Quotes from Pete Earley

Unfortunately, we force people to break the law in order to get any kind of mental health treatment.

Our health care system squanders money because it is designed to react to emergencies. Homeless shelters, hospital emergency rooms, jails, prisons - these are expensive and ineffective ways to intervene and there are people who clearly profit from this cycle of continued suffering.

I think that some of the greatest muckrakers and some of the greatest investigative journalists of all time had strong feelings about civil rights. There is a role for the journalist-advocate. And as long as you play your cards on the table, I think that's a role that we should allow.

People with mental illnesses are dying on our streets. More than 350,000 are in jails and prisons. Most are people whose only real crime is they got sick.

Having been a journalist for thirty-nine years, I've developed a pretty thick skin.

Mental illnesses are so frightening and there's so much ignorance about them that I think it comforts people to think, 'Oh, well, it happens to these people because they deserve it.'

Sometimes I feel the only way I can get a major publisher interested in mental illness is if I find a character who has bipolar disorder and is also a love-sick vampire attending an English school called Hogwarts. But I'm not giving up.

There was however, a group of 507 individuals who were permanent street dwellers [in Miami.] These 507 were not indigent, down-on-their-luck families. They were single people and every one of them was mentally ill.

If you ask most people today where the mentally ill are in our society, they will tell you they're in state mental hospitals. They're wrong. . . . They are in our jails and prisons. —Judge Steven Leifman Eleventh Judicial Circuit Miami, Florida

We insist no one be compelled to take antipsychotic drugs until he becomes so deranged that he is in 'imminent danger' and a judge has to intervene to save his life. If we really believed that forced treatment was an injustice and forced medication was cruel, then why would we allow a judge to impose it as a last resort to save a life?

The actor playing Lee got really irritated. He tried to escape by turning, running, or twisting and talking or yelling above the voice of the illness, but the illness didn't sit quietly.

Mental illness is a cruel disease.

when your own goddamn brain starts fucking with you, you're not just fucked up a little bit, you're totally fucked up.

psychiatrists would eventually decide that most mental disorders were caused by faulty chemistry in the brain, not bad parenting, bad morals, or horrible childhoods.

This led NIMH to conclude that excess dopamine is one of the reasons people's brains malfunction.

Any who say they are not willing to shoot an inmate are not hired.

of the Shadows, a powerful exposé that documented how deinstitutionalization and failed government policies had created a "mental health crisis" in America.

Schizoaffective disorder bridges the gap between bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Bipolar disorder causes mood shifts. Schizophrenia is a thought disorder that makes its victims hallucinate. Schizoaffective is both a mood disorder and a thought disorder.)

caused their insanity. That is why we can justify housing them in inhumane conditions and punishing rather than treating them. The federal government says mental illness is a chemical imbalance, and because of that it's a sickness and not something, as Rachel Diaz said, that anyone seeks or wants or deserves to get any more than he seeks, wants, or deserves to get a cold.

We lock up the mentally ill because they terrify us. We are afraid of them and even more frightened of what they symbolize. We want to believe they did something that

I've never had one person whom I've helped say, 'Doc, I wish you would have left me crazy on the streets.

with the Baker Act commitment process, I decided to contact Dr. Morton Birnbaum. Most historians credit him with being the father of the civil rights movement for the mentally