So the story goes in 2010 a scandal blew up about the abuse of patients at the Milwaukee, WI, mental health hospital. Subpoenaed emails disclosed that future Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, then serving as the Milwaukee County executive, and his aides worried about the damage to his political future. One aide, who later went to prison, tried to calm another staffer with a harsh political calculation: “No one cares about crazy people.”
That phrase is the title of a new book by Ron Powers – “No One Cares About Crazy People.” Powers, a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaperman and co-author of “Flags of Our Fathers,” which was turned into a Clint Eastwood-directed film in 2006, has written a memoir of a father who could do little to ease the pain and suffering of his two sons, both beset by schizophrenia. His younger son, Kevin, hanged himself in the home basement at age 20 after a three-year struggle with the illness. Powers and his wife were asleep upstairs. His son, Dean, now 35, is, in Powers’ words, “in possession of himself, aware of his limitations, and ready to live on his own in the wider world.” Still, the father seems to intuit Dean will always be at risk, and he and his wife remain Dean’s chief protectors.