Gail Freedman exposes the lie in ‘No One Cares About Crazy People’

In the new documentary “No One Cares About Crazy People,” narrator Bob Odenkirk appears onscreen at the start to explain the origins of the film’s title: Back in 2010, the phrase was used in a private message by a top staffer for then-Milwaukee city official and Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Scott Walker, to calm Walker’s concerns about a scandal at his county’s mental health facility and its impact on his campaign.

While Walker did go on to be Wisconsin’s governor, Gail Freedman’s film, which screens Wednesday, March 4, at the Wexner Center for the Arts as part of ReelAbilities Film Festival Columbus, presents a vastly different perspective. Her work covers the modern history of mental health legislation and some elected officials working to repair the social safety net for the mentally ill, but it centers affected families, humanizing a crisis that touches people in every corner of the country. 

“One thing I learned over the course of the five-plus years it took to finish this film is, there aren’t six degrees of separation,” Freedman said in a late February phone interview. “There are no degrees of separation. Every one of us – whether it’s in our family, a neighbor, a friend, a schoolmate, somebody we work with – has some connection to this subject.”

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, more than 14 million people, or nearly six percent of adults in the United States, experienced a serious mental health crisis in 2024, the most recent year with data available. Nearly 30 percent received no treatment. With a disorder such as schizophrenia, recognition and care can be further complicated by the fact that it manifests relatively late, generally in a person’s teens or early twenties. (This scenario is actually a subplot in the current season of HBO’s The Pitt.)

“It’s a subject that’s increasingly in the news right now, but it’s usually some lurid headline or the latest horror story,” Freedman said. “And there’s not much backstory. There’s not a look at the context. How did we get here? Where was this person’s family? Which is always the question that comes up, right?”

A response comes in the form of Mark Rippee and his family. After a horrific accident in his youth, Mark was left almost totally blind, with a traumatic brain injury that made him psychotic. He’d been living on the streets in his small California city for 15 years when we meet him in the film. Then we encounter Mark’s sister, Linda, as she looks for him to provide daily food and comfort. Before Mark became homeless, the family tried to care for him on their own for 21 years. Despite Mark’s condition, California law prevented them from institutionalizing or medicating him against his will. As Rippee’s other sister, Catherine, says in the film, “There is no common sense to the laws we have now.”

“The families are right there taking all the blame and all the stress, and trying desperately to get their loved one help,” said Freedman. “It’s horrible, but the Reiner [family] tragedy has helped a lot of people start to understand better. Here a family with enormous privilege and resources, and caring, and obviously they had been super involved. And even they couldn’t fix what clearly was a systemic failure.”

The Rippee family’s experience is supported in accounts by others, including the Powers family. Father Ron, an award-winning writer and former colleague of Freedman’s at CBS News, wrote a book about his two sons developing serious mental illness. It shares the film’s title.

Although she already knew Powers, Freedman worked to build trust with his entire family, and the other subjects. “I was continually blown away by the candor, by the bravery of all the people who participated in this film,” she said. “I think all of them felt that they were performing a public service.”

Through Powers, the filmmaker met Odenkirk. He introduced Freedman to Jeff Tweedy, who’s been open about his own mental health challenges. The Wilco frontman offered to compose an original soundtrack and share rights to a song he felt was an appropriate theme for the film, “Please Be Patient with Me,” off the Wilco album Sky Blue Sky, from 2007.

Freedman also tapped into a nationwide grassroots movement of families advocating for legal change for their loved ones and interviewed two California politicians who’ve taken up the cause: former State Senator Susan Talamantes Eggman and current Gov. Gavin Newsom. 

“Like him or not, Gavin Newsom really took this on as a signature issue of his administration,” Freedman said. “We chose to focus on California because the governor was actually putting his foot down and saying, ‘I want this.’”

Freedman acknowledged the current federal lack of support for this issue (in January, the Trump administration rolled back nearly $2 billion in funding for mental health and addiction services). And California’s work isn’t a silver bullet. 

“The report card’s not in yet,” she observed. “Some of those bills, they’re being implemented gradually, and it’s a rocky start.”

Freedman holds hope nonetheless, and she wants the same for audiences. “Even though the challenges are enormous and remain, there is progress, there is a real quest for answers,” she said. “I think we may be at a tipping point.”