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:
