Talk about crazy.

In the state of Colorado, people with severe bipolar disorder, major depression or schizophrenia are four times more likely to end up in jail than in treatment.

Police officers see more people with mental illness on a day-to-day basis than psychiatrists do.

And the largest “mental institution” in the United States is a wing of the Los Angeles County Jail known as the Twin Towers, where some 1,400 inmates/patients — the lines are decidedly blurred — are housed on any given day.

“Our jails and prisons are filling up with people whose only crime is that they got sick,” says former Washington Post journalist Pete Earley, whose best-selling book “Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness,” takes a disturbing look into a broken system. “And that’s costing you and your community in ways you don’t even know.”

Earley plunged into the madness after his son Mike experienced a manic break while in college. Like an estimated 40 percent of Americans with mental illness, Mike didn’t think he had a problem. His father and family knew otherwise, but because the law says only people who are an imminent danger to themselves or others deserve the attention of the system, nobody could keep him under care if he didn’t consent.

Mike “was so out of control that a nurse called hospital security,” Earley writes of one attempt to get his son help. “Maybe now they will medicate him, I thought. But before the security guard arrived, Mike dashed outside, cursing loudly. … (T)he doctor told my ex-wife that it was not illegal for someone to be mentally ill in Virginia. But it was illegal for him to treat them unless they consented.

“‘Even if he’s psychotic?’ she asked.

“Mike couldn’t be forcibly treated, the doctor elaborated, until he hurt himself or someone else.”

Eventually the young man was deemed dangerous, after he broke into a neighbor’s home to take a bubble bath.

“As a parent, I knew something was wrong. He (literally) had tinfoil wrapped around his head and said the CIA was reading his thoughts. But that wasn’t against the law. Then, when he became ‘dangerous,’ everyone wanted to punish him for it,” says Early, who will speak in Boulder on April 13 as part of the Interfaith Network on Mental Illness’ 7^th Annual Spring Conference.

For the book, Earley spent time in the psychiatric cellblock at the Miami-Dade County (Fla.) jail and ferreted out why it’s so difficult to get help for mentally ill people in America. It starts with a lack of resources. Earley says that the general recommendation is to have 50 “beds” available for people with mental illness for every 100,000 of population. In Denver, he says, there are just 16.

But mental-health funding is nobody’s favorite cause. Officials are a lot more comfortable funding cancer research or police or schools than help for “the psychotic screaming out on the street.” Yet that winds up costing taxpayers more in the end. A mentally ill person walking the streets, going in and out of jail, costs between $40,000 and $60,000 a year. For half that, Earley says, we can provide housing and treatment to help them get better.

“Political leaders don’t have a lot of money to spend, but we can say, ‘Look, I can save or cost-avoid you a lot of money. … It’s the right thing to do, morally and financially,’” he says.

Before the 1960s, someone who was hearing voices simply got locked away forever; some were involuntarily lobotomized. President Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act in 1963, but it was never adequately funded, Earley says.

In the ‘70s the federal government threatened to withhold funds from states that didn’t shutter their “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” hospitals and get patients into more humane community treatment. But in 1980 President Ronald Reagan slashed spending on housing and treatment and thousands of patients wound up on the streets. Since then, we have expected police and courts to handle the problem (Boulder County is an outlier that does an excellent job of helping the mentally ill).

“In Alabama, the best thing to do if you want treatment is to get arrested,” Earley says. “Why do we expect the criminal-justice system to solve what is a community health problem?”

Chipping away at stigma, making smarter funding choices and recognizing that 40 percent of mentally ill patients have a “dual diagnosis” of substance abuse all are necessary to start changing the madness of our current approach.

Proper treatment works, and Earley’s son is living proof. Mike suffered three more acute incidents — including being tasered by police — after the book was published in 2007. But he’s now stable, taking medication, holding a low-level job and living in an apartment.

“People can, and do, get better,” Earley says.

Pete Earley will speak at 7 p.m. April 13 in the Wittemyer Courtroom in the Wolf Law Building on the CU-Boulder campus. The talk is free and open to the public. CU sociology Ph.D. candidate Tracy Devell will lead discussions on Earley’s book at 7 p.m. on April 2 and 9 at First Congregational Church, 1128 Pine St. in Boulder. For more information, go to www.interfaithnetworkonmentalillness.org.

