Lost Patients

Lost Patients

Lost Patients takes you into new spaces most people have likely never experienced before — the inside of someone's psychosis, mental health court rooms, and the past and present streets of Seattle, says Esmy. Jimenez, collaborating journalist of Lost Patients, Apple Podcasts' Spotlight show for August 2024. Jimenez, joined by Will James and Sydney Brownstone, have created a deeply immersive six-part docuseries that explores the challenges of treating severe mental illness through the lens of one city's past, present, and future. Together, they have crafted a listening experience that mirrors the labyrinthine journey of individuals and families grappling with this crisis. "Lost Patients put us in contact with some of the most profound people we've ever met: people who have experienced psychosis," says James. "They have been to some of the farthest reaches of human experience, often with terrifying or devastating results, and nonetheless wanted to share what it was like with others to help them understand. These conversations have changed my perspective on mental illness — and, in some ways, on being alive." Brownstone agrees, "I hope considering someone in psychosis as being stuck in a dream — rather than simply unpredictable and volatile for no reason — opens up a new pathway to empathy for listeners." "Our goal was to help listeners see all the various shades of gray in these big national conversations about homelessness, addiction, and mental health," Jimenez explains. For James, "This podcast is for the countless people who witness people in mental health crisis — either on the sidewalks, busses, and subways of U.S. cities or in sensational TV coverage — and are working through their own feelings of confusion, fear, anger, and hopelessness."

Episodes

Introducing Lost Patients

February 29, 2024 • 2 mins
Imagine a sprawling house in which every room, doorway, and hall passage was designed by a different architect. Doorways don't connect. Staircases lead to nowhere. Rooms are cut off from each other. That's how reporter Will James describes our complicated system for treating people with severe mental illness – a system that, almost by design, loses patients with psychosis to an endless loop between the streets, jail, clinics, court...
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Churn

March 12, 2024 • 47 mins
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. A mother asks: How could her son pass through so many institutions and none are able to stop his decline?

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Against Their Will

March 19, 2024 • 42 mins
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 at one of the most delicate questions our society has faced: When does our belief about what's best for someone override someone's righ...
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Nostalgia

March 26, 2024 • 47 mins
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 surrounds our societal memories of these mental institutions — and try to sort out which narrative is true.

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Opening

April 2, 2024 • 46 mins
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 hospital beds. It's about how incentives and decisions half a century created the dysfunction many people with serious mental illness are lost ...
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The Way Out

April 9, 2024 • 53 mins
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 pulled back into the "churn." A Seattle Times reporter tries to pinpoint where the discharge process failed — and the investigation lea...
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Coming up on Lost Patients

April 16, 2024 • 3 mins
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.

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Disease Without Knowledge

April 23, 2024 • 50 mins
"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 into what a functioning system of psychiatric care might look like — and what might be getting in the way?
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Lost Patients Live: First-Person Stories from Seattle's Mental Health Crisis

June 26, 2024 • 54 mins
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 system forced to make every day? And what might it look like to design care around the needs of patients?

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Presenting: The Fifth Branch

August 27, 2024 • 36 mins
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 up new branches of emergency services that specifically handle mental illness, addiction, and homelessness. Tradeoffs recently...
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Presenting: Hush

September 24, 2024 • 43 mins
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.

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