Welcome to Rumbel Strip, this is Erica Heilman.

Some of you may remember a show I made back in 2016.

It was called Emergency.

It was about the rising number of people with psychiatric crises

that are going to emergency rooms looking for help.

The nurses I spoke with were overwhelmed then,

and I'm sorry to say that not much has changed in the nearly two years since I made that show.

ERs all over the state, in fact all over the country are overwhelmed by psychiatric patients who they can't properly treat.

So after I made that show, I started working on a mental health series for Vermont Public Radio, which is starting air this week.

I wanted to understand what the mental health care system looked like, or even just figure

out what it is, which is harder than you'd think.

For the past year I've been talking with people who have serious mental illnesses and their families,

people who work in psychiatric hospitals and in community mental health,

about what's working and what's definitely not

working and though these conversations happened in Vermont a lot of the stories

could have been told anywhere across the country so over the next couple weeks I'll be

running this special series for

Vermont Public Radio. It's called They Are Us inside Vermont's mental health

care system. The first show is called Sarah. Welcome.

Imagine if suddenly one day there was a brand new disease in Vermont that affected 27,000 people.

At first, maybe you ignore it because no one you know has it, or not that you know of.

It's not infectious or dangerous or anything.

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