These deep dives take time. We expect to drop our episodes by the end of 2024.
In the meantime, we’ve partnered with KQED’s The California Report Magazine and MindSite News to bring you some of our reporting. Check out the Sneak Peeks below.
Sneak Peek
We’re reporting our episodes in pairs — contemporary and historical— to explore how bias persists in our mental health and criminal legal systems for the most marginalized among us. Just being LGBTQ+ used to be considered a crime and a mental illness. Those criminal laws and psychiatric diagnoses no longer exist. But trans folks in particular are still over-criminalized and subject to the harshest conditions of confinement in jails and prisons — conditions that take a stark toll on mental health.
Listen to this October 2023 show of KQED’s The California Report Magazine to get a preview of our reporting for our contemporary LGBTQ+ episode.
Illustration by Anna Vignet/KQED
You can read the print version of the story on KQED’s website here. It’s full of links to documents and more.
To learn more about the experiences of trans women and trans men confined to the Central California Women’s Facility, read these first-person accounts from MindSite News.
‘‘My mind was going wild: ‘Are these women gonna accept me?’’’ — Michelle Kailani Calvin
History As a Road Map
Up until about fifty years ago, even in California, being LGBTQ+ meant living in the shadows. You could be targeted, entrapped and arrested. “Homosexuality,” the term of that time period, was also considered a mental illness. So judges were committing people to psychiatric hospitals as well as to prisons.
Listen to this June 2022 show of KQED’s The California Report Magazine to get a preview of our reporting for our historical LGBTQ+ episode. It’s about how state laws and psychiatric diagnoses converged to create a really dark era for all LGBTQ+ people – and especially for gay men.
You can read the print version of the story here, at MindSite News. It’s full of photos and links to historical documents.
Rural Mental Health
We have one last sneak peek for you….When we first got started on this project, we made a preview episode that digs into the extraordinary challenges in rural California. There’s a saying in remote Siskiyou County -- that geography is destiny. And for Marlene Baker it was. To get the help she needed, she had to commit a crime. Not just any crime. A felony. But stick with us, and you'll discover what can happen when public defenders, prosecutors, judges and mental health officials collaborate to try to break the cycle of mental illness and incarceration.