Review by New York Times Review
IN THE OPENING CHAPTER of his extraordinary and courageous book, the author and critic Ron Powers writes about a recurring dream in which he imagines his sanity as resting atop "a thin and fragile membrane that can easily be ripped open, plunging me into the abyss of madness, where I join the tumbling souls whose membranes have likewise been pierced over the ages." The "horror and helplessness of the fall," he goes on, "are intensified by an uncaring world." In "No One Cares About Crazy People," he joins those tumbling souls, two of whom are his beloved schizophrenic sons. He writes with fierce hope and fierce purpose to persuade the world to pay attention. No doubt if everyone were to read this book, the world would change. But its clumsy title (taken from a stunningly cruel offhand remark by one of Scott Walker's staffers) is painfully correct. The mentally ill are still viewed with fear or suspicion, as broken, as damaged goods or objects of pity. Still, Powers will surely help to correct that perspective; it's impossible to read his book without being overcome by empathy for his family, respect for his two beleaguered boys and, by the end, faith in the resilience of the human heart. Powers, whose books include an acclaimed biography of Mark Twain and, with James Bradley, "Flags of Our Fathers," is a deft craftsman of sweeping tours of history but also intensely personal human narratives. He brings all his talents to bear in this account of his literatureloving, endearingly goofy, high-achieving family's descent into hell. Powers, his college-professor wife, Honoree, and their children had a beautiful life in Middlebury, Vt., until their younger son, Kevin, a gifted musician, began to exhibit symptoms of schizophrenia at age 17. Three years later, in 2005, he took his own life. Dean, the Powerses' elder son, also developed the disease but eventually found some stability and a productive life through vigilant, compassionate care. In the boys' letters and emails to their parents, elegantly threaded through the book, you can hear the voice of a family holding tight to one another and frantically expressing love as a shield against an onslaught of pain. I'm not sure I've ever read anything that handles the decline of one's children with such openness and searing, stumbling honesty. This sort of truth-telling is particularly difficult inside a family, where fictions are often deeply baked and compounded by what they have invented (or ignored) to survive tragedy. And this candor is always serving a larger purpose: "to arm other families with a sense of urgency that perhaps came to us too late," Powers writes. "When symptoms occur in a loved one, assume the worst until a professional convinces you otherwise. Act quickly, and keep acting. If necessary, act to the limit of your means. Tough advice. Tough world." POWERS'S stated objective, and one that he brilliantly fulfills, is "to persuade my fellow citizens in the Schizophrenic Nation that their ordeals, while awful, are neither unique to them nor the occasion for shame and withdrawal," and "to demonstrate to those who fear and loathe 'crazy people' that these victims are not typically dangerous, weak or immoral, or in any other way undeserving of full personhood." But he is less successful in his second goal: to call for America to "turn its immense resources and energy and conciliatory good will to a final assault on mental illness." In doing so, he creates what feels like two books, alternating his family's story with a densely reported, sometimes dizzying survey of mental illness through history, from 1403, when London's notorious Bethlehem "Bedlam" Hospital first began accepting "lunaticks." He shows how major leaps in science and innovation have found twisted applications in the care and treatment of the mentally ill - Darwin's theories of evolution become the basis of Nazi eugenics; pharmaceutical companies promoted "wonder drugs," freely exaggerating claims, playing down dangerous side effects and unjustifiably inflating prices. These are mainly horror stories, broken by the occasional crusader-heroes like Dorothea Dix, who fought for the establishment of America's first mental hospitals in the 19 th century. More often, even the best intentions have had disastrous consequences. In the 1960s the deinstitutionalization movement shifted patients from large, crowded psychiatric hospitals to what was viewed as more effective and humane community settings. Today there are some 10 million Americans with mental illness and only 45,000 inpatient psychiatric beds, leaving the suffering to shuffle between "crisis hospitalization, homelessness and incarceration." Jails and prisons are now the nation's largest mental health care facilities. The worst data point: There are 38,000 suicides a year in this country, and 90 percent of the victims are mentally ill. Midway through, the book fuses into a powerful coherence. Sweeping exposition and finely grained narrative weave together, as confusion, pain and uncertainty emerge in the Powers home. An email from Dean, in college in Colorado, about a football game - "I think that game was fixed, and probably by the government" - strikes Powers as odd. Dean's behavior becomes erratic. His father blames drugs or alcohol. Meanwhile, Kevin, studying at the Berklee College of Music, is increasingly anxious. Powers chalks it up to adolescence until Kevin calls at 4 a.m., giddy with the news that he has been selected to go on a concert tour of Russia . His parents try to make sense of it. "Such is the power of persuasion, or the need to believe, or something, that we tried to fit his announcement into some plausible context," Powers writes. "He was pretty damn good, after all. Had he made it through an all-night winnowing process of deserving students?" When Kevin reports a few hours later that he's boarded a Greyhound for Los Angeles, where