Owen Whooley’s timely book provides an in-depth view of the current crisis in community mental health care. His ethnography illuminates one of the most persistent, complex, and challenging social problems of our time. Anyone who is concerned with the difficulties confronting persons with serious mental illness and the thoroughly inadequate social responses to their problems needs to read this book.

Allan V. Horwitz, author of 'Between Sanity and Madness: Mental Illness from Ancient Greece to the Neuroscientific Era'

“By stepping outside of the clinic and into the backseats of police cruisers, corridors of emergency rooms, and decrepit housing complexes, Owen Whooley gives us perhaps the most accurate look yet at what ’care’ actually looks like for people with the most serious mental illnesses in the United States today. Recognizing his disturbing conclusion - that community mental health is too fragmented, under-resourced, and leaderless to qualify as a ’system’ - is a first step for getting ourselves out of this mess.”

Alex V. Barnard, author of 'Conservatorship: Inside California’s System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness'

In A Mad Mess, the great historical chronicler of psychiatry Owen Whooley turns his gaze to the present-day failings of American mental health care and offers a new way to think about the “system.” Drawing on extensive fieldwork with street outreach, police, and emergency care, he convincingly shows that the disconnected pieces do not amount to a system at all. This compelling portrait of the world-as-it-is will be eye-opening to policymakers, practitioners, patients, and concerned citizens alike. 

Neil Gong, author of 'Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles'

Through a meticulous ethnography of street-level bureaucrats working in the epicenter of the mental health crisis in Albuquerque, NM, Owen Whooley expertly explores the paradoxes of contemporary mental health work, like being buried in paperwork while operating in a “system” without coordination, communication, regularity, or predictability. Indeed, Mad Mess challenges social scientists to rethink their presumptions of systemic order and explore associations that are more loosely and incoherently coordinated to make sense of both the mental health crisis and the implications this has for mental health work. With analytic clarity and poignant prose, Mad Mess is a critical intervention for any social scientist seeking to make sense of the messy worlds of medicine, healthcare, professions, and public health. 

Claire Decoteau, author of 'Emergency: COVID-19 and the Uneven Valuation of Life'