Pete Earley:From Journalist to Advocate

Welcome to Why Not Me the World? Podcast hosted by
Tony Mantor, Broadcasting from Music City, USA, Nashville, Tennessee. Join
us as our guests tell us their stories. Some will
make you laugh, some will make you cry. Real life
people who will inspire and show that you are not
alone in this world. Hopefully you gain more awareness, acceptance,
and a better understanding for autism around the world. Hi,
I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to Why Not Me the World?
Humanity over Handcuffs the Silent Crisis Special event we by
Pete Early, an accomplished author of twenty two books, including
four New York Times bestsellers, with a fourteen year journalism career,
including six years at The Washington Post. His book Crazy
chronicles the personal events that led him to advocate for
mental health reform. Peace here to share a wealth of insights.
Thanks for coming on.
Oh my pleasure. I'm like you.
I mean, I want to spread the word absolutely. I
know so many people that say your work is amazing.
Your names everywhere in writing and blogging. What sparked your
passion for mental health advocacy.
Well, you know, as a reporter, I had covered mental health,
I'd covered the great the institutionalization 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, 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, and we know that most serious
mental illnesses emerging young men and young women from seventeen
up to twenty five. 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.
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. If you're
not lucky, has a mental illness. And I thought, I'm lucky.
If I have a kid with a drug problem, come
on really well, blood tests showed that he didn't have
a drug problem, and Stady was showing signs of by
polar The doctor really kind of scared us because he said,
I'm not going to sugarcoat this. You have any curable disease,
he will take medications the rest of your life. 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 alls die fifteen to twenty
years earlier before the rest of us. When I was
diagnosed with plung cancer, the first thing I did is
I've 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 med's for two or three weeks,
which is the therapeutic lay. They quit taking him, and
I thought, of course, if you have a headache, you'd
take aspirin and goes away. Right. Well, a year later
I got a panic called 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 eat, and
he was convinced God him on a special mission. So
I convinced him to come back to Fairfax, Virginia outside
Washington see where I lived, 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 he loved killed himself? So I thought,
oh my gosh, I got to deal with this. The
nurse rolled her eyes when he came in because he
was talking guberation. 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 poisoned and there's nothing
wrong with me.
Wow, that's kind of scary. What happened next? Did a
doctor finally see him and hopefully get into control?
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 for 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 a emergency
room and have a doctor tell you.
That, Wow, Yes, that's very tough to take in for sure.
What happened from there.
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
three hundred and sixty five thousand people with serious mental
illness gizophrenia and 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 around probation.
Every jail in the United States is overcrowded with folks
who have mental illnesses. It's become cliche, but it's true.
The LA 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 could, and
the next thing I know, he's being charged with two felonies,
breaking and 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 Ely,
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 ten 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 Likeman.
Yes, he's been on the podcast, which was a great episode.
Once you're in the system, what unfolded from there.
I followed people through the system to see what happened
to now. I want to make one more comment, and
that is my book came out 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, actually was
the beginning of six more years of hell. And 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.
This whole journey with your son got you into writing
this book. Once you got it all put together, then
you found there are others out there that are going
through the same things that you went through. What was
the next step on this journey that you found yourself on.
I've learned as a journalist for more than fifty 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 him 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 in the miniseries. I've 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 was CBS. In sixty minutes he
actually called a 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 your 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.
I agree with you one hundred percent on that point.
I've heard cases where the legal system told parents they
couldn't act until something happened. Sadly, involving the system often
led to bad outcomes, not all of them, but a
lot of cases, 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
progress 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 be in jail. Well,
let's look at a case. Let's look at Jashamiel Mitchell,
a young man over in Norfolk, Virginia. He got arrested
because he was stole something out of his seven to
eleventh store. They recognized he had a mental illness. There
was no room in the state hospital, so he had
to wait for a bed there. Over one hundred days later,
he was found dead in his fishies line cell. He
died from a heart attack called by 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 once worse was the nurse saw him and she
didn't find it alarming that he'd lost fifty 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.
I've spoken with advocates who trained police and first responders
to better support individuals with autism in those facing mental
health crisis. It's a start. It's a good start. However,
it'll take time to foster the trust and awareness needed
for officers to understand what these individuals experienced during such encounters.
Let me tell you about my son's recovery. If I
had been a Hollywood screenwriter, I could have done a
better job than what happened. We go through six years
a hell. At one point he becomes dangerous and I
call up the local mobile crisis response team. We live
in an area of one point five million people. We
had one team that only operated between eight to four
on 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 bobile 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 with their 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,
I call, and he won't answer. It's fune. Finally answers that.
I said, where are you going? He says, I'm going
to heaven and that support's very alarming and he hung up. Well,
then he called me run out of gas in North Carolina.
So I said, Okay, that's not a problem. That's not
a problem. I'll arrange for you to get gas or
go gas station. I'll give you a credit card num
where 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
fathers should do. I arranged for him to be a
gas and drove completely psychotic up ninety five, went off
the road twice. Luckily, when arrested, didn't hit anybody. That's
how close you come in these situations. I said, by
this time, I'd talked to all the experts Tony, and
they said you got to be a partner, not a parent.
I can imagine that must be really, really tough. What
kind of things did they tell you that needed to
be done to accomplish this?
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
Ken 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 saying, well, you got up middle night, took off
all of cloths, 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
forty 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, okay, okay,
get in the back of the car, and he used
as this crush. He didn't handcuff him, which was very important.
