Pete Earley

And he thought she was mocking, but she wasn't. She said, come and talk to some people in my group. And so he did. And he realized he was doing great compared to a lot of folks. And she said, I had the perfect job for you. I want you to be a peer to peer counselor. So my son took all the courses and he became a person with metals who helps other people with mental illnesses. It's a fantastic job.

Now he's gone on. He's got his master's degree in social work and he's working full time, living independently. So don't tell me recovery is not possible. The problem is we know how to help most people. We just don't do it. Also, there are cases where we don't know what to do. And that's what's really sad.

Dr. Jameson, K. Redfield Jameson up in Baltimore, wrote a book called where she hypothesized that if you have a mental illness, you often are extremely artistic and you think outside the box. You think differently than other people. Of course, for parents, this is fantastic. We're all in for that.

But he was an artist and then he switched over and wanted to start doing rap music because of his writing. And nowadays, people can put their own music out there and he does his own music and puts it out. And it's helped him because, you know, we went through, a decade of hell over this. It was awful. I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but we were extremely lucky.

We know that medication used to go by the rule of thirds and they're getting better with medication, but we know one third are really helped with medication and my son falls in that. One third get no effect and one third actually are hurt. We were very, very lucky with him. Besides the medication, you had to have a purpose in life. And as strange as it sounds, his illness gave him a purpose.

And it turned me from a journalist into an advocate and gave me a purpose. So it's that finding that silver lining. And there's so many parents out there. There is no silver lining. I think the hardest thing, and I imagine it's true for autism too, is the hardest thing for me, and I still work on it, is accepting that I may not be able to save my own child.

And even six years later, after the book was published, we were going through trying to get him stable, trying to help him move forward. He was in college. We know that most serious mental illnesses emerge in young men and young women from 17 up to 25. That's the prime period. He called me up one day and he said, dad, food doesn't taste good. And he just hung up. Then he called back.

Exactly.

Well, and also we have a system that is designed for failure. If you get sicker and sicker and sicker and sicker and sicker, eventually the system will react to you. Because of the civil rights movement that transferred in the 70s and 80s to mental health and the shuttering of all these horrible, a lot of horrible institutions. You know, I was in Portugal.

Nobody over there is scared of a mental hospital. They're run by nuns and it's just like any other hospital. Iceland, the same way. But in our country, the idea of a mental hospital is like terrifying to people. So what we've done is we have insisted that we get all these folks that we can and treat them in a community.

And actually, autism and Down syndrome, those folks really led the whole effort to deinstitutionalize. That has been fantastic for those who can be helped in those community settings and dangerous for those who cannot, who end up homeless on the street. I must say this, within our own communities, though, we have of prejudice.

It's interesting to me that if you look at the Virginia Department of Mental Health, the highest funding priorities are not mental illness. They are developmental disabilities. I don't want to pit us against each other. But one of the reasons is because those folks in the developmental disabilities have been fighting for their kids from day one. They have an empathetic audience.

It's difficult to compete with that when you have somebody who has bipolar who are schizophrenic who just got in a movie theater and shot people.

Exactly. Well, and also, you know, it's daunting. And I don't, I mean, in my own neighborhood, we have someone who's very highly functioning and then someone who's not. And the parents, you know, it's just rough on the parents either way. But it's rough on a parent when you have someone who has a mental illness. Now, my son's doing fantastic now.

But you have that fear, what happens if his meds quit working or what happens when I'm gone? And I mean, you go through similar things. It's interesting because when he first got sick, we spent a little while going like, oh, I just wish it was the way it used to be. And that was a waste of time. But you have to go through those levels. It's almost like the levels of grief to get to the point.

But I do think, and I still have struggles with this, even though my son's doing so well, I can't imagine it being too much different for any other parent, is that That's your job as a parent, is to save this person. And you have to realize that cruel illnesses, you may not be able to save someone, and accepting that is really, really tough.

