The Fringe Element

Crazy, by Pete Earley, is the recounting of a fathers struggle to cope with his sons mental illness. Through his travels, he explores the world that envelops the mentally ill in this country in a hope to better understand the goliath he faces. Through this comprehensive narrative, I gained a more in depth understanding of the super-critical conditions that face the mentally ill and the straight jacket restrictions on family and friends who want to help.
Conditions for the mentally ill have always been at least sub-par for all of human history. From the beginning of institutionalization in the 1800’s, where “patients” were chained to the walls and kept in a livestock equivalent state, they have been seen as less than even the prisoners who had committed such acts as murder or rape. This stigmatism has followed them even to this day. One of the first places that Earley visits is the 9th floor of the Miami Dade County Pretrial Center, a fancy name for a jail. There, a quasi-institutionalized hellhole festers, where 92 inmates are held and looked after. Though none are chained to any walls, many are stored in small concrete alcoves without sheets for their beds and, if there happen to be two people in a cell, as was the occasion for many, there was only one mattress to share between them. Even worse, among these 92 patients, there is only one doctor on staff, with rounds in the morning taking 19.5 minutes, an average of 12.7 seconds per person. Also, because of the lack of funding, proper prescriptions can’t be fulfilled and patients receive medication that doesn’t provide the same level of results that others would. If the lack of qualified medical treatment wasn’t bad enough, punishments for misbehavior on the part of the inmates is often served physically by the correctional officers.
Hope dwindles as you examine the mentally ill population outside the confines of the 9th floor or any other detainment facility. In regards to Miami, there is a considerable population of chronically homeless mentally ill people. All of which live in destitution unknown to common America. Men and women living off of scrapes left in trash cans and dumpsters, drinking water from gutters, and defecating in bushes and alleyways propagate the streets. Men and women who have been unfortunate enough, in some respects, to exit the confines of the Miami jails are sometimes placed in designated homes for the recently released mentally ill as well as recovering drug addicts. 90% of the 600 half-ways houses in Miami are unaccredited by the state due to their lack of meeting the minimum requirement set forth. Most are poorly operated by individuals who have no medical training or experience in dealing with the mentally incapacitated. There are even accounts of building managers hiring illegal immigrants to care for the people housed there.