Then he said, what kind of music do you like
And my son said, oh, I love rap music. And
he said oh, and he turned the radio to a
wrap 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, he
don't meet criteria because you got to understand one thing
here and then I'll get back to this 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 health. But anyway, so the doctor wasn't
going to 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 thirty 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 responsibil It gave him was a 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 all these things. So she said, let
me find a doctor to work with you. You know, 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 fifteen 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. And then she said,
what do you want to do with your well? Can
I do I have a mental healsss? 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 whole Depot store collecting carts and he
got depressed. Then she signed one day and she said,
but you're doing great, 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 a 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 mentals 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 reuly sad.
That's definitely a sad situation. You sent me a video
of him singing on stage. The audience seemed to really
love it, which feels like a bright spot for him.
Can you give a quick Rundown on how that came about.
Doctor Jamison k Redville Jamison up in Baltimore wrote a
book where she hypothesizes 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 courts for parents,
this is fantastic. We're all into that. But he was
an artist and then he switched over and wanted to
start doing rap music because of his writing. And you
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 and 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 heard. 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 to an advocate and gave me a purpose.
So it's said 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 excepting that I may not
be able to save my own child.
Yes, that's a very tough realization to have. I talk
with so many people in how they try and work
with their child, and the fact that you brought up
the thirds that does make sense in a lot of things.
You have different levels in autism. That's why they call
it the spectrum, right. You have those that struggle, you
have those that can be very successful in life. Then
you have those that will always need help for their
whole life.
Exactly.
There's a lot of similarities in autism and certain mental
health issues. In both cases, the child has difficulties. The
parents they we have that big black hole, the big unknown.
They don't know what to do. So lots of times
they're learning at the same rate that their kids are
learning 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 seventies
and eighties to mental health and the shuddering of all
these horrible, 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 a 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. And no want to pit us
against each other, but one of the reasons is 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 schizophrenia, who just gone in
a movie theater and shot people.
Yes, unfortunately, that's the one thing that mental health has
to fight as as well as autism is the stigma
of it all. People that do not understand it sometimes
rush to judgment because they have a perception of what
they think it is rather than the reality of what
it actually is.
Exactly well, and also, you know, it's 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 yeah,
someone who has a mental illness and now my son's
doing fantastic now, but you have that fear what happens
if it's medsquit 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's wells 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 this, even though my son's doing so well. I
can't imagine it being too much different for any other parent.
Is 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.
It's very hard to accept because a parent only wants
what's best for the child. If they can't give it
to them, they think they failed, which in reality they
haven't failed. The one thing that you just brought up,
which is common with everyone I speak with, is they
are so fearful is what happens to my child if
I'm not here 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 Ornandez 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?
You would do that to get her off the street
because she wasn't considered a danger to herself for 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 are interesting
because your sheriff down there has actually built a behavioral
health unit in the jail because he wants to help
people get him restored before he sends them back. Now
that's a wonderful idea, but I also links in jail
with treatment, and you shouldn't have to go to jail
to get treatment. So that's the conundrum.
Yeah, Unfortunately, you are so correct there. The only thing
I can say about that is at least you have
someone that's stepping up and trying to at least help. Well, right,
the beauty of what he's doing is he's doing exactly
opposite of what we hear a lot that makes the
daily news.
Well, and 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 healths. The problem is that
with mental illnesses, it's kind of hard to say, oh,
this is a serious mental healths and this is not.
For instance, gets a frendie as a serious mental healths.
But if you have a fifteen year old girl who's
cutting herself because she's being bullied at school, that doesn't
follow as a serious mental health 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 disorders, gets so effective disorder early on sets schizophrenia.
The truth is we don't know because there's no blood tests,
there's no mark 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 stupod 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, et cetera.
Yes, there's definitely a lot more that we need to learn.
What would you like to tell the listeners that you
think is very important they hear about what you're doing 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 haven't 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 in the treatment rather than just punishing them
and getting them stuck in a revolving door? How do
I access those services? You need to educate yourself on
all those things, including the illness itself. You know, I
talked to Tom Mitzel, who was the head of the
National Institute's 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 and tell you the story. My
son head gets out and he has I know he's
office met So I think, well, I'm pretty smart. You
know I've been to going to these meetings. I've talked
to all these experts. So I said to him, look,
let's look on a legal pad. Divide in half. This
is when you're doing well, and 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 Pepe. So then I said, okay, Kevin, I'll pay
you fifty 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 plates
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 was a caseworker, but it was also he
woke up and he said, I'm a hospital again. I
mean five hospitalizations and being tasered. Something's definitely wrong. I
have to admit it. It took him that long to
min it because who wants to when 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 anyways, 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.
Yeah, that's so true. Well, this has been great, great conversation,
tremendous information. I appreciate you coming on, Tony.
Thank you so much, Shade talking to you. I'd 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. Thanks again. Thanks for taking the
time out of your busy schedule to listen to our
show today. We hope that you enjoyed it as much
as we enjoyed bringing it to you. If you know
anyone that would like to tell us their story, send
them to tonymantor dot com contact then they can give
us their information so one day they may be a
guest on our show. One more thing we ask tell
everyone everywhere about why not me? The world, the conversations
we're having, and the inspiration our guests give to everyone
everywhere that you are not alone in this world.