Name: No One Cares About Crazy People
Rating: 4.4 (56 reviews)
Author: Ron Powers

What’s in it for me? Learn the dark story behind America’s approach to mental illness.

Depression, anxiety, schizophrenia – mental illness can mean many things and take many shapes, from the depressive feelings of struggling teens to the overwhelming paranoid thoughts of those with severe schizophrenia. But despite the fact that mental illness is exactly that – an illness that requires medical treatment – Americans struggling with mental illness have been funneled out of hospitals and into the country’s prisons and streets.

It all started back in the 1970s, when US mental-health policy took a major turn for the worse, a turn that’s resulted in suffering for patients, terror for families and a sizable financial burden for taxpayers.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how one court decision sealed the fate of people with mental illness;
why freedom isn’t always ideal; and
how mental illness packed America’s prisons.

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder caused by genetic and environmental factors, and it can be devastating.

Schizophrenia can be an incredibly debilitating mental illness. It radically alters the brain, and may diminish a person’s ability to function within society. Certain genes that may contribute to the onset of the disorder exist in the brains of people with schizophrenia from birth, but symptoms usually don’t present until adolescence, when the brain begins pruning cells.

This pruning process, which tends to occur during a person’s late teens and early twenties, destroys particular cortical synapses, the brain structures that facilitate communication between neighboring cells. Destroying these synapses is the brain’s way of cleaning house and making space for new synapses crucial to adult life.

But there’s a problem. When the old synapses are pruned, the genes involved in schizophrenia come to life, filling in the gaps. If these genes are then activated – by stressful environmental conditions, for instance, or marijuana abuse – the affected person enters what’s known as the prodromal phase of schizophrenia. During this phase, no major behavioral differences are necessarily discernible. However, this phase often leads to a psychotic breakdown, which may manifest in a number of ways, including paranoid delusions or delusions of grandeur. This often grabs the attention of friends and family, making them, and the person affected, painfully aware of the disorder’s existence.

That all being said, the onset of schizophrenia is always the result of external triggers. Stress is one of the most common, so it’s no coincidence that schizophrenia often dawns as a young mind begins facing serious stress for the first time, whether it be related to school, socializing or a first heartbreak. Any and all of these can jumpstart the prodromal phase of the disorder.

Another major external trigger is cannabis use, which can predispose a person to all manner of psychotic disorders – including schizophrenia – if the genes for those disorders are present. A recent article published in the Wall Street Journal cited research by many prestigious medical journals, like the Lancet, which confirmed the link between cannabis use and psychosis.

Mental illness has been de-legitimized and denied, resulting in horrific suffering for patients.

Have you ever heard the name Thomas Szasz? This prominent 1960s psychiatrist saw the treatment of mental illness as authoritarian and inhumane. So he set out to prevent others from interfering in the lives of those with mental illness.

His influential book The Myth of Mental Illness, published in 1961, did much to increase people’s skepticism of the existence of mental illness. In the book, Szasz claimed that what was commonly called mental illness was merely a set of pathologized behaviors that society found annoying and inconvenient; according to Szasz, the mind – unlike the brain – is intangible. Therefore, mental illness cannot be regarded as something that is tangibly “wrong”.

The widespread closure of mental-health institutions resulted in dire conditions for patients.

Freeing Americans with mental illness from mental institutions was, supposedly, a well-intentioned political move. However, it wasn’t sufficiently thought through and its implementation was an absolute disaster. Furthermore, the simultaneous advent of “wonder drugs” further encouraged what, in the end, proved to be an ill-advised mass deinstitutionalization.

Here’s the story:

Mental health should be a priority of our society.

Mental illness is a hidden threat, easy to evade until it comes knocking on your door. But turning a blind eye is no solution and, by taking concrete action, we can protect countless people from ever enduring this trying experience.

The first step is to make serious efforts to diagnose mental illness early on. For the author, this step is personal; he lost a son to suicide brought on by a schizo-affective disorder that causes a frightening combination of hallucinatory episodes and manic depression. If his son had received an earlier diagnosis, it’s possible that the disease could have been stopped before it became so aggressive.

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