he expects to be a rock star, they race from Vermont to intercept his bus. But they find that he had already been removed by a police officer and delivered to a hospital emergency room in Syracuse, where he was sedated. The doctor suspected bipolar disorder, which, he said, "was a better diagnosis 'than the alternative,'" Powers writes. "Yet, uninitiated as we were, we thought that perhaps we knew." They learn, as does the uninitiated reader, how the mentally ill retain their humanity, with all its hues, through the perils of the damned, in and out of emergency rooms, chased by police officers, from one good day back into the abyss. Powers and Honoree do what all parents do. They fight right until the end, when they find their son's body. Then they fight, with added ardor, to save their other son. Dean also attempts suicide - but is rescued in time. He finds the right doctor, the right medicine, the right dose. He walks again in sunlight. Is he different, from peak to valley? Not in his essence, or in his bond with his brother, which animates the book. "I am grateful for the almost 21 years I was given with Kevin," Dean writes in a letter to a local newspaper after his brother's death. "And after God takes back a gift like Kevin, it is a small request to ask Him for enough hope and strength to endure the grief." Like many families that have struggled with mental illness, the Powerses have seen way beyond their reasonable share of darkness, but they do eventually find a kind of hope and strength. This brave book - which reads like the act of consecration it is - imparts both, and demands society do the same for all who struggle. ? Jails and prisons are now the nation's largest mental health care facilities. RON suskind is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of "Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 9, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Powers shares his family's struggles as two sons suffer from schizophrenia. Youngest son Kevin ends up committing suicide by hanging himself in the basement just before turning 21. Older son Dean remains under treatment for the disease. So much pain and loss, helplessness and frustration. Powers recalls the boys' darkening moods, increasing opaqueness, and psychotic episodes. He points out a major obstacle to survival is anosognosia a lack of insight into one's condition, a faulty belief that nothing's wrong with your mind. His very emotional memoir also covers some of the history, legislation, pharmacology, and science of schizophrenia. He reminds us how apathetic and cruel society can be when it comes to mental illness. Consider the colloquial nomenclature: loonies, lunatics, nutcases, psychos, wackos. He reviews the tsunami of miscalculations and mistakes in the 1960s that launched mental-health care on a terrible trajectory: the denouncing of psychiatry, dosing patients with new drugs to make them more docile, and releasing hundreds of thousands of mentally ill individuals from psychiatric hospitals and community-health centers. Presently, prisons are America's biggest mental-health facilities. Powers grieves, Too many of the mentally ill in our country live under conditions of atrocity. Shame on us.--Miksanek, Tony Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This resounding rebuke to scornful attitudes toward the mentally ill takes its title from a notably insensitive 2010 email exchange between high-level staffers of Scott Walker during his run for Wisconsin governor. Using that moment as a touchstone of indifference, Powers (Mark Twain: A Life) weaves a dual tale of the personal and the political. In one thread, he traces the history of public efforts to ameliorate (or, more often, hide) the plight of those living with mental illness, from London's infamous Bedlam in the 18th and 19th centuries, where wealthy visitors were charged admission to gawk at the inmates, to America's present-day prison-industrial complex. In the other, he tells his own family's heartrending story of grappling with disease: both of his sons have struggled with schizophrenia, and his younger son, Kevin, lost his life to it in 2005. Along with grief, this section of the book is full of joy, serving as a loving tribute to Powers's sons and putting a human face on serious mental illness for anyone lucky enough never to have been forced to confron it. Readers will surely be moved by this double portrait of one family's days of happiness and sorrow, and the world's halting and flawed attempts to care for troubled people. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Educating general readers about mental illness and its troubled history in America, Pulitzer Prize winner Powers (Mark Twain: A Life) shares his searingly personal, heart-wrenching account of the schizophrenia that overtook his two talented, promising sons. In loving detail, Powers describes the joys and unfathomable challenges inherent in parenting two such blessed and simultaneously cursed young men. Most arresting is his narrative about his younger son, Kevin, a guitar prodigy. As a child, Kevin fell in love with playing the guitar and went on to dedicate his life to music. At the prestigious Berklee College of Music, he spiraled into inexplicable mental illness, and in the throes of depression, hanged himself in the basement one week before his 21st birthday. Older son Dean, a talented writer, also suffers from mental illness, but, with treatment, ultimately stabilizes. Powers alternates chapters between the history of his sons and the larger history of systemic mental health treatment failures in the United States. Ultimately, he sacrifices privacy, as he offers this book in powerful argument for necessary revised legislation. VERDICT For readers of Pete Earley's Crazy. [See Prepub Alert, 8/22/16.]-Lynne Maxwell, West Virginia Univ. Coll. of Law Lib., Morgantown © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
