THE WEEKLY REVEAL
Saturday, April 5, 2025
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This week:
- People who experience psychosis often cycle through homelessness, emergency rooms, and jail. What happened to America’s mental health system?
- This week on More To The Story, the co-creator of The Daily Show tells us how she’s blending comedy and politics to advocate for abortion access.
- How error-prone drug tests are causing hospitals to change their policies for newborns.
- After spending years locked in solitary confinement, a group of California men united to launch the largest prison hunger strike in US history.
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THIS WEEK’S PODCAST
The Churn
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Photos of Adam Aurand are on display at the home of his mother, Heidi Aurand. Credit: Daniel Kim/The Seattle Times
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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 US: 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 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.
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🎧 Other places to listen: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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MORE TO THE STORY
She Launched The Daily Show. Now She’s Fighting Red State Abortion Bans.
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A woman stands outside the Jackson Women’s Health Organization in Jackson, Mississippi, moments after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Credit: Rogelio V. Solis/AP
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Lizz Winstead’s path to advocacy was a curvy one. She started out as a comedian, first as a stand-up and eventually as the co-creator of The Daily Show.
“I kept getting increasingly unnerved and also frustrated that I was just shelling people with information, even though it was funny, and not giving them a way to fight back,” she says.
In the early 2000s, she co-founded Air America Radio, which was designed to be a counterweight to the popularity of radio personalities on the right. Today, Winstead is the founder of Abortion Access Front while also producing the Feminist Buzzkills podcast.
On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Winstead talks with host Al Letson about using comedy to educate people and give them tools to fight.
Find this episode wherever you listen to Reveal, and don’t forget to subscribe:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora
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Why Some Doctors Are Pushing to End Routine Drug Testing During Childbirth
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“You learn that in order to survive, you yourself then have to become predatorial.”
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Jack Morris was sentenced to life in prison in 1979, and he spent years in a special supermax unit at the state’s highest-security prison, locked in a windowless concrete cell for 22 to 23 hours each day.
Decades later, the prisoners at Pelican Bay used coded messages and other covert communication channels to launch a hunger strike to protest solitary confinement. It would become the largest in US history and helped push California to implement reforms.
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This issue of The Weekly Reveal was written by Kate Howard and edited by Nikki Frick. If you enjoyed this issue, forward it to a friend. Have some thoughts? Drop us a line with feedback or ideas!
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