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A warning to listeners.

Lost patients is about serious mental illness.

It's true that horrors unfolded at Northern State Hospital,

the psychiatric hospital run by Washington State in the valley

north of Seattle. Insulin comas. Transorbital lobotomies. We heard about some of that from

Joanne McKinnis, who started as a nurse at Northern State in the 1950s. Now in her 90s, and

living in a retirement home near the hospital, she still wrestles with

those memories.

But there's one thing Joanne's sure about.

As the years rolled on, as the 1950s became the 1960s, Northern State got better.

I'm talking about the development of the first psychotropic drugs.

And then there was a lot of research that was going on.

And I felt good about Northern's part in that.

These new antipsychotic drugs seem to calm people with psychotic disorders and reduce their

symptoms. As these drugs swept the country, the more brutal treatments faded away, and a new

optimism set in. For decades, the best psychiatrists could hope for was to contain psychosis.

But now, they believed, they might actually cure it.

The doctors were evolving too. This was the 1960s, a revolutionary time. And the little gods who

...