Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Insane
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://alisaroth.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Marketplace, staff reporter; NPR, radio news and feature contributor.
AWARDS:Recipient of Fulbright Scholar in Berlin; Soros Justice Fellow, 2014-15; grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the International Reporting Project, and the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
WRITINGS
Contributor of news and articles to New York Review of Books and New York Times. Contributor of chapters to books, including the e-book, Flight from Syria: Refugee Stories, published by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
SIDELIGHTS
Alisa Roth has been a news and feature reporter for various radio and print outlets, including National Public Radio, New York Review of Books, New York Times, and Gastonomica. She worked for The World and for Marketplace covering economic justice and the auto industry. A Soros Justice Fellow, she reports on refugees and asylum seekers, unemployed autoworkers in Michigan, and day laborers in New York City. She lives in New York City.
In 2018, Roth published Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness, about mental illness and the criminal justice system. She spent a year investigating the increasing use of jails and prisons as the de facto mental healthcare system. Statistically, nearly half the people incarcerated have a psychiatric disorder, and a quarter of the people fatally shot by police have mental health issues. The Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago jails are the three largest providers of mental health care in the United States. Roth has interviewed dozens of prisoners, their families, psychiatrists, lawyers, wardens, and corrections officers. She explores how inmates are denied proper treatment and are physically abused, how disastrous mental health policies are adopted over and over again, and how poverty and racial discrimination exacerbate the situation. She also explains that more fair and humane approaches would resolve many of these issues, and highlights some communities and judges that are working to keep the mentally ill out of prison.
Calling the book eye-opening and a searing expose, a Kirkus Reviews writer noted: “Though the subject matter dictates that much of the book is relentlessly depressing, the author is such a talented information gatherer and fluid stylist that the narrative becomes compulsive reading.” In Publishers Weekly, a reviewer commented: “Roth strikes a powerful balance between big picture analysis and individual stories,” adding that Roth offers a disturbing synthesis of her academic and field research.
In an interview with Alisa Chang on All Things Considered, Roth alluded to the horrific psychiatric institutions of the mid-twentieth century, dramatized in movies like One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and said that today those institutions have become jails and prisons: “Understaffing on the security side, understaffing on the medical side, under-trained mental health care workers, overmedication—it’s like we’ve just rebuilt them and call them something else, but it’s all the same problems.” Roth was marginally hopeful, saying: “One of the heartening things I found in all this very upsetting reporting is that there is a consensus that what we’re doing is wrong. …We need to figure out how to come to a consensus about what that change looks like.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2018, review of Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness.
ONLINE
All Things Considered, https://www.npr.org/ (April 25, 2018), Ailsa Chang, author interview.
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (April 2, 2018), review of Insane.
< 'Insane': America's 3 Largest Psychiatric Facilities Are Jails April 25, 20184:56 PM ET Listen· 8:16 8:16 Queue Download Embed Facebook Twitter Flipboard Email AILSA CHANG, HOST: To get a picture of the horrors of this country's psychiatric institutions in the mid-20th century, you can read or watch "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest." (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST") SYDNEY LASSICK: (As Charlie Cheswick) I ain't no little kid. LOUISE FLETCHER: (As Nurse Ratched) You sit down. LASSICK: (As Charlie Cheswick) I ain't no little kid. CHANG: Or you can do what Alisa Roth did - spend time in our present-day jails and prisons. ALISA ROTH: We have recreated those asylums almost point-by-point. CHANG: The journalist says that includes the brutality, the cruelty and the filth. ROTH: Understaffing on the security side, understaffing on the medical side, under-trained mental health care workers, overmedication - it's like we've just rebuilt them and call them something else, but it's all the same problems. CHANG: Alisa Roth investigates the widespread incarceration of the mentally ill in her new book "Insane: America's Criminal Treatment Of Mental Illness". By some counts, she writes, as many as half of all inmates suffer from a psychiatric disorder. Some correctional institutions turned her away. Others, including the LA County jail, allowed her to see firsthand what goes on inside. ROTH: What you see in Los Angeles County is a jail which is scary. It's unpleasant. It's loud. It's claustrophobic. You see people who are desperately sick - I mean, desperately sick. So one time when I was there, corrections officers came out with a man who had been strapped into a wheelchair and was bleeding from his arm because he had scratched out a piece of his own flesh. I was walking around with officers one day, trying to get people to come out for recreation time or for a shower, what have you, and they opened the little door in the cell where you hand food trays through, and there was this almost overpowering smell of feces because this man had smeared the walls of his cell with feces like plaster. CHANG: Wow. I was also struck by the attitude of some of the officers