57 pages • 1-hour read
Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness
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Part 4, Chapters 31-33Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “Searching for a Safe Place”
Part 4, Chapter 31 Summary
With Diaz’s assistance, Earley arrives at Passageway and meets program director and founder Tom Mullen. Earley asks Mullen to share his backstory, which includes a tough childhood in the Bronx that led him to a Catholic religious order. He eventually joined the order and would devote his life to serving others, even when it meant angering the archdiocese. He started a methadone clinic in Miami but realized that what he really wanted to start was a halfway house for people with mental illnesses.
Despite several financial, media, and neighborhood setbacks, Passageway managed to stay open, able to convince government inspectors to overlook the fact that it had more than 16 beds in its facility (which is the limit to receive federal funding). Mullen only admits residents who pass a screening, making sure that they are voluntarily taking their medication and willing to live in the facility until staff decide they are ready to live on their own.
Part 4, Chapter 32 Summary
At Mullen’s urging, Earley sits in on a social worker’s Passageway therapy session with a group of residents. Their session focuses on the differences between thought disorders and mood disorders. Mullen gets to know several of the residents, following them through their routine and structured day. Their time at Passageway is meant to instill life skills so the residents can be part of the community and live on their own, even if they may never hold full-time jobs or have families of their own.
Earley follows Carl, a resident, throughout his day, from therapy to a meeting with a social worker to socializing, all while learning about Carl’s experiences with hallucinations, homelessness, and police brutality. Carl confides in Earley that he still hears voices sometimes.
Part 4, Chapter 33 Summary
Tragedy strikes when two Passageway residents die, one in his sleep and the other from a suspected suicide. Mullen takes the suicide very personally. Earley then watches Mullen yell at a pharmaceutical representative for making money off the suffering of Passageway residents.
Later, when Earley overhears Mullen on the phone with a jail social worker, he learns that Mullen still checks in on former residents after they leave Passageway. Among them is a former resident who murdered his girlfriend and returned to prison. Twelve years after the man was sent to prison for murder, Mullen fought for the former resident to return to Passageway so that he could have a second chance. When the resident became aggressive and quit his medications, Mullen was forced to send him away once again.
Earley is shocked to learn that Mullen wants this resident to return to Passageway yet again. Mullen responds, “How many chances would you want us to give your son?” (340). He likens the Passageway community to a church parish, a place that accepts those who are not accepted anywhere else in society. He tells Earley this concept has been the key to Passageway’s success.
Part 4, Chapters 31-33 Analysis
These chapters focus on themes of success and support, developing the theme of Invisibility, Stigma, and the Need for Community and suggesting a way to combat The Dangers of Deinstitutionalization. Unlike other narratives that Earley has braided together so far in the book, the story of Passageway and Tom Mullen appears in one continuous section, building up to Mullen’s ideology about community and “parish” atmospheres as a way forward for people with mental illnesses.
Mullen’s ties with Catholicism inform his views on mental health care, specifically when considering the best environment to help formerly incarcerated individuals get back on their feet. While it is not a religious institution, Passageway does uphold many of the same teachings as a church, including taking responsibility for oneself while also supporting others through their ups and downs. There is also a focus on forgiveness and second or third chances for former residents. Unlike the jails and court systems Earley has been investigating, Passageway seeks not merely to medicate or punish people with mental illnesses but rather to find a way for them to thrive on their own.
Earley illustrates the power of community and success by following Carl at Passageway. Even though the reader can tell that life is not always peaceful or pleasant there, it is obvious how the community benefits people who may never fully recover from their mental illnesses yet still want to contribute to society.
Notably, even Earley finds Passageway’s ethos shocking at first. This testifies to how dramatically it differs from the mainstream US mental healthcare system, but it also reveals Earley’s own biases. Although he began his investigation hoping to find insights into his son’s case, he implicitly views Mike as different than the people he profiles, who are mostly poor and often people of color. In bringing the discussion back to Mike, Mullen subtly points out Earley’s assumptions about the people Passageway serves, and by including the episode in the book, Earley acknowledges that he too has fallen prey to the misconceptions he now seeks to address.
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