Right, exactly. In my book, a couple of deputies came to me and they said, you should look and see why this girl, I call her April Hernandez in the book, why she's in jail. And the reason she was in jail is her parents and relatives had framed her. They'd accused her of stealing a car. Now, why would you do that?

He said, dad, I don't know if I'm dreaming or awake. I think I took five homeless people to breakfast. And then he hung up. I called him back. And this time he said, dad, I don't know if I'm dreaming or awake. So I managed to get him in to see a psychiatrist. And I'll never forget what that psychiatrist said. He said to me, after talking to him, he says, if you're lucky, he has a drug problem.

You would do that to get her off the street because she wasn't considered a danger to herself or others, but she was psychotic. And she'd been gang raped twice, living on the streets of South Beach and beaten up three times by teenagers who thought it was hilarious to beat people up. This is the world.

I mean, I was just down in Nashville, and you guys were interesting because your sheriff down there has actually built a behavioral health unit in the jail because he wants to help people get them restored before he sends them back. Now, that's a wonderful idea, but it also links in jail with treatment, and you shouldn't have to go to jail to get treatment. So that's the conundrum.

Well, you know, the amount of money that we spend on mental health is unbelievable when you see what kind of reaction we get. I focus on jails and prisons and serious, serious mental illness. The problem is that with mental illnesses, it's kind of hard to say, oh, this is a serious mental illness and this is not. For instance, schizophrenia is a serious mental illness.

But if you have a 15-year-old girl who's cutting herself because she's being bullied at school, that doesn't follow as a serious mental illness. But you may have a high suicide rate because of that. One of my pet peeves is since my son, he's been diagnosed as bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, early onset schizophrenia. The truth is we don't know because there's no blood test.

There's no marker that you can identify. What you have to do on is you go based on what that person presents to you at the time and how many boxes under bipolar do they fit. But the truth is, in my mind, your brain is so much more complicated than that, that it's really kind of a stew pot of both emotions and heredity. I mean, the truth is, we don't know.

We know that there's some kind of genetic component to schizophrenia, but we don't know why it emerges when it does, etc.,

Well, I think if you're a parent, what you need to do is realize whether it's autism or whether it's serious mental illness, this isn't going to go away. I mean, when it first happens, you think, oh, this is just a bump in the road and this is just, it happened in college and people have it. No, if you have a serious mental illness, it's a lifetime.

You got to educate yourself if you want to help your child. You really have to know in mental health, do we have crisis intervention team police officers? Do we have a jail diversion program? Do we have judges who are interested in getting people into treatment rather than just punishing them and getting them stuck in a revolving door? How do I access those services?

If you're not lucky, he has a mental illness. And I thought, I'm lucky if I have a kid with a drug problem? Come on, really? Well, a blood test showed that he didn't have a drug problem. Instead, he was showing signs of bipolar. The doctor really... kind of scared us because he said, I'm not going to sugarcoat this. You have an incurable disease. You will take medications the rest of your life.

You need to educate yourself on all those things, including the illness itself. You know, I talked to Tom Insell, who was the head of the National Institutes of Mental Health. And he said, Pete, being a parent is not helping you. Being a partner is. Don't argue with your son. You can't argue with. I got to tell you this. I can't tell you this story. My son gets out. And I know he's off his meds.

So I think, well, I'm pretty smart. You know, I've been to go into these meetings. I've talked to all these experts. So I said to him, look, let's look on a legal pad divided in half. This is when you're doing well. This is when you're not doing well. Oh, look, when you're doing well, you're on your medication because medication helps you.

Well, I found out you couldn't talk logic to someone who's not thinking logical. So then I said, okay, Kevin, I'll pay you 50 bucks a week. Take your meds in front of me. And he looked at me and said, dad, I'm not a prostitute. So that didn't go well. So then I decided that I'd actually grind up his medication and hide it in his breakfast cereal. Well, what happened?

