I am intrigued by the diversity of human responses to suffering. As a social scientist, I've had the great fortune to carry out research in Israel, Okinawa (Japan), and the US. People in each of these countries have experienced horrific events, and they deal with the suffering they’ve endured in very different ways. In Israel and Okinawa, people seem to understand that suffering is a natural part of life and come together to deal with the aftermath of tragedy. In the US, in contrast, we tend to treat tragedy as an individual trauma that leads to emotional pathology, and our responses tend to be limited to therapy, medicine, and drugs.
I wrote
Can't Catch a Break: Gender, Jail, Drugs, and the Limits of Personal Responsibility
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.
Hundreds of thousands of the inmates who populate the nation's jails and prison systems today are identified as mentally ill. Many experts point to the deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals in the 1960s, which led to more patients living on their own, as the reason for this high rate of incarceration. But this explanation does not justify why our society has chosen to treat these people with punitive measures.
In Crime, Punishment, and Mental Illness, Patricia E. Erickson and Steven K. Erickson explore how societal beliefs about free will and moral responsibility have shaped current policies and they identify the differences…
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.
Crazy in America shows how people suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, clinical depression, and other serious psychological illnesses are regularly incarcerated because alternative care is not available. Once behind bars, they are frequently punished again for behaviour that is psychotic, not criminal. A compelling and important examination of a shocking human rights abuse in our midst, Crazy in America is an indictment of a society that incarcerates its weakest and most vulnerable citizens , causing them to emerge sicker and more damaged.
When Jennifer Shea married Russel Redmond, they made a decision to spend their honeymoon at sea, sailing in Mexico. The voyage tested their new relationship, not just through rocky waters and unexpected weather, but in all the ways that living on a twenty-six-foot sailboat make one reconsider what's truly important.…
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.
"A magnificent gift to those of us who love someone who has a mental illness...Earley has used his considerable skills to meticulously research why the mental health system is so profoundly broken."-Bebe Moore Campbell, author of 72 Hour Hold
Former Washington Post reporter Pete Earley had written extensively about the criminal justice system. But it was only when his own son-in the throes of a manic episode-broke into a neighbor's house that he learned what happens to mentally ill people who break a law.
This is the Earley family's compelling story, a troubling look at bureaucratic apathy and the countless…
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.
In this rare firsthand account, Lorna Rhodes takes us into a hidden world that lies at the heart of the maximum security prison. Focusing on the 'supermaximums' - and the mental health units that complement them - Rhodes conveys the internal contradictions of a system mandated to both punish and treat. Her often harrowing, sometimes poignant, exploration of maximum security confinement includes vivid testimony from prisoners and prison workers, describes routines and practices inside prison walls, and takes a hard look at the prison industry. More than an expose, "Total Confinement" is a theoretically sophisticated meditation on what incarceration tells…
As a young doctor, Carl Holman has experienced the horrors of World War I and the death of his lover, a fellow officer. Back home after the War, he befriends a young jazz musician who he hopes will become a companion he can share his life with. But this is…
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.
“A blistering and truly original work of reporting and analysis, uncovering America’s role in homogenizing how the world defines wellness and healing” (Po Bronson).
In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad.
It is well known that American culture is a dominant force at home and abroad; our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documented…
My book tells the stories of women who simply cannot catch a break. All the women described in the book have been incarcerated. All struggle with mental health challenges: depression, anxiety, PTSD, or more severe mental health illnesses. All have been treated, counseled, helped, and punished through various therapeutic programs, drug treatments, social welfare programs, jails, shelters, and job training programs.
Despite all these interventions, none of the women had attained the life she dreams of: a life with a secure home, children, a decent job, and reasonably good health. My book argues that these interventions fail because they do not address the institutional and structural factors that lock women into poverty, abusive relationships, and poor health.
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left…
When Lara was four years old, her father moved from Rochester, New York, to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of over 4,000 miles. She spent her childhood chasing after him, flying a quarter of the way around the world to tug at the hem of his jacket.
