Tony Mantor: Why Not Me ? - Pete Earley:From Journalist to Advocate

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

Send us a text Pete Early shares his journey from Washington Post journalist to mental health advocate after his son developed bipolar disorder, revealing how a broken system forces families into crisis before providing help. • Diagnosis came during his son Kevin's college years with warning signs like "food doesn't taste good" and confusion about reality • Psychiatrist delivered a devastating prognosis: "incurable disease" with lifetime medication, weight gain, likely unemployment • Kevin stopped taking medication after a few weeks, leading to psychosis and breaking into a stranger's house • Early couldn't get help until his son became "dangerous" enough for intervention • His son joined 365,000 Americans with serious mental illness who end up in jails and prisons annually • Crisis intervention training for police makes crucial difference in mental health encounters • Recovery came through proper medication, independent living with supportive roommates, and finding purpose as a peer counselor • Early discovered the difference between being a parent versus a partner in someone's recovery • Mental health system requires criminal behavior before providing adequate treatment • Despite Early's connections and resources, getting proper help took years of struggle If you know anyone who would like to share their story on Why Not Me? The World, visit TonyMantor.com/Contact. T ell everyone everywhere about our show and the inspiration our guests provide, reminding you that you are not alone in this world.   https://tonymantor.com https://Facebook.com/tonymantor https://instagram.com/tonymantor https://twitter.com/tonymantor https://youtube.com/tonymantormusic intro/outro music bed written by T. Wild Why Not Me the World music published by Mantor Music (BMI) The content on Why Not Me: Embracing Autism amd Mental Health Worldwide, including discussions on mental health, autism, and related topics, is provided for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not reflect those of the podcast, its hosts, or affiliates.Why Not Me is not a medical or mental health professional and does not endorse or verify the accuracy, efficacy, safety of any treatments, programs, or advice discussed.Listeners should consult qualified healthcare professionals, such as licensed therapists, psychologists, or physicians, before making decisions about mental health or autism- related care.Reliance on this podcast's contents is at the listener's own risk. Why Not Me is not liable for any outcomes, financial or otherwise, resulting from actions taken based on the information provided. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Why Not Me The World Podcast, hosted by Tony Mayator. Broadcasting from Music City, USA, Nashville, Tennessee. Join us as our guests tell us their stories. Some will make your laugh, some will make you cry. Real life people who will inspire and show that you are not alone in this world. hopefully you gain more awareness, acceptance, and a better understanding for autism around the world. Hi, I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to Why Not Me the World, Humanity Over Handcuffs, the Silent Crisis Special Event.

We're joined by Pete Early, an accomplished author of 22 books, including four New York Times bestsellers, with a 14-year journalism career, including six years at the Washington Post. His book Crazy chronicles the personal events that led him to advocate for mental health reform. Pete's here to share a wealth of insights. Thanks for coming on. No, my pleasure. I'm like you. I mean, I want to spread the word.

Absolutely. I know so many people that say your work is amazing, your names everywhere in writing and blogging. What sparked your passion for mental health advocacy? Well, you know, as a reporter, I had done. covered mental health. I'd covered the great de-institutionalization process, but I really didn't get it until it happened to my own son. What happened is my son, Kevin, I call him Michael in the book, because he was going through all this while I was writing the book, and even six years later, after the book was published, we were going through trying to get him stable, trying to help him

move forward. He was in college. We know that most serious mental illnesses emerge in young men and young women from 17 up to 25. That's the prime period. He called me up one day and he said, Dad, food doesn't taste good. And he just hung up. Then he called back. He said, Dad, I don't know if I'm dreaming or awake. I think I took five homeless people to breakfast. And then he hung up. I called him back. And this time he said, Dad, I don't know if I'm dreaming or awake. So I managed to get him in to see a psychiatrist. And I'll never forget what that psychiatrist said. He said to me, talking to him, he says, if you're lucky, he has a drug problem. If you're not lucky, has a mental illness. And I thought, I'm lucky if I have a kid with a drug problem? Come on, really?