you talked to. I remember the nonchalant way one of the officers showed you his special knife for cutting down people trying to hang themselves. It was just like, yeah, this is just part of my uniform. ROTH: Yeah, and it was just part of his job. Suicide is the leading cause of death in jails. And it was part of his job the same way as taking people out of their cells and bringing them for out-of-cell time. CHANG: Yeah. ROTH: At the same time, you know, it's easy to portray these people as monsters or otherworldly. And I think we need to remember that they are real people who are just not getting the treatment that they need. The officers, too, are legitimately concerned about having things thrown at them or being attacked. You know, the officers post signs on the cells saying, this man is a spitter or this one is will hold his door open when you try to put him back. CHANG: Or throw feces at you. ROTH: Or throw feces at you. I mean, another thing that struck me there was this sense of people cycling through. So we talk about the civilian mental health care system and the criminal justice system as two separate entities. And really, in a lot of cases, the patients in both of them are going back and forth between the two. One day when I was there, there was a man who had acted up in court and was sent back to the jail. He was strapped into a restraint chair for transport from the court to the jail, and I went with the officers to retrieve him, bring him back to a cell. And they kept talking to him because they knew him. He'd been there a bunch of times before, and they kept saying, hey, what happened; what's going on? And the man didn't say anything until we were getting off the elevator, and then he started asking if he could be sent back to his old cell. And it sounded for all the world like somebody, you know, a businessman coming back to his favorite hotel in some city, saying, can I have... CHANG: Right. ROTH: ...You know, this room? CHANG: The room, the penthouse, yeah. ROTH: Exactly, exactly. CHANG: You have this very amazing statistic that LA, New York and Chicago - the jails in those three cities are the three largest providers of mental health care now in the country. ROTH: It's ridiculous, but it's true in just about every jurisdiction in the country. So LA and Chicago and New York are enormous, but it's true if you go to Rochester. It's true if you go to Albuquerque. This is truly a national crisis that's playing out at a very local level. CHANG: The enormous numbers of mentally ill people you see in jails and prisons - for them, the story begins actually outside of jail or prison - right? - much earlier in a community where they just weren't given enough access to mental health care and then went along and did things that got them arrested. And the story goes on for them. ROTH: It's astonishing to me how difficult it can be to access mental health care in this country. In Oklahoma, I visited community clinics - so, you know, outpatient clinics in the community. So what happens in Oklahoma is that if you come in with symptoms of mental illness or somebody brings you in with symptoms of mental illness, you're given a score. And basically if you are not actively suicidal or actively psychotic, you're going to be diverted to some other form of treatment. You're not going to get in to see a psychiatrist, or you're not going to get in to see a psychiatrist for months and months and months. Even figuring out where to go for treatment can be difficult. At one point, I was following somebody here in New York who had been in and out of the mental health care system and in and out of jail and prison. And I wanted to see how many psychiatrists in New York City alone accept Medicaid and how many of those would be accepting new patients. CHANG: And what did you find? ROTH: I spent probably two days making phone calls. I should add that I made those calls without worrying about losing time from my job. I wasn't worried about running out of money on my cellphone. I wasn't worried about where I was going to sleep that night. I wasn't worried about getting my medication. I wasn't worried about where my next meal was coming from. And I finally gave up. I went to one of the public hospitals here in the city. I went to the Medicaid office. I explained to the very nice clerk what I wanted to do. She handed me a sheet of paper. She said, well, it really depends which Medicaid plan you're on. And there were - I forget - five or six different options. She said, you need to go online and look up the psychiatrists, and then you need to call the office and see if they're accepting patients. CHANG: Oy. ROTH: It's just - it's so - who's going to do that? CHANG: Right. ROTH: Who has the time or the wherewithal or even just the brainpower to do that? CHANG: Right - and persistence and focus to see it all through. ROTH: Exactly. CHANG: So who's paying attention to all of this? How is this all going to change? ROTH: One of the heartening things I found in all this very upsetting reporting is that there is a consensus that what we're doing is wrong. Whether we're talking about the people who are locked up and their families or the corrections officers or the prosecutors, the defense attorneys, the judges, the doctors - you name it - we are in agreement that what we're doing is not working, that it's counterproductive, that we need to change. We need to figure out how to come to a consensus about what that change looks like. But at least we're all on the same page that this is not the way it should be and that nobody is benefiting from this situation. CHANG: Alisa Roth is author of "Insane: America's Criminal Treatment Of Mental Illness." Thank you very much for joining us. ROTH: Thank you for having me.
Alisa Roth, a long-time radio and print journalist, has reported on refugees and asylum seekers in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Her work has appeared on Marketplace, NPR, and The World, as well as in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and Gastronomica.
