The Churn
Reveal
The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX
4.7 • 8K Ratings
🗓️ 27 July 2024
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Adam Aurand spent nearly a decade of his life stuck in a loop: emergency rooms, psychiatric hospitals, jails, prison, and the streets in and around Seattle.
During that time, he picked up diagnoses of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and schizoaffective disorder. He also used opioids and methamphetamine.
Aurand’s life is an example of what happens to many people who experience psychosis in the U.S.: a perpetual shuffle from one place to the next for visits lasting hours or days or weeks, none of them leading to longer-lasting support.
This week on Reveal, reporters who made the recent podcast Lost Patients, by KUOW and The Seattle Times, try to answer a question: Why do America’s systems for treating serious mental illness break down in this way?
The answer took them from the present-day streets of Seattle to decades into America’s past.
You can find Lost Patients wherever you get your podcasts:
NPR: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510377/lost-patients
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lost-patients/id1733735613
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1avleoc5U4DA7U37GFPzIH
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Katia Adler with a gift wrapped in a podcast. |
| 0:03.7 | It's called The Global Story. |
| 0:05.9 | One big international news story in detail every weekday |
| 0:10.4 | with the BBC's best journalists. |
| 0:12.4 | They've always got stories to tell. |
| 0:14.8 | Hiding under the desk in the BBC Garza Bureau while airstrikes came in and were blowing |
| 0:19.4 | the windows in. And they always deliver insight. That is the Global Story gift. |
| 0:24.6 | Join us, the Global Story from the BBC World Service, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. |
| 0:30.0 | From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is reveal. |
| 0:35.0 | I'm Al Aletton. |
| 0:37.0 | For as long as his family can remember, |
| 0:41.0 | Adam Urand wanted to fix things. |
| 0:43.4 | As a kid, like six, seven years old, he'd go get lawnmowers that adults had given up on, |
| 0:50.1 | put them back together and they'd run. |
| 0:53.0 | Heidi Errand is Adam's mom. |
| 0:56.0 | She has a photo of Adam from when he was even younger, around three years old. |
| 1:00.0 | He's underneath his red, yellow, and blue tricycle, a big wheel pretending to be a mechanic working under a car. |
| 1:07.0 | That is Adam. He was working on his big well. |
| 1:11.0 | He was going to fix it. |
| 1:13.0 | Adam grew up to be an actual mechanic, giving new life to banged up cars up and down the Pacific |
| 1:19.9 | Northwest. One night, around 2013, Adam calls his sister Bethney in the middle of the night. |
| 1:27.0 | It was probably midnight one o'clock in the morning, and my oldest brother, he gets a call and I get a call, both from Adam, telling us that there's somebody |
... |
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