Well, blood tests showed that he didn't have a drug problem. Instead, he was showing signs of bipolar. The doctor really kind of scared us because he said, I'm not going to sugarcoat this. You have an incurable disease. You would take medications the rest of your life. those medications will cause you to gain weight. You probably can't hold a job. Getting married is probably not a good idea. Oh, yeah, people with mental illness die 15 to 20 years earlier before the rest of us. When I was diagnosed with lung cancer, the first thing I did is I read everything I could,

and I said, well, I'm going to beat the odds. Well, Kevin was the same way. He wasn't going to be one of those crazy people out there. So he took meds for two or three weeks, which is the therapeutically. they quit taking them and I thought, of course, if you have a headache, you take aspirin and goes away, right? Well, a year later, I got a panic call from my older son in New York and he said, come quick, Kevin is crazy. I went up there and Kevin had been wandering around Manhattan for five days.

He barely slept, barely eaten. He was convinced God had him on a special mission. So I convinced him to come back to Fairfax, Virginia outside Washington, to see where I live. And we drove to an emergency room. I didn't have a family psychiatrist. Right before we got there, he said to me, Dad, how would you feel if someone you love killed himself?

So I thought, oh my gosh, I've got to deal with this. The nurse rolled her eyes when he came in because he was talking gibberish. Then we were put in a room to wade all by ourselves. And we waited and waited and waited and waited. And then after four hours, my son said, I'm leaving. Pills are poison. There's nothing wrong with me.

Wow, that's kind of scary. What happened next? Did a doctor finally see him? and hopefully get into control? So I literally grabbed a doctor, Tony, and brought him in that room, and he said, I can't really help you. I said, you haven't even examined my son.

He said it didn't matter. Kevin had told the nurse that he thought all pills were poison, and we'd been there for four hours, so clearly there was no immediate, imminent danger to himself or others. He said, you seem like a concern dad, bringing back after he tries to harm you or someone else. Can you imagine being an emergency room, have a doctor tell you that? Wow, yes, that's very tough to take in for sure.

What happened from there? Took my son home. He slipped out of the house early one morning, broke into a stranger's house to take a bubble bath, took five police officers to get him out. And at that point, my son became one of the 365,000 people with serious mental illness, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and severe and persistent depression, who end up in our jails and prisons. Two million a year get booked in.

Over a million are on probation. Every jail in the United States is overcrowded with folks who have mental illnesses. It's become cliche, but it's true. The L.A. jail is the largest public mental facility in the United States, Cook County. I was so frustrated that I tried to get him help and I couldn't. And the next thing I know, he's being charged with two felonies, breaking, entering, and destruction of property. I didn't know what to do. I mentioned it.

I said to my wife, I want to help our son. She said, Peter Early, a father can't do much, but as a reporter, you can. And so I decided I'd write a book about him. I spent 10 months in the jail in Miami-Dade, which was the only one that would let me in because of a great judge down there, Judge Stephen Leibman. Yes, he's been on the podcast, which was a great episode. Once you were in the system, what unfolded from there? I followed people through the system to see what?

happened to him. Now I want to make one more comment, and that is my book came out. It hit a real nerve because there's so many parents like me out there. But the end of the book, you always want a happy ending, and it ends with my son and I talking about his future and he's on his meds, and meds help him. It all looks like everything's going great. Well, it actually was the beginning of six more years of hell. At one point, he got tasered by the police, which we can talk about. and it wasn't until his final breakdown that he finally decided that he needed to help himself, and that's a key to all this. This whole journey with your son got you into writing this book.

Once you got it all put together, then you found there are others out there that are going through the same things that you went through. What was the next step on this journey that you found yourself on? I've learned as a journalist for more than 50 years of power of the press. I did not want my son to be just cast aside and not matter. So I felt if I wrote a book, and I also contacted Don Graham, who was then the owner of the Washington Post, and got them interested in this,

because I wanted to make people realize that, hey, this is my son. I wanted to put a human face on it, and I wanted them to know that I was going to write about it. Now, what's ironic about that is here's a guy who worked at the Washington Post, I've been very lucky and fortunate in my books. I've had five bestsellers in the miniseries. I got a college education. Yet I couldn't get my kid help.