I discovered that his medication floated, all these pink flakes, and he got mad. Then I said, you know, look, I have the golden rule. I'm the guy with the gold. You want to live here, you have to follow my rules. You take your meds. And, of course, he told me some words you can't use on a podcast or shouldn't and left the house and moved in with my ex-wife. So these are the kind of –

things that weren't helpful, but they're the natural things you do as a parent. The thing that saved my son was not me. It was a caseworker, but it was also, he woke up and he said, I'm in hospital again. I mean, five hospitalizations and being tasered. Something's definitely wrong. I have to admit it. It took him that long to admit it because who wants to admit, want to admit you're crazy?

Nobody. So he did that. Then the doctor scared the hell out of him because he showed him a brain scan and said, You're killing parts of your brain every time you have a breakdown. It begins with that person wanting to change.

And of course, the frustrating thing with autism and the frustrating thing with mental illness in many ways is the person who needs to change often isn't aware they need to change or they can't be. There's a big argument made that the first part of your brain that goes bad is your judgment. They're the ones with the problem. You're not.

Tony, thank you so much. I appreciate talking to you. God bless you for what you're doing. Like I said, most people have a dog in the fight. Hopefully our paths will cross again. It's been my pleasure.

Those medications will cause you to gain weight. You probably can't hold a job. Getting married is probably not a good idea. Oh yeah, people with mental illness die 15 to 20 years earlier before the rest of us. When I was diagnosed with lung cancer, the first thing I did was I read everything I could. And I said, well, I'm going to beat the odds. Well, Kevin was the same way.

He wasn't going to be one of those crazy people out there. So he took meds for two or three weeks, which is the therapeutic length. They quit taking them. And I thought, of course, if you have a headache, you take aspirin and it goes away, right? Well, a year later, I got a panic call from my older son in New York. And he said, come quick. Kevin is crazy.

I went up there and Kevin had been wandering around Manhattan for five days. He barely slept, barely eaten. He was convinced God had him on a special mission. So I convinced him to come back to Fairfax, Virginia, outside Washington to see where I live. And we drove to an emergency room. I didn't have a family psychiatrist.

Right before we got there, he said to me, Dad, how would you feel if someone you love killed himself? So I thought, oh my gosh, I've got to deal with this. The nurse rolled her eyes when he came in because he was talking gibberish. And then we were put in a room to wait all by ourselves. And we waited and waited and waited and waited. And then after four hours, my son said, I'm leaving.

Pills are poison. There's nothing wrong with me. Wow, that's kind of scary.

So I literally grabbed a doctor, Tony, and brought him in that room. And he said, I can't really help you. I said, you haven't even examined my son. He said it didn't matter. Kevin had told the nurse that he thought all pills were poison. And we'd been there for four hours. So clearly there was no immediate, imminent danger to himself or others.

He said, you seem like a concerned dad, bringing back after he tries to harm you or someone else. Can you imagine being in an emergency room and have a doctor tell you that?

Took my son home. He slipped out of the house early one morning, broke into a stranger's house to take a bubble bath, took five police officers to get him out. And at that point, my son became one of the 365,000 people with serious mental illness, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and severe and persistent depression who end up in our jails and prisons. Two million a year get booked in.

Over a million are on probation. Every jail in the United States is overcrowded with folks who have mental illnesses. It's become cliche, but it's true. The L.A. jail is the largest public mental facility in the United States, Cook County. I was so frustrated that I tried to get him help and I couldn't. And the next thing I know, he's being charged with two felonies.

breaking, entering, and destruction of property. I didn't know what to do. I mentioned it. I said to my wife, I want to help our son. She said, Peter, only a father can't do much, but as a reporter, you can. And so I decided I'd write a book about him.

I spent 10 months in the jail in Miami-Dade, which was the only one that would let me in because of a great judge down there, Judge Stephen Lightman.

