Presenting: The Fifth Branch

In Seattle, police responded to nearly ten thousand scenes of people in crisis last year. And one of the only remaining paths into Washington State's largest psychiatric hospital is through jail. But some cities are experimenting with ways to disentangle mental health care from policing — setting …

Presenting: Hush

A story from the 'Hush" investigative podcast from Oregon Public Broadcasting. In this episode, reporter Leah Sottile explores the case of Jesse Lee Johnson, a Black man who lived for 17 years on Oregon's death row for a crime he says he didn't commit.

Lost Patients Live: First-Person Stories from Seattle's Mental Health Crisis

Lost Patients compares the system for treating mental illness in America to an elaborate house, where every room, hallway and staircase was designed independently by a different architect. So what is it like to be shuttled from room to room? What sorts of tradeoffs are doctors working within this s…

Disease Without Knowledge

"Something is preventing us from building a system that works for people with serious mental illness. In lieu of that, patients are often left to improvise recovery for themselves. They learn to live with their inner voices and build their own support structures. Can their stories give us insight i…

Coming up on Lost Patients

A look ahead at the final episode of Lost Patients, coming next week on April 23. We'll explore what recovery looks like for people with serious mental illness — and what it might look like for our fractured system of psychiatric care itself.

The Way Out

After 10 months at Washington State's largest psychiatric hospital, Adam Aurand is discharged onto the streets of downtown Seattle — ejected into a world shaped by decades of deinstitutionalization and failure to build community-based mental health care. His mother rushes to save him before he gets…

Opening

In the middle of the last century, a movement to free patients from state-run psychiatric hospitals swept the U.S. This movement — deinstitutionalization — is widely blamed for seriously mentally ill people ending up on the streets. The real story goes much deeper than a loss of psychiatric hospita…

Nostalgia

After Carrie Davidson learned that her great-grandmother died in a psychiatric hospital, she spent years tracking down details of her life there. Was the asylum a refuge? Or a prison? This earlier era hangs like a shadow over our approach to care today. We peer into horror and nostalgia that surrou…

Against Their Will

Across the U.S., efforts are underway to make it easier to involuntarily commit people to psychiatric hospitals. It's a reaction to the sight of seriously mentally ill people on the streets and the cries of families who say it's too hard to get a loved one help when they're in crisis. But this gets…

Churn

Heidi Aurand has watched her son Adam spiral from one psychiatric crisis to the next for about eight years, bouncing between emergency rooms, jails, and homelessness. Now, after treatment at the state's largest psychiatric hospital, Adam was just released back onto the streets of downtown Seattle. …