Shownotes Transcript
When you ask someone who has experienced psychosis what it's like to go through it and come out the other end, they often describe it as a dream state. You know, you'll see things that are fantastical. Obviously, none of it is really happening. But when you're in a dream, you don't know that. Sometimes it's a state of wonder. It's euphoric in some way.
I think I felt sort of euphoric at the same time I was feeling frightened. Sometimes it's an experience of paranoia. I would be looking at somebody and I'd see their face and I'd turn around and it wasn't that same person. It was like they had a different face. There's a reason I track down people like this who know what psychosis feels like from the inside.
It's because, like a lot of us living in big cities in the U.S., I see psychosis all the time. I'm Will James, and my city, Seattle, it can feel overwhelmed by it. Police responded to almost 10,000 of these calls last year.
Shop owners, distraught family members, and bystanders seeking help for people who are often so deep in an inward spiral that they don't know they're sick. Folks who ricochet between emergency rooms, jails, and the streets. Over the last decade or so, I've watched Seattle become one of a handful of cities that are national symbols of a mental health crisis on our streets.
Fairly or unfairly, many of us feel like something in our society has gone deeply, almost spiritually off course. In this podcast, Lost Patience, my colleagues from the Seattle Times and KOW are going to ask a simple question. Why? Why is it this way? What decisions have we made or not made over the last 50 years that have brought us here?
We'll seek answers in mental health courts, emergency rooms, and on the grounds of long-shuttered institutions. Episodes drop every Tuesday, starting March 12th.