I followed people through the system to see what happened to them. Now, I want to make one more comment, and that is my book came out. It hit a real nerve because there's so many parents like me out there. But the end of the book, you always want a happy ending, and it ends with my son and I talking about his future and He's on his meds and meds help him.

It all looks like everything's going great. Well, it actually was the beginning of six more years of hell. At one point, he got tasered by the police, which we can talk about. And it wasn't until his final breakdown that he finally decided that he needed to help himself. And that's a key to all this.

I've learned as a journalist for more than 50 years the power of the press. I did not want my son to be just cast aside and not matter. So I felt if I wrote a book, and I also contacted Don Graham, who was then the owner of the Washington Post, and got them interested in this because I wanted to make people realize that, hey, this is my son.

I wanted to put a human face on it, and I wanted them to know that I was going to write about it. Now, what's ironic about that is here's a guy who worked at the Washington Post. I've been very lucky and fortunate in my books. I've had five bestsellers and a miniseries. I got a college education. Yet I couldn't get my kid help.

Even after I wrote a book about it, even though at one point I called up Mike Wallace with CBS and 60 Minutes, he actually called the hospital on my behalf. Even after all of that, I still couldn't get my son the kind of help he needed. until he got in trouble one more time. I often wonder, what if you're a recent immigrant? What if you don't speak the language?

What if you have no connections, no money, no knowledge of the system, and you're just going to be swept away by it? There's a high chance that the person you love is going to end up in jail, and that's just not right.

And that's always the danger. Now, you live in Nashville, which is pretty interesting because I was just there. Your sheriff has made mental health a high priority because the sheriffs and the judges have done more than the mental health advocates at getting people out of jail and setting up programs because they don't want them there. They're very expensive.

They stay three times longer than people charged with the same crime. The medication bills are astronomical. And most of them don't belong there. This is important, Tony, because people say, well, they broke the law. They need to be in jail. Well, let's look at a case. Let's look at J. Shamil Mitchell, a young man over in Norfolk, Virginia.

He got arrested because he stole something out of a 7-Eleven store. They recognized he had a mental illness. There was no room at the state hospital, so he had to wait for a bed there. Over 100 days later, he was found dead in his feces-lined cell. He died from a heart attack caused by starvation.

because they didn't get around to getting him in the hospital and he didn't know how to follow the rules in the jail. So they give him an order and he didn't understand it. So they wouldn't give him food. And what's worse was a nurse saw him and she didn't find it alarming that he'd lost 50 pounds and was so weak. So this is the kind of stuff that's going on out there.

And I can see how with someone with autism, we know of incidents like that too. We had a case in Maryland where a young man stayed in a movie theater and he ended up paying for it in his life because we have to train our officers. That's one of the first steps.

Let me tell you about my son's recovery. If I'd been a Hollywood screenwriter, I could have done a better job than what happened. We go through six years of hell. At one point, he becomes dangerous, and I call up the local mobile crisis response team. We live in an area of 1.5 million people. We had one team. that only operated between 8 to 4, not on weekends.

But this was a team that was supposed to come and see you and decide whether you met the criteria that you could be required to take medication or get some kind of treatment. They said, well, is your son dangerous? I said, no, but let me tell you what he did last time. He broke into a house, take a bubble bath, and he's off his medication. And please, we can't come.

You have to wait till he's dangerous. Well, the night he was dangerous, I called that same dispatcher and I said, look, please come. My son's violent. And he goes, oh, wait, is he dangerous or is he violent? And I said, he's violent. He says, well, we don't come if they're violent, call the police. So the police came and they rushed in and shot him twice with the taser.

That's the kind of stuff that happens when you get police involvement if the police have no training. Last time my son, Kevin, was sick, Six years after my book was published, it's Thanksgiving. He can tell I know he's off his meds because of the way he's acting. So he jumps in his car and he goes, driving off. And I call and I call and I call. He won't answer his phone. Finally, he answers it.