Do you hear that rumbling? That’s the sound of the next manufactured “fiscal crisis” from Washington, D.C. and it will start rising to crescendo over the next three weeks. You will soon hate the word “sequestration.”

Don’t know the term? I found the following succinct explanation from Paul M. Johnson of the Auburn University Department of Political Science (isn’t the Internet swell?):

“Under sequestration, an amount of money equal to the difference between the cap set in the Budget Resolution and the amount actually appropriated is ‘sequestered’ by the Treasury and not handed over to the agencies to which it was originally appropriated by Congress. In theory, every agency has the same percentage of its appropriation withheld in order to take back the excessive spending on an ‘across the board’ basis. However, Congress has chosen to exempt certain very large programs from the sequestration process (for example, Social Security and certain parts of the Defense budget), and the number of exempted programs has tended to increase over time — which means that sequestration would have to take back gigantic shares of the budgets of the remaining programs.”

And as Charlie Brennan reported in the Feb. 10 Daily Camera, Boulder is poised to take a massive economic hit if Congress and President Obama can’t come together to prevent sequestration. Brennan focused on cuts that would affect Rocky Mountain National Park, but also noted that the city is heavily dependent on federal money that supports its peerless scientific labs. To boot, because only a paltry 4.6 percent of its funding comes from state government, the University of Colorado Boulder leans more heavily on federal funding than many universities.

As Johnson explains above, politically protected programs like “defense” and Social Security would probably come out OK. Which means that everything else would take deeper cuts. Boulder could be headed for a budget apocalypse.

(Aside: Isn’t it curious that Republicans who insist government spending doesn’t create jobs freak out at the prospect of lost military jobs?)

I have friends who would revel in such a result. After all, they say, we’re only talking about “dead wood” bureaucrats, people who need a slap in the face and who will, in time, take their rightful place in the private sector. Perhaps as Walmart greeters, but hey, it’s a job.

The schadenfreude — German for taking pleasure in another’s misfortune — some Americans seem to feel about their fellows is not just distasteful, but also short-sighted. Whether you own a yogurt shop or a motorcycle dealership, you are a Realtor or a massage therapist, all those newly unemployed people won’t be spending as much on your business. You are going to suffer, too, if the sequestration bomb hits Boulder. (Believe me, state and local government officials are taking this threat very seriously.)

We hear from some quarters that refusing to raise the debt ceiling is smart policy, that it will force a much-needed reduction in the size of government.

But here’s another way to look at it: We’re all scofflaws. The debt is high due to money we borrowed to buy the “stuff” we Americans wanted — or didn’t.

The current national debt has reached an astounding $14 trillion. Here are the biggest contributors, according to figures collated by The New York Times from the Congressional Budget Office in 2012:

The Bush-era tax cuts: $1.8 trillion.

Iraq-Afghanistan wars and new military spending: $1.4 trillion.

Bush-era stimulus and TARP bailout: $997 billion.

Obama-era stimulus spending: $711 billion.

Bush-era non-defense spending: $608 billion.

Obama-era stimulus tax cuts (yes, Virginia…): $425 billion.

Bush-era Medicare Part D: $180 billion.

Obama-era health reform: $152 billion.

That doesn’t include the massive influence of the recession(s), which vastly reduced tax revenue.

With the possible exception of some true-blue libertarian-types, most of us probably supported some of that spending and opposed some. But guess what? It’s our debt. Not the government’s. Yours. Mine. And now we have to pay for it.

We can try to do that through draconian cuts to non-defense discretionary programs such as social services and scientific research. Problem is, we can’t get there from here, since such spending represents only a thin 15 percent of the federal budget (compared to about 20 percent for military/defense, 70 percent combined for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and about 5 percent for interest).

Under the rule of schadenfreude, we may think it better to have somebody else lose his or her job, especially a “lazy bureaucrat.” But I’ve worked in the private sector, the nonprofit world and more recently, in a public role, and guess what? There are lazy, incompetent people in all three, but most are hard working and honest.

We could share the load and pay higher taxes for the stuff we bought. That, too, has an impact, since every dollar of taxes won’t be spent, saved, invested or given to charity. But it’s far more equitable. Fat chance.

Endlessly putting off hard choices is not a sound approach. But there is a strong argument that now is not the time to drop the austerity axe; just ask Ireland or Britain. And if sequestration hits, we’re all going to pay anyway.