The Churn (Reveal podcast)

People who experience psychosis often cycle through homelessness, emergency rooms, and jail. What happened to America’s mental health system?

Adam Aurand spent nearly a decade of his life stuck in a loop.

He cycled for years among emergency rooms, psychiatric hospitals, jails, and the streets in and around Seattle. During that time, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and schizoaffective disorder. He also used opioids and methamphetamine.

Each time he entered an institution for care or incarceration, he was released back into homelessness. And the cycle started again.

“I don’t know what the answer is, but I know that wasn’t the answer,” said his mother, Heidi.

In 2023, when Aurand was discharged from Washington’s largest psychiatric hospital and dropped off on the streets of downtown Seattle, she made a last-ditch effort to interrupt this pattern. This week on Reveal, with reporters from the Lost Patients podcast by KUOW and the Seattle Times, Aurand’s mother shares her attempts to save her son from “the churn” and the forces that pulled him back in.

This churn has contributed to the rising visibility of people in mental health crises on the streets of US cities. It’s fed a political narrative that American cities have fallen into chaos and decay. And it’s powered efforts from New York to California to add psychiatric hospital beds and make it easier to institutionalize people against their will.
Interview: 

https://revealnews.org/podcast/lost-patients-mental-health-crisis/

 

The Black Man Whose Killing Sparked Milwaukee Riots Had Bipolar Disorder

Sylville Smith, the 23-year-old black man whose shooting by police sparked riots in Milwaukee earlier this month, suffered from bipolar disorder and attention deficit disorder, according to his mother, Mildred Haynes. Smith had chosen not to take medication, Haynes told me, because he thought that admitting to mental illness would impede his ability to get a concealed-carry license. "He didn't want to be disabled because he wanted a gun," she told me. Her son had been shot twice in the past, and robbed four times, Haynes said. He wanted the weapon to protect himself.

Wisconsin is a concealed-carry state. Applicants who have been committed for treatment for mental illness or drug dependency are barred from receiving a permit, but people are not required to undergo a mental health evaluation when they apply. Haynes earlier told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that her son had, in fact, obtained a permit. Police officials have said the gun in Smith's possession at the time of his death was stolen from a home in a nearby town....
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/milwaukee-police-shooting-victim-sylville-smith-bipolar

Harrisburg Police Shoot Bipolar Man In The Heart

After police shot Earl “Shaleek” Pinckney in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on Sunday, they said the 20-year-old was armed with a knife, threatening his mother, and refusing to follow their commands. But Kim Thomas says that her son wasn’t holding a knife when police shot him through a window, putting a bullet in Pinckney’s heart.

According to the police account offered on Monday, officers were responding to a call about a man endangering his mother. When they arrived, Pinckney was holding a knife to Thomas’ neck, but refused to put the weapon down. An unidentified officer shot the 20-year-old as his mother tried to get away.

But Thomas has since disputed the officers’ narrative, maintaining that Pinckney wasn’t holding a knife and was actually shot through a window....
https://thinkprogress.org/earl-pinckney-shooting-2218d903c256#.lho3syxa0