Even after I wrote a book about it, even though at one point I called up Mike Wallace with CBS in 60 Minutes, he actually called a hospital on my behalf. Even after all of that, I still couldn't get my son the kind of help he needed until he got in trouble. one more time. I often wonder, what if you're recent immigrant? What if you don't speak the language? What if you have no connections, no money, no knowledge of the system? And you're just going to be

swept away by it. There's a high chance that the person you love is going to end up in jail. And that's just not right. I agree with you 100% on that point. I've heard cases where the legal system told parents they couldn't act until something happened. Sadly, involving the system often led to bad outcomes. Not all of them, but a lot of cases. And that's always the danger. Now, you live in Nashville, which is pretty interesting,

because I was just there, your sheriff has made mental health a high priority because the sheriffs and the judges have done more than the mental health advocates at getting people out of jail and setting up programs, because they don't want them there. They're very expensive.

They stay three times longer than people charged with the same crime. The medication bills are astronomical. And most of them don't belong there. This is important, Tony, because people say, well, they broke the law. They need be in jail. Well, let's look at a case. Let's look at Jay Shamil Mitchell, a young man over in Norfolk, Virginia.

He got arrested because he stole something out of his 7-11 store. They recognized he had a mental illness. There was no room at the state hospital. so he had to wait for a bed there. Over 100 days later, he was found dead in his fecese blind cell. He died from a heart attack caused by starvation because they didn't get around to getting him in the hospital and he didn't know how to follow the rules in the jail.

So they give him an order and he didn't understand it so they wouldn't give him food. And what's worse was a nurse saw him and Sheen didn't find it alarming that he'd lost 50 pounds and was so weak. So this is the kind of stuff that's going on out there. And I can see how with someone with autism, we know of incidents like that, too.

We had a case in Maryland where a young man stayed in a movie theater and he ended up paying for it in his life because we have to train our officers. That's one of the first steps. I've spoken with advocates who train police and first responders to better support individuals with autism and those facing mental health crisis. It's a start.

It's a good start. However, it'll take time to foster the trust and awareness needed for officers to understand what these individuals experience during such encounters. Let me tell you about my son's recovery. If I'd been a Hollywood screenwriter, I could have done a better job than what happened. We go through six years of hell. At one point, he becomes dangerous, and I call up the local mobile crisis response team. We live in an area of 1.5 million people.

We had one team that only operated between 8 to 4 on non-on weekends. But this was a team that was supposed to come and see you and decide whether you met the criteria that you could be required to take medication or get some kind of treatment. They said, well, is your son dangerous? I said, no, but let me tell you what he did last time. He broke into a house, take a bubble bath, and he's off as medication. And please, we can't come. you have to wait till he's dangerous.

Well, the night he was dangerous, I called that same dispatcher, and I said, look, please come. My son's violent. And he goes, oh, wait, is he dangerous or is he violent? And I said, he's violent. He says, well, we don't come, but they're violent. I call the police. So the police came and they rushed in and shot him twice with the taser. That's the kind of stuff that happens when you get police involvement if the police have no training.

last time my son, Kevin was sick, six years after my book was published, it's Thanksgiving. He can tell, I know he's off his meds because of the way he's acting. So he jumps in his car and he goes, driving off. And I call and I call and I call. He won't answer his phone. Finally he answers it. I said, where are you going? He says, I'm going to heaven.

And that, of course, very alarming. And he hung up. Well, then he called me, run out of gas in North Carolina. So I said, okay, that's not a problem. That's not a problem. I'll arrange for you to get gas or go to gas station. I'll give you a credit card number. He says, no, Dad, you don't understand. If I step out of this car, I will die. Now, you know that's ridiculous. But that's what his mind was telling him, and that's what he believed. So I did what no father should do.

