crime and mental illness in the United States. The book explore some really fascinating case studies (for example, school shooter Kip Kinkel).

But the bigger contribution is how the authors sort out the core ideological approaches of the law versus the social sciences (including psychology and psychiatry.) They show how the law is rooted in philosophical and religious ideas about good, evil, and free will. In contrast, the social sciences use complex empirical observations and theories to explain human behavior.

The best chapter, in my opinion, is “The ‘Mad’ or ‘Bad’ Debate Concerning Sex Offenders.” It is the only thing I’ve ever read that has helped me understand why our society singles out sex offenders for demonization.

I cannot get Shayne’s story out of my mind! It tells the stories of six very different individuals from diverse backgrounds with various access to health care and other resources. All six struggle with mental illness. And all six end up incarcerated and, finally, dead. But it’s Shayne’s story that I (and my students) can’t stop thinking about.

Shayne was a bright and beautiful child who grew up in a close and loving family. By the time she was eleven, Shayne had begun to make inappropriate comments, sneak out of her house at night, and lose interest in school. At age fourteen, she was found in a park with a young man and some beer. She refused to tell her therapist what she had been doing there but mentioned that she felt people could read her mind. A physician who met her just the one time diagnosed her as psychotic and recommended hospitalization. Because of the laws in place at that time in Iowa, Shayne was made a ward of the state. The next decades were rounds of increasingly horrific attempts at self-harm, increasingly oppressive hospitalizations and incarcerations, and finally, death.

Shayne’s story is incredibly compelling both because her personality comes through so clearly (she was bright, funny, creative, and provocative) and because the author has done a fabulous job tracing her institutional journey.

I love well-written memoirs that allow me insight into real people and, at the same time, shed light on broader social problems that often are hidden. In this book, Pete Earley manages the incredibly complicated job of telling the story of his son (who broke into a neighbor’s house while amid a mental illness crisis), his own story as a father trying to help his son navigate both the mental health system and the criminal justice system, and the story of his observations as a journalist inside the Miami-Dade County jail.

By the end of the book, I felt I had experienced the privilege of getting to know Pete’s son, peeking inside Pete’s head, and seeing what commonly goes on as thousands of Americans cycle through the revolving doors of mental health and carceral institutions. Perhaps because my own research is with people who do not have many advantages in life (they are poor, tend to come from dysfunctional families, and many have cognitive impairments as well as mental health challenges).

I especially appreciated following a young man's journey with all the advantages of a supportive, middle-class, educated family. It's sad to say that it’s not clear that any of that helped much. The system, it seems, is set up for too many people to fail.

Before I read this book, I had only the vaguest idea of what happens in supermax prisons or even solitary confinement in regular prisons. In this book, Rhodes shares her observations of a maximum-security prison–really inside. She had incredible access to the guards, the cell blocks, and the prisoners.

I already knew that Rhodes is a brilliant anthropologist–I loved her book Emptying Beds: The Work of an Emergency Psychiatric Unit (the bit that has stayed in my mind is the practice of offering patients a one-way ticket to California to get these pesty mentally ill, homeless people out of the overcrowded Chicago unit).

This book is, in some ways, the next step in that story, but in some ways, the opposite. Where the emergency unit tried to get rid of patients, the supermax prison tried to hold onto them. I was especially fascinated by the detailed descriptions of interactions between prisoners and guards.

Through these descriptions, I came to understand that the entire setting is pathological: Everyone involved becomes more dysfunctional as time goes on.

This book differs from the others on my “best books” list. This one doesn’t deal (directly) with the convergences of mental illness and criminal justice institutions and policies. However, it provides extraordinary insight into the many ways in which mental health/illness has been understood in diverse societies around the world and into the power of American ideas and treatments to eradicate that diversity within incredibly brief periods of time.

This book has great chapters on the rise of anorexia in Hong Kong, changing responses to schizophrenia in Zanzibar, and the marketing of depression in Japan. But the chapter that most spoke to me is “The Wave that Brought PTSD to Sri Lanka.” In this chapter Watters traces how American mental health professionals responded to the enormous, disastrous tsunami that wiped out entire towns in 2004. In a nutshell, while American mental health professionals focused on PTSD, Sri Lankans were more concerned with building shelters and getting food. They saw little value in talking about the trauma they experienced; indeed, they saw this kind of talking as harmful.

This duality echoed what I observed in my US research with formally incarcerated women: Most of the professionals who deal with them want to focus on PTSD (nearly all of the women have been victims of assault), whereas the women typically feel that constantly talking about the past distracts from the more pressing needs for housing, jobs, and the like.