Crazy is a word we often throw around lightly, just to joke and tease. But when a family member suffers a serious mental illness, the word takes on a different intensity. When writer Pete Earley’s own son broke into a neighbor's house in the throes of a manic episode, he learned what happens to mentally ill people who break a law. Join Dr. Clif Tennison, Chief Clinical Officer, Helen Ross McNabb Center for a discussion of Earley’s book Crazy: A Father's Search through America's Mental Health Madness in this month’s Books Sandwiched In, Wednesday, July 17, 12 p.m. in the East Tennessee History Center auditorium, at 601 South Gay Street.

“Pete Earley’s riveting book is an infuriating read,” Tennison says, “an eye-opener for the uninitiated, and a timely and bracing shove to action for those of us who may have become 'comfortably numb' to the misery and chaos of untreated mental illness that surrounds us every day, everywhere. His son’s initial episode of a manic psychosis resulting in an arrest led him to discover the underside of our society’s tragic abandonment of our neighbors with brain and behavior disorders. The frighteningly harsh lessons he learned include the never-realized ‘hospitals without walls’ – comprehensive and intensive outpatient treatment – due to decades of underfunding and the blindness of fragmented, shortsighted funding silos, coupled with highly restricted access to critical hospital admissions because of arcane, unworkable commitment laws and dangerously brief inpatient treatments.”

His hundreds of interviews reveal neglect that “consumes the time and efforts of law enforcement and homelessness agencies, crowds our emergency rooms with problems left on waiting lists, and fills our local jails with the incoherence of disorganizing psychosis, life-destroying substance abuse, and the death-wishes of profound depression,” Tennison says. “He awakens our concern that our cemeteries are populated with those whose illnesses cause premature deaths 25 years younger than the general population.”

Tennison’s talk will be a revisitation of these issues for this area. Earley came to Knoxville several years ago as the keynote speaker for the Volunteer Ministry Center’s annual Carry the Torch community awareness luncheon. “Even so,” Tennison says, “we persist in local uncertainty about how to address these unanswered issues.”

Local authorities are actively considering solutions to these longstanding problems. Tennison points to local projects currently being considered. “The first is the resurging interest in a community ‘safety center,’ an assessment and treatment site to which officers can bring mentally ill or intoxicated nonviolent misdemeanants instead of taking them to jail,” he says.

A second project under consideration is the state’s pilot project to look at a form of “assisted outpatient treatment,” which Tennison describes as “a new way to arrange for involuntary community-based treatment for people whose disorders have caused anosognosia, a lack to insight into one’s own illness.”

Coming from a long line of Southern Baptist ministers, Tennison first studied comparative religion, with a career in academia in mind. When he almost had a Masters degree, he dropped out, deciding he wanted to have a more far reaching impact. His work as an orderly while in graduate school inspired his new path. With a scholarship at Tulane University medical school, he first pursued pediatrics and then ultimately realized psychiatry was his true calling.

Tennison started his career with a residency at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he worked with the renowned forensic psychiatrist Seymour Halleck. He has served as Staff Psychiatrist, Assistant Medical Director, Medical Director, and Chief Clinical Officer since coming to the Helen Ross McNabb Center in 1983. Several years ago, he changed his “extracurricular” focus from national public psychiatry policy and professional advocacy to local and state community mental health and public health improvements. He helped found the American Association of Community Psychiatrists and has numerous honors, including twice being recognized by National Alliance on Mental Illness.

The public is invited to join the conversation on their lunchtime and bring a sandwich along. Copies of the books are available at the Library.

For more information, please call Emily Ellis at (865) 215-8723.