There's a common perception that democracy ends with a battle, soldiers in the streets, a coup d'etat, the fall of a government.

But we know that democracy can be lost one little step at a time.

We've reported on it and lived through it.

And when we look at America today, right now,

we see a place where the slide to autocracy has already begun.

It's not some distant future, it's the present.

I'm Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at the Atlantic.

I'm Peter Pomerantse of a senior fellow at the

S&F Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

We're the host of a new podcast from the Atlantic, Autocracy in America.

Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Hannah Rosen.

Today we have the second episode of Scripps,

our three-part series exploring the pills we take for our brains,

the stories we tell about them,

and what happens when you combine the two. This week's episode is about a

family, three generations dealing with one diagnosis and the question of

what it means to get better. Reporter Ethan Brooks will take it from here.

In the mid-1990s, somewhere in Central Connecticut,

Cooper Davis was on a school bus, headed towards New York.

We had a field trip to go see the Scarlet

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