No One Cares About Crazy People
The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America

This is a deeply emotional book about an important topic, and it seems to have found a large audience (judging by the number of holds at my local library if not the number of ratings on Goodreads). It’s a great idea, alternating between nonfiction chapters about the nature and history of mental illn......more

This was an extremely painful book to read, not least because I have a history of mental illness in my family. Both my mother and her mother committed suicide—same method, same place—and I grew up visiting the local mental hospital where my mother stayed for long periods of time. She died in 1979, w......more

As a clinical social worker with a special interest in the seriously mentally ill, I very much appreciated Ron Powers' personal and societal exploration of mental illness. As the father of two schizophrenic sons, one who took his own life, he knows the ravages of this disease firsthand. Despite a de......more

This book is personal enough to be review-proof, so I'm giving it a noncommittal three stars even though I thought it had a lot of flaws. I picked it out because of its important topic: mental illness, and bad public policy surrounding mental illness. However, I think Powers's account of the history......more