I arranged for him to get gas and drove completely psychotic up 95, went off the road twice. Luckily, he wasn't arrested, didn't hit anybody. That's how close you come in these situations. I said, by this time I'd talk to all the experts, Tony, and they said, you've got to be a partner, not a parent. I can imagine that must be really, really tough. What kind of things did they tell you that needed to be done to accomplish this? You've got to not argue with them, figure out what they're trying to accomplish and see if you can move them in a direction that is beneficial to their health. So I said, what do you want to do? And Kevin says, oh, there's a safe house. I want to spend the night in a safe house and kind of get, you know, figure it all out. I said, great. So I took him over, checked him in, went home, breathed the sigh of relief. At least I knew he was safe. Well, you got up in the middle night, took off all his clothes,

because when you take off your clothes, you know, you're invisible. So then he's walking down the street. But listen to what happened this time. This time, a crisis intervention team trained officer, someone who had taken the 40-hour Memphis model course on how to recognize and help people with mental illness, that officer saw him and he rolled down his window and said, hey, buddy, not safe of you walking here around naked. Why don't you get in the car and we'll go over in the hospital? My son said, don't handcuff me. I'm not a criminal. And that's when I got tasered last time. You guys tried to handcuff me and I resist it. So he goes, okay, okay, get in the back of the car and he used his discretion. He didn't handcuff him, which was very important. Then he said, what kind of music

you like and my son said oh i love rap music and he said oh and he turned the radio to a rap station when they got to the hospital my son actually shook his hand said this is better than a taxi ride but he showed him compassion he listened to him and then he didn't leave and when the doctor said well nothing dangerous about walking around naked he doesn't meet criteria because you got to understand one thing here and then i'll get back to the story most doctors don't want to treat somebody with a severe mental illness they really don't They want to treat somebody who's worried well. Someone who's been married a couple times, has good insurance,

they can have the rest of their life talk therapy. They're scared of people with schizophrenia. They're scared of people who have mental illness. But anyway, so the doctor wouldn't get to admit him. And so the officer actually said to him, well, I'm going to look up where you live and drive him over there and drop him off. So all of a sudden he was admitted. And then he got a case manager.

What happened then was a miracle because she said, you really shouldn't live with your dad. Let's find you a place. You're 30 years old. Let's find you a place to live independently. So I moved in with two guys with schizophrenia. And I thought that was silly because I'm an empty nester and I thought he could live with me. But it was brilliant because it gave him responsibility. I gave him his own home, gave him responsibility. And then she said, why don't you take your meds? And he said, well, they make me sluggish. I can't drink. It's all these things. So she said, let me find a doctor to work with you. You know, of my son's seven psychiatrist, only two ever bothered to learn anything more than his name and his

diagnosis, because they're going to be a 15-minute med check and then send you out to the door. So he found a doctor actually talked to him, and they got a medication that really helped him with fewer side effects. Then she said, what do you want to do with your? What could I do? I have a mental illness. She said, no, knock it off. Control the illness. Don't let it control you. So my son, college educated, brilliant, high IQ was the guy outside the Home Depot store collecting carts. And he got depressed. Then she signed one day and she said, but you're doing great. And he thought she was mocking. But she wasn't. She said, come and talk to some people in my group. And so he did. And he realized he was doing great compared to a lot of folks. And she said, I had the perfect job for you.

I want you to be a peer to peer counselor. So my son took all the courses and he became a person with mentals who helps other people with mental illnesses. It's a fantastic job. Now he's gone on. He's got his master's degree in social work and he's working full time, living independently. So don't tell me recovery is not possible. The problem is we know how to help most people. We just don't do it. Also, there are cases where we don't know what to do. And that's what's really sad. That's definitely a sad situation. You sent me a video of him singing on stage. The audience seemed to really love it, which feels like a bright spot for him.

Can you give a quick rundown on how that came about? Dr. Jameson, Kay Redfield Jameson, up in Baltimore, wrote a book where she hypothesized that if you have a mental illness, you often are extremely artistic. And you think outside the box, you think differently than other people. on courts for parents. This is fantastic. We're all in for that. But he was an artist and then he switched over and wanted to start doing rap music because

of his writing. And nowadays, people can put their own music out there and he does his own music and puts it out. And it's helped him because, you know, we went through a decade of hell over this. It was awful. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. But we were extremely lucky. We know that medication used to go by the rule of thirds and

they're getting better with medication, but we know one-third are really helped with medication, and my son falls in that. One-third get no effect, and one-third actually are hurt. We were very, very lucky with him. Besides the medication, you had to have a purpose in life. And as strange as it sounds, his illness gave him a purpose, and it turned me from a journalist into an advocate and gave me a purpose. So it said finding that silver lining, and there's so many parents out there, there is no silver lining.