I said, where are you going? He says, I'm going to heaven. And that's, of course, very alarming. And he hung up. Well, then he called me, run out of gas in North Carolina. So I said, OK, that's not a problem. That's not a problem. I'll arrange for you to get gas or go to the gas station. I'll give you a credit card number. He says, no, dad, you don't understand.

If I step out of this car, I will die. Now, you know, that's ridiculous. But that's what his mind was telling him. And that's what he believed. So I did what no father should do. I arranged for him to get gas and drove completely psychotic up 95, went off the road twice. Luckily, wasn't arrested, didn't hit anybody. That's how close you come in these situations.

I said, by this time, I talked to all the experts, Tony, and they said, you got to be a partner, not a parent.

No, my pleasure. I'm like you. I mean, I want to spread the word.

You got to not argue with them, figure out what they're trying to accomplish and see if you can move them in a direction that is beneficial to their health. So I said, what do you want to do? And Kevin says, oh, there's a safe house. I want to spend the night in a safe house and kind of get, you know, figure it all out. I said, great.

So I took him over, checked him in, went home, breathed a sigh of relief. At least I knew he was safe. Well, he got up in the middle of the night, took off all his clothes, because when you take off your clothes, you know, you're invisible. So then he's walking down the street. But listen to what happened this time.

This time, a crisis intervention team trained officer, someone who had taken the 40-hour Memphis model course on how to recognize and help people with mental illness, That officer saw him and he rolled down his window and said, hey, buddy, not safe of you walking here around naked. Why don't you get in the car and we'll go over to the hospital? My son said, don't handcuff me. I'm not a criminal.

And that's when I got tasered last time. You guys tried to handcuff me and I resisted. So he goes, OK, OK, get in the back of the car. He used his discretion. He didn't handcuff him. which was very important. Then he said, what kind of music you like? And my son said, oh, I love rap music. And he said, oh, and he turned the radio to a rap station.

When they got to the hospital, my son actually shook his hand and said, this is better than a taxi ride. But he showed him compassion. He listened to him. And then he didn't leave. And when the doctor said, well, Nothing dangerous about walking around naked. It doesn't meet criteria. Because you got to understand one thing here, and then I'll get back to the story.

Most doctors don't want to treat somebody with a severe mental illness. They really don't. They want to treat somebody who's worried well. Someone who's been married a couple times, has good insurance, they can have the rest of their life talk therapy. They're scared of people with schizophrenia. They're scared of people who have mental illness. But anyway, so the doctor wouldn't admit him.

And so the officer actually said to him, well, I'm going to look up where you live and drive him over there and drop him off. So all of a sudden he was admitted and then he got a case manager. What happened then was a miracle because she said, you really shouldn't live with your dad. Let's find you a place. You're 30 years old. Let's find you a place to live independently.

So I moved in with two guys with schizophrenia. And I thought that was silly because I'm an empty nester and I thought he could live with me. But it was brilliant because it gave him responsibility, gave him his own home, gave him responsibility. And then she said, why don't you take your meds? And he said, well, they make me sluggish. I can't drink. It's all these things.

So she said, let me find a doctor to work with you. You know, of my son's seven psychiatrists, only two ever bothered to learn anything more than his name and his diagnosis. Because they're going to be a 15-minute med check and then send you out to the door. So he found a doctor, actually talked to him, and they got a medication that really helped him with fewer side effects.

Well, you know, as a reporter, I had covered mental health. I'd covered the great deinstitutionalization process. But I really didn't get it until it happened to my own son. What happened is my son, Kevin, I call him Michael in the book because he was going through all this while I was writing the book.

Then she said, what do you want to do with your... What can I do? I have a mental illness. She said, no, knock it off. Control the illness. Don't let it control you. So my son, college-educated, brilliant, high IQ, was the guy outside the Home Depot store collecting carts. And he got depressed. Then she saw him one day and she said, but you're doing great.