Fans pick 100 books like Crazy in America

I found it fascinating to read Ethan Watters’ analysis of how American concepts of mental illness are exported and globalized, usually with disastrous consequences.

During a cultural moment when social justice, cultural relativism, and imperialism have entered the public consciousness, this book is more relevant than ever. With its focus on mental health labels and diagnoses, specifically, this book helped me understand how our notions of illness, psychological distress, and mental health don’t necessarily translate into other societies.

I loved thinking about familiar diagnoses here in the US, such as anorexia, depression, and PTSD, and reading about well-meaning initiatives that bring these labels into foreign contexts. By attempting to superimpose our conception of mental illness onto people in other countries, we inadvertently diminish the social networks and resilience of the societies we aim to help.

As a therapist who is sometimes weary of our cultural stories about psychological suffering, this… show more.

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 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… show more.

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… show more.

One thing prisons purposely do not do is teach you anything about the history of prisons. If you want to do that, you’ll have to do it on your own—and Oshinsky is such a great start. His 1996 book details the roots of Parchman prison in Mississippi and draws a line from slavery to convict leasing to modern-day penal farms.

This is the only piece of nonfiction on this list, but the plot is as tortuous and epic as any good novel. This book helped me understand the vast inequities inherent in our prison industry—from mandatory sentencing to privatization to the abhorrent practice of convict leasing, aptly known as “slavery by another name.” If there’s any hope of rehabilitating the country’s prison system, we must learn its history—as ugly and unjust as it might be. This is a hard read, but an immensely important one. 

Hatch did stellar research to expose how coercive psychiatric treatment—especially tranquilization with heavy antipsychotics—is spreading into nursing homes, child foster care and juvenile facilities, immigration centers, and prisons.

Antipsychotics are becoming a ‘go-to’ approach for institutional management of large populations, especially targeting people of color.

Hatch’s work also draws attention to a vital, related issue: Abundant research shows that involuntary treatment is driven by our culture’s dominant prejudices: classism, racism, sexism, sanism, etc. Predictably then, public discussions of involuntary treatment routinely lack, and desperately need, a greater diversity of voices.

So, while highlighting the work of the Black scholar Hatch, I want to also mention several recent anthologies that bring forth a fantastic diversity of voices and perspectives on contempory psychiatric care, forced treatment, and alternatives: Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies; Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada, and We've… show more.

This is the true first person account of Illinois Governor George Ryan’s courageous and unprecedented decision to suspend the death penalty and empty death row in 2003. He oversaw the state’s last execution, an experience that was seared in his brain. In 2000, he became the first governor (and a Republican at that) to impose a moratorium on the death penalty. I was there as a journalist and I helped him write this powerful memoir.

If you want to have an informed conversation about the effectiveness of international criminal justice, it is vital to understand two things. One, that whether or not it’s effective entirely depends on how you measure ‘effectiveness’. And two, that the local context in which an international court operates is going to have a major effect on how effective it can be at anything.

I enjoyed Wierda’s book because she clearly works out these important starting points and studies the ICC’s impact in four very different countries: Afghanistan, Colombia, Libya and Uganda. She also is careful to distinguish between different kinds of effectiveness (systemic, transformative, reparative and demonstrative), enabling us to have much more sophisticated conversations about the results of ICC interventions. 

Forman’s book is a must-read to learn why the War on Crime was not merely the work of one party or one racial group in society. Indeed, a number of people of color, including black mayors and black chiefs of police, strongly supported tough-on-crime measures.

The book raises the question of what it will take to reverse the trends of mass incarceration, given these realities.