I think the hardest thing, and I imagine it's true for autism too, is the hardest thing for me, and I still work on it, is accepting that I may not be able to save my own child. Yes, that's a very tough realization to have. I talk with so many people in how they're trying to work with their child,

and the fact that you brought up the thirds that does make sense in a lot of things. You have different levels in autism. That's why they call it the spectrum. Right. You have those that struggle. You have those that can be very successful in life. Then you have those that will always need help for their whole life.

Exactly. There's a lot of similarities in autism and certain mental health issues. In both cases, the child has difficulties. the parents, they have that big black hole, the big unknown. They don't know what to do. So lots of times they're learning at the same rate that their kids are learning. Well, and also we have a system that is designed for failure. If you get sicker and sicker and sicker and sicker and sicker, eventually the system will react to you. Because of the civil rights movement that transferred in the 70s and 80s to mental health and the shuddering of all these horrible,

a lot of horrible institutions. You know, I was in Portugal. Nobody over there is scared of a mental hospital. They're run by nuns and it's just like any other hospital. Iceland the same way. But in our country, the idea of a mental hospital is like terrifying to people. So what we've done is we have insisted that we get all these folks that we can and treat them in a community.

and actually autism and Down syndrome, those folks really led the whole effort to deinstitutionalize. That has been fantastic for those who can be helped in those community settings and dangerous for those who cannot, who end up homeless on the street. I must say this. Within our own communities, though, we have a prejudice. It's interesting to me that if you look at the Virginia Department of Mental Health, the highest funding priorities are not mental illness. They are developmental disabilities and no one of pit us against each other.

But one of the reasons is it's because those folks and the developmental disabilities have been fighting for their kids from day one. They have an empathetic audience. It's difficult to compete with that when you have somebody who has bipolar, who are schizophreny who just gone in a movie theater and shot people. Yes, unfortunately. Unfortunately, that's the one thing that mental help has to fight, as well as autism, is the stigma of it all. People that do not understand it sometimes rush to judgment because they have a perception of what they think it is rather than the reality of what it actually is.

Exactly. Well, and also, you know, it's daunting. And I don't, I mean, in my own neighborhood, we have someone who's very highly functioning and then someone who's, on. And the parents, you know, it's just rough on the parents either way. But it's rough on a parent when you have someone who has a mental illness. Now, my son's doing fantastic now, but you have that fear. What happens if his meds quit working or what happens when I'm gone? And I mean, you go through similar things. It's interesting because when he first got sick, we spent a little while going like, oh, I just wish it was the way it used to be. And that was a waste of time.

But you have to go through those levels. It's almost like the levels of grief to get to the point. But I do think, and I still have struggles with this, even though my son's doing so well, I can't imagine it being too much different for any other parent, is that's your job as a parent, is to save this person. And you have to realize that cruel illnesses, you may not be able to save someone.

And accepting that is really, really tough. It's very hard to accept because a parent only wants what's best for the child. If they can't give it to them, they think they failed, which in reality, they haven't failed. The one thing that you just brought up, which is common with everyone I speak with, is they are so fearful as what happens to my child if I'm not here. Right, exactly. In my book, a couple deputies came to me and they said,

you should look and see why this girl, I call her April Hernandez in the book, why she's in jail. And the reason she was in jail is her parents and relatives had framed her. They'd accused her of stealing a car. Now, why would you do that? You would do that to get her off the street because she wasn't considered a danger to herself or others, but she was psychotic and she'd been gang raped twice, living on the streets of South Beach and beaten up three times by teenagers who thought it was hilarious to beat people up.

This is the world. I mean, I was just down in Nashville. And you guys are interesting because your sheriff down there has actually built a behavioral health unit in the jail because he wants to help people get them restored before he sends them back. Now, that's a wonderful idea. But I also links in jail with treatment. And you shouldn't have to go to jail to get treatment. So that's the conundrum. Yeah, unfortunately, you are so correct there.

