Focus: Adults in the Room

Across the U.S., efforts are underway to make it easier to involuntarily commit people to psychiatric hospitals. It's a reaction to the sight of seriously mentally ill people on the streets and the cries of families who say it's too hard to get a loved one help when they're in crisis. But this gets at one of the most delicate questions our society has faced: When does our belief about what's best for someone override someone's righ...

After Carrie Davidson learned that her great-grandmother died in a psychiatric hospital, she spent years tracking down details of her life there. Was the asylum a refuge? Or a prison? This earlier era hangs like a shadow over our approach to care today. We peer into horror and nostalgia that surrounds our societal memories of these mental institutions — and try to sort out which narrative is true.

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In the middle of the last century, a movement to free patients from state-run psychiatric hospitals swept the U.S. This movement — deinstitutionalization — is widely blamed for seriously mentally ill people ending up on the streets. The real story goes much deeper than a loss of psychiatric hospital beds. It's about how incentives and decisions half a century created the dysfunction many people with serious mental illne...

After 10 months at Washington State's largest psychiatric hospital, Adam Aurand is discharged onto the streets of downtown Seattle — ejected into a world shaped by decades of deinstitutionalization and failure to build community-based mental health care. His mother rushes to save him before he gets pulled back into the "churn." A Seattle Times reporter tries to pinpoint where the discharge process failed — and the inves...

"Something is preventing us from building a system that works for people with serious mental illness. In lieu of that, patients are often left to improvise recovery for themselves. They learn to live with their inner voices and build their own support structures. Can their stories give us insight into what a functioning system of psychiatric care might look like — and what might be getting in the way?

You can find resourc...

Lost Patients compares the system for treating mental illness in America to an elaborate house, where every room, hallway and staircase was designed independently by a different architect. So what is it like to be shuttled from room to room? What sorts of tradeoffs are doctors working within this system forced to make every day? And what might it look like to design care around the needs of patients?

KUOW and the Seattle Tim...

The production team behind Lost Patients returns on February 24 with a new investigative series: Adults in the Room. Seattle, 1999. At Garfield High School, Mr. Hudson is a legend. With a thundering voice and imposing stature, Mr. Hudson — or “Tom” as select students call him — teaches biology and leads an elite outdoors program. But when teen reporters at the school paper start exploring a rumor that h...

In 1998, a popular teacher at Garfield High School in Seattle—named Tom Hudson—falls into a crevasse while mountain-climbing in Olympic National Park. Hudson is accompanied by six teenage students from the school's outdoor program, who pull off a daring rescue of their teacher using techniques he taught them.

Isolde Raftery, a reporter for the school paper, plans to write about the rescue as a hero story validating Huds...

Garfield High School is shocked after learning their beloved principal is in an inappropriate relationship with a student.

In the fallout of the revelation about their principal, Isolde and Ella hear a second-hand allegation of child abuse against teacher Tom Hudson from a member of his outdoors club, Post 84. The students debate what they should do and decide to bring the allegation to their journalism teacher, Dave Ehrich, and Is...

The school district sends an investigator to Garfield to look into the allegations against Tom Hudson. Isolde and Ella feel like the entire school blames them for Hudson's suspension and the new inquiry into his behavior with students. The investigator questions Isolde and fellow reporter Rosie Bancroft again and again as the Post 84 community closes ranks and refuses to talk. 

Months go by as Isolde and Ella anxiously wait fo...

The Garfield community—and, it seems, the whole city of Seattle—mourns Tom Hudson, remembering him as a great man and teacher. One of the students who was closest to him, Jonathan Hill, spends the weeks after Hudson's death trying to ensure his reputation and legacy go untarnished by the allegations that led to his suspension in late 1999. 

But secretly, Jonathan is still reeling from the weeks before Tom's death. ...

As adults, Isolde and Ella start re-investigating the question of Mr. Hudson’s guilt. For years, they've wondered if they spread unfounded rumors that drove Mr. Hudson to take his own life. 

Isolde digs out a brown manila envelope containing the school district's records on Mr. Hudson, which she requested shortly after college. She tracks down the original school district investigator from 1999, Eddie Hill Sr., and the w...

As Isolde looks through records on Mr. Hudson from Seattle Public Schools, she comes across a document describing a photograph of Hudson and two students at a mountain lake near Seattle. All three of them are naked.

Isolde learns that back in 1994, before she attended Garfield, this photo spurred a separate investigation into Hudson's relationship with students. But ultimately, records say the boy told investigators it was no big d...

A surprise archival interview with a former Garfield High School principal reveals that the teacher abuse problem at the school extended beyond Tom Hudson. Isolde discovers that the district received numerous credible allegations of temper outbursts and sexual harassment about her Garfield journalism teacher, Dave Ehrich, but kept him in the classroom until his retirement in 2019.

As Isolde looks into the district’s recent hi...

The team behind Adults in the Room is hard at work on an Epilogue episode, set to release later this summer.

In the meantime, the team recently gathered for a live event to discuss behind-the-scenes moments and decisions from the series—including interviews that didn't make it into the final episodes, the continued challenges of addressing grooming and childhood sexual abuse, and audience questions.

KUOW's Libby Denkmann was ...