Alisa Roth, Producer, is a radio and print reporter and has reported extensively from abroad, most recently in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. Her work has been broadcast on Marketplace, where she spent several years as a staff reporter, NPR, and The World. Her print work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and Gastronomica. A Fulbright scholar, she has received grants from the International Reporting Project and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.
Alisa Roth is a print & radio reporter. Her book about mental illness & and the criminal justice system, Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness, is out now from Basic Books.
Her work has been broadcast on Marketplace, NPR, and The World; her stories have also appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and Gastronomica, among other publications.
As a 2014-2015 Soros Justice Fellow, Alisa spent a year investigating the growing role of jails and prisons as our de facto mental healthcare system. She has visited the country’s three largest psychiatric care providers, Rikers Island in New York City, the Cook County Jail in Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Jail in LA, and her research has included dozens of interviews with prisoners and their families, psychiatrists, lawyers, wardens, corrections officers and others.
Alisa’s previous journalism has taken her around the world: she has interviewed Syrian refugees in Turkey, Egyptian migrants in Jordan, Afghan asylum seekers in Germany, unemployed autoworkers in Michigan, and women who work as day laborers in New York City.
As a long-time staff reporter in the New York bureau of Marketplace, she covered economic justice and the auto industry. She also worked as an independent producer in Germany and a newspaper reporter in California. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Berlin and her reporting has been funded by grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the International Reporting Project, and the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Her essay about the Syrian refugee crisis is included in Flight from Syria: Refugee Stories, an e-book published by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Alisa Roth is a former staff reporter for Marketplace and frequent contributor to various NPR programs. A Soros Justice Fellow, her work has also appeared in the New York Review of Books and New York Times. She lives in New York.
Roth, Alisa: INSANE
Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Roth, Alisa INSANE Basic (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 4, 3 ISBN: 978-0-465-09419-6
A searing exposA@ about the criminalization of mental illness that features a simple underlying theme that a society attempting the same disastrous policies over and over but expecting a different outcome is where the actual craziness resides.
Former Marketplace reporter Roth goes broad and deep, first explaining why the United States has never devoted adequate resources to dealing with its millions of mentally ill inhabitants, then using case studies to demonstrate why incarcerating the mentally ill in jails or prisons often makes no sense and does more harm than good. Because compassionate, well-trained, readily accessible professionals are unavailable to most severely mentally ill individuals--those with schizophrenia and/or bipolar disorder especially--when those individuals appear as threats to themselves or others, the first responders are usually police officers or others unequipped to deal with such situations. Too often, Roth explains, encounters between the mentally ill and armed police result in serious injury or death. As for the mentally ill who survive such encounters, their incarceration without medical treatment is quite likely to result in the worsening of the disease, until no amelioration seems possible or suicide results. Although Roth expresses pessimism about the future of mental illness treatment--especially when poverty and race and lack of education enter the equation--she shares rare positive examples of community-based care that is adequately funded as well as the laudable work of a few law enforcement agencies mounting sincere efforts to treat inmates humanely and effectively. In the instances where an incarcerated mentally ill individual enters an actual courtroom, Roth explores how judges can aid in solutions rather than compounding an already fraught situation. Though the subject matter dictates that much of the book is relentlessly depressing, the author is such a talented information gatherer and fluid stylist that the narrative becomes compulsive reading.
An eye-opening book that cries out for change--but can policymakers show the resolve to make that change?
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Roth, Alisa: INSANE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461680/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c970aa32. Accessed 16 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461680
Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness
Alisa Roth. Basic, $28 (320p) ISBN 978-0-465-09419-6
Marketplace reporter Roth’s cri de coeur uses moving anecdotes of how the American criminal justice system treats the mentally ill to make the problem palpable. Roth provides a deeply disturbing synthesis of her research, both academic and in the field, including conversations with professionals, and the mentally ill, to show how despite the increased understanding of mental illness over the last two centuries, and apart from the development of more effective medications, “we continue to treat people with mental illness almost exactly as we did before electricity was invented.” In one of the more unsettling examples, a businessman and former firefighter with bipolar disorder was arrested for indecent exposure after he stripped naked in the hallway of a hotel when he was unable to open the door to his room. Later, when he turned violent, correction officers with no access to his medical records or understanding of the care he needed put him in solitary confinement. Roth proposes sound alternatives, such as San Antonio’s investment in a 24/7 crisis center devoted to keeping people with mental illness “out of the criminal justice system and [getting them] into effective treatment.” Roth strikes a powerful balance between big picture analysis and individual stories to make this searing account of America’s misguided treatment of the mentally ill hard to ignore. (Apr.)
DETAILS
Reviewed on: 04/02/2018
Release date: 04/03/2018