The only thing I can say about that is at least you have someone that's stepping up and trying to at least help. Right. The beauty of what he's doing is he's doing exactly opposite of what we hear a lot that makes the daily news. Well, you know, the amount of money that we spend on mental health is unbelievable when you see what kind of reaction we get. I focus on jails or prisons and serious, serious mental illness. The problem is that with mental illnesses, it's kind of hard to say, oh, this is a serious mental illness and this is not. For instance, schizophrenia is a serious mental illness. But if you have a 15-year-old girl who's cutting herself because she's being bullied at school, that doesn't follow as a serious mental illness.

But you may have a high suicide rate because of that. One of my pet peeves is since my son, he's been diagnosed as bipolar disorders. Schizoaffecting disorder. Early on says schizophrenia. The truth is, we don't know because there's no blood test. There's no marker that you can identify. What you have to do on is you go based on what that person presents to you at the time and how many boxes under bipolar do they fit.

But the truth is, in my mind, your brain is so much more complicated than that that it's really kind of a stupod of both emotions and heredity. I mean, the truth is we don't know. We know that there's some kind of genetic component to schizophrenia, but we don't know why it emerges when it does, et cetera. Yes, there's definitely a lot more that we need to learn. What would you like to tell the listeners that you think is very important they hear about what you're doing? Well, I think if you're a parent, what you need to do is realize whether it's autism

or whether it's serious mental illness, this isn't going to go away. I mean, when it first happens, you think, oh, this is just a bump in the road and this is just it happened in college and people haven't. No, if you have a serious mental illness, it's a lifetime. You've got to educate yourself if you want to help your child. You really have to know in mental health, do we have crisis intervention team police officers? Do we have a jail diversion program? Do we have judges who are interested in getting people in treatment rather than just punishing them and getting them stuck in a revolving door? How do I access those services?

You need to educate yourself on all those things, including the illness itself. You know, I talked to Tom Insull, who was the head of the National Institutes of Mental Health, and he said, Pete, being a parent is not helping you. Being a partner is. Don't argue with your son. You can't argue with it. I got to tell you this story. My son gets out, and I know he's off as met.

So I think, well, I'm pretty smart. I've been to go into these meetings. I've talked to all these experts. So I said to him, look, let's look on a legal pad divide in half. This is when you're doing well and this is when you're not doing well. Oh, look, when you're doing well, you're on your medication because medication helps you. Well, I found out you couldn't talk logic to someone who's not thinking logical. So then I said, okay, Kevin, I'll pay you 50 bucks a week, take your meds in front of me.

And he looked at me and said, Dad, I'm not a prostitute. So that didn't go well. So then I decided that I'd actually grind up his medication and hide it in his breakfast cereal. Well, what happened? I discovered that his medication floated, all these pink flakes. And he got mad. Then I said, you know, look, I have the golden rule. I'm the guy with the gold.

Do you want to live here? You have to follow my rules. You take your meds. And, of course, he told me some words you can't use on a podcast or should and left the house and moved in with my ex-wife. So these are the kind of things that weren't helpful, but they're the natural things you do as a parent. The thing that saved my son was not me, was a caseworker, but it was also, he woke up and he said, I'm in hospital again. I mean, five hospitalizations and being tasered, something's definitely wrong. I have to admit it. It took

him that long to admit it because who wants to admit one, admit you're crazy. Nobody. So he did that. Then the doctor scared the hell out of him because he showed him a brain scan and said, you're killing parts of your brain every time you have a breakdown. It begins with that person wanting to change. And of course, the frustrating thing with autism and the frustrating thing with mental illness in many ways is the person who needs to change often isn't aware they need to change or they can't be. There's a big argument made that the first part of your brain that goes bad is your judgment. they're the ones with the problem. You're not.

Yeah, that's so true. Well, this has been great. Great conversation, tremendous information. I appreciate you coming on. Tony, thank you so much. I appreciate talking to you. God bless you for what you're doing. Like I said, most people have a dog in the fight. Hopefully our paths will cross again. It's been my pleasure. Thanks again.

Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to listen to our show today. We hope that you, You enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you. If you know anyone that would like to tell us their story, send them to tonymentor.com. Contact, then they can give us their information so one day they may be a guest on our show. One more thing we ask, tell everyone, everywhere, about why not me, the world, the conversations we're having, and the inspiration our guests give to everyone, everywhere, that you are not alone in this world.