Our Approach

Curious about the title of our podcast? It comes from the first paragraph of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Ishmael wanders the streets in a haze of suicidal depression which he describes as a “damp and drizzly November in my soul.”

It’s a beautiful description of a dark place that is familiar to so many people who are trapped in the revolving cycle of mental illness and confinement.

November In My Soul reflects on institutionalization, deinstitutionalization, and criminalization of people diagnosed with mental illness through the overlooked voices of Black, Latinx, LGBTQ+ and rural Californians, as well as the elderly and other disenfranchised populations. Each episode is anchored by characters with lived experience, past and present, whose “treatment” ranged from benevolent warehousing to benign neglect to torture at the hands of the state.

Don’t worry. There’s plenty of light in the darkness. In each episode, we’ll be elevating the work of forgotten heroes who have fought against all odds to infuse dignity into the treatment of mental illness.

While the stories we’ll be bringing you are California-focused, they are nationally relevant. Our goal is to surprise you, debunk some myths about our mental health history and serve as your trustworthy guides as we explore who our society labels as mentally ill, how those diagnoses have shifted over time, who is most likely to lose their liberty, and who is least likely to be treated with dignity.

We’ll be presenting our episodes in pairs – one historical and one contemporary – to reveal how our darkest history continues to cast shadows today. Our podcast takes the long view because we’re convinced that to truly understand our contemporary crisis, and to solve it, we need to understand our past. Because conscious and unconscious bias continue to play a role in the decision making of our institutions. Mental illness doesn’t discriminate. Yet, we continue to label the most powerless among us as deviant, vagrant, demented, psychopathic, schizophrenic—and criminal.

Trailer

Who We Are

  • Lee Romney

    CO-CREATOR & CO-HOST

    Lee is an independent journalist, audio producer and author based in Oakland. She spent 23 years as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, developing an expertise in our mental health and criminal legal systems and other topics centering equity. She took a buyout in late 2015 to focus on in-depth projects close to her heart and to learn the art of audio storytelling. Her print work has also appeared in The Guardian and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. Her award-winning radio pieces have aired on Radiolab, KQED's The California Report Magazine, KALW’s Crosscurrents, Making Contact and NPR's Here & Now. Lee believes in working collaboratively with sources to help them tell their own stories. She is co-author of What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly: A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection, forthcoming from Heyday Books in April 2024

  • Jenny Johnson

    CO-CREATOR & CO-HOST

    Jenny is an independent consultant working at the intersection of mental health and criminal justice. For nearly two decades, she was a trial attorney at the San Francisco Public Defender’s office where she specialized in representing clients with serious mental illness. She is a founder of San Francisco’s Behavioral Health Court and for more than 15 years, Jenny was the lead attorney assigned to the court. Since 2012, she has been a lecturer at Berkeley Law where she co-teaches a seminar in mental health and law with forensic neuropsychiatrist Dr. George Woods. Jenny has helped shape mental health and criminal justice policy at the local, state and national levels in her role as a Senior Consultant with SAMHSA’s GAINS Center for Behavioral Health and Justice Transformation. She is currently working on a memoir about her final homicide case as a public defender—an experience that changed the course of her life. That story will also anchor one of our podcast episodes.

  • Catherine Stifter

    SENIOR STORY EDITOR

    Catherine is a mostly-retired, longtime public radio producer, trainer and editor. For four decades, she helped create compelling audio programs featuring the voices and experiences of people navigating challenges posed by oppressive systems in the US. She was managing editor of the first public radio series on Asian American history, the Peabody Award-winning documentary series “Crossing East,” produced by Dmae Roberts. As podcast editor of “After the Assault,” she joined a team of reporters, producers and survivors exploring the experience of survivors in the immediate aftermath of sexual violence and during police investigations in California’s capitol city. That project helped change training, procedures and mentorship at several local law enforcement and advocacy organizations. For the last ten years of her career she thoroughly enjoyed mentoring professional journalists as Senior Fellow for the Center for Health Journalism.

  • Gabe Grabin

    LINE EDITOR & ENGINEER

    Gabe spent many years as a full-time production engineer and part-time editor at KALW’s news magazine, Crosscurrents. He was a producer at Maine Public Radio, where he produced a weekly program called Safe Space Radio, and came up with the tagline: “The show about the things we would struggle with less if we could talk about them more.” The ethos behind that statement is a perfect match for November In My Soul.

  • Beau

    MASCOT

    Beau is our mascot. And Jenny’s everything.

Our Advisors

  • George Woods, M.D., L.F.A.P.A

    Dr. George Woods is a physician licensed to practice in California and seven other states. His clinical practice treats people with a variety of medical problems with psychiatric manifestations, including neurological disorders that manifest with psychiatric symptoms. He has served for more than half a dozen years as President of the International Academy of Law and Mental Health. George has worked with legal teams dealing with complex criminal and civil litigation. He has written about the forensic assessment of neurodevelopmental disorders, race and cognition, cognitive impairment in the elderly, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, trauma, and financial deception in elderly populations, among other topics. In 2021, Dr. Woods was appointed Chief Scientific Officer from Crestwood Behavioral Health Care, the largest provider of behavioral health congregate care in California, with 7000 clients and 3000 staff. He chairs the Board of Directors of Felton Institute, a visionary behavioral health nonprofit serving 80,000 people across six Bay Area counties, and also serves on the Stanford Medical Partners Board of Directors. Dr. Woods has taught Clinical Aspects of Forensic Psychiatry and Introduction to Geriatric Psychiatry at Morehouse School of Medicine, Atlanta, Georgia, and for nine years was a lecturer with Jenny Johnson at Berkeley Law – University of California, teaching Mental Health and the Law.

  • Lois A. Weithorn

    Lois A. Weithorn is a Raymond L. Sullivan Research Professor of Law, Harry & Lillian Hastings Research Chair at UC Law in San Francisco, and a Consortium Senior Scholar with the UCSF/UC Law SF Consortium on Law, Science and Health Policy. She received the UC Law SF Foundation Faculty Scholarship Award in 2002, and the Rutter Award for Teaching Excellence in 2007. Professor Weithorn is a member of the American Law Institute and serves as an Advisor to the ALI’s drafting of its first Restatement on Children and the Law.  Professor Weithorn also has a Ph.D. in Psychology. Prior to joining the faculty at UC Law SF, Professor Weithorn held positions at the University of Virginia (Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy and Department of Psychology). She served as a fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, worked on federal mental health policy at the National Mental Health Association in Washington, D.C., and consulted with the Judicial Council of California and other agencies on child and family policy issues. Professor Weithorn also served on the Ethics Committee of the American Psychological Association. Professor Weithorn’s work at UC Law SF integrates perspectives in law and the behavioral and health sciences. Her scholarship has included topics related to mental health and the law, informed consent and healthcare decision-making capacity, physician aid in dying, legal challenges in healthcare decision-making for children (such as parental vaccine refusal and state prohibitions on gender-affirming care); and policies affecting youth crossing child welfare, juvenile justice and/or mental health system boundaries.

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Our Supporters

  • This project was made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Visit calhum.org to learn more.

  • November In My Soul is also supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit chcf.org to learn more.

  • Our LGBTQ+ work has received support from support of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s California Impact Fund. Visit centerforhealthjournalism.org to learn more.

  • Our LGBTQ+ work has received support from the Fund for Investigative journalism. Visit fij.org to learn more.