Hey there, it's Chamehia here.

This week on the show, we're bringing you a favorite episode from our archives.

Last year I sat down with Atlantic writer Jennifer Senior to talk about a piece she wrote

that threads together a personal story with a much larger history of institutionalization in America.

Since then, Jennifer won the 2024 National Magazine Award for columns and and Essays for her article.

I really enjoyed our conversation and I hope you do too.

This is in conversation from Apple News. I'm Shemeit Tabasu. Today, the dark history of institutionalizing people with disabilities. When Jennifer Senior was 12 years old, her mom finally told her the truth about their family.

Her mom wasn't in fact an only child.

She had a sister, a younger sister, named Adele.

I was overwhelmed.

I mean, at one point I started crying.

Because I think they also thought in some way, wait,

like, I have an aunt, like I want to know who my aunt is.

Jennifer learned that her aunt Adele had been born in 1951

with an intellectual disability and had been institutionalized before her second birthday.

She had lived almost her entire life separated from her family.

I remembered being made unbelievably sad by this fact and grasping immediately that this couldn't have

been easy for my mother or my grandparents. Jennifer grew up not knowing much

else about her Aunt Adele aside from a single visit she and her mom paid her in the 90s.

But a few years ago, Jennifer decided she wanted to know more.

She needed to know to understand her aunt's life story.

And what she learned helped piece together the picture of not just her family tree,

...