Investigating how the Massachusetts mental-health system was failing those who needed it most

Spotlight editor Scott Allen looked through a window at the Globe office in Dorchester and saw protesters. There were dozens, maybe more than a hundred. And they were angry, not at the corruption or other outrage the Spotlight team had exposed, but at everyone and the reporters themselves. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he says.

A few weeks earlier, on June 26, 2016, the Spotlight team released the first of a series of reports on how the Massachusetts mental health system is failing those who need it most. The article was invigorating and, as critics said, inflammatory. It was titled The Desperate and the Dead project and led with the agonizing report of Lee F. Chiero, a man with a mental illness who had killed his mother.

The article and the project itself were born from the team that saw a disturbing trend. In the 2010s, Massachusetts saw a spate of murders in which mental health appeared to be a factor. Sometimes the killer suffered from severe mental illness. In other cases, the victim, who was often killed by police officers, was in a psychiatric crisis. Spotlight reporter Michael Rezendes has put together a database of examples. Then the team went on a mission to answer one of the most basic journalistic questions: Why?

Why did so many serious mental illness cases end in tragedy in a state that boasted world-class health care?

During more than a year of coverage, the team found that the Massachusetts mental health system was more or less gone. Decades earlier, the state was littered with inpatient psychiatric hospitals. But these institutions had often been brutal, inhuman places, and the state had closed them. The result: people who urgently need help without turning.

The seven-part series documented the consequences of this story of neglect: relatives who had to work as unskilled caregivers, police officers who step in where social workers were needed, prisons that fill the void left by closed hospitals. The series also examined the types of modern, evidence-based mental health programs that Massachusetts may have but had not previously implemented.

The team intended that the series should serve as a call to action to get distracted policymakers to focus on an issue they had been ignoring for too long. But that’s not how some mental health advocates saw it. “The headline is incredibly dramatic and fear-driven,” says Sera Davidow, who helped organize the protest at the Globe. Fear, Davidow says, can lead policymakers to force mandatory treatment on people with severe mental illness. Fear of mental illness can also lead police officers and ordinary citizens to jump to violence, says Davidow: “These attitudes kill us.”

Some members of the Spotlight team took the protest harshly. “It has been difficult for respected people to say you do harm,” says Spotlight reporter Jenna Russell.

But there were also strong voices that supported the team’s reporting. Some families reprimanded activists who opposed mandatory outpatient treatment programs. One man whose stepdaughter relied on a New York State program to take her medication and get off the streets said of the activists, “I have a feeling these people are trying to kill them.”

Allen went outside to speak to the activists on the day of the protest. He listened to them, but also stood behind what the team found in their coverage that would later be named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. “If you want to talk about difficult things,” says Allen, “you have to say the hard things.”

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source https://www.bisayanews.com/2021/09/23/investigating-how-the-massachusetts-mental-health-system-was-failing-those-who-needed-it-most/