CRAZY: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness

Pete Earley will use his personal story to illustrate how difficult it is to get a loved one with a severe mental illness meaningful help. He will specifically focus on how and why persons, such as his son, often end up in our criminal justice system and why that is wrong. In addition to telling his son’s story, he will describe the results of a nine month investigation that he conducted as a journalist inside the Miami Dade County jail where he followed persons with severe mental illnesses through the criminal justice system and out into the community to observe what services were available to them. The goal of his presentation is to explain why jails and prisons have become our new asylums, why this is wrong, why it wastes money, and how communities can better serve persons with mental illnesses by focusing on a variety of successful programs that help people recover rather than punish them for being ill.

For his book, The *Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison*, Earley spent a full year as a reporter inside a maximum security prison. His book, *Circumstantial Evidence* helped lead to the release of a black man from death row after he had been wrongly convicted of murdering a white teenager in Alabama. His book, *CRAZY: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness, *tells two stories. It describes his attempts to help is college age son, Mike, after he becomes ill with bipolar disorder and is arrested. It also describes a year that Earley spent at the Miami Dade County Jail where he followed persons with mental disorders, who had been in jail, out into the community to see what sort of services they received. His book was one of two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 and has won awards from Mental Health America, National Alliance on Mental Illness, and the American Psychiatric Association.

We offer the following accreditation which is available during the Web Conference, via a link below the video window: The University of Missouri-Columbia Missouri Institute of Mental Health (MIMH) will be responsible for this program and maintain a record of your continuing education credits earned. The Missouri Institute of Mental Health will award 1 clock hour or 1.2 contact hours (.1 CEU) for this activity.MIMH credit will fulfill Clinical Social Work and Psychologist licensure requirements in the State of Missouri. Attendees with licensure from other states are responsible for seeking appropriate continuing education credit, from their respective boards for completing this program.