Anyone ever admitted to a hospital could be asked to rate their experience. Except one place - psych wards.

People who go into psychiatric hospitals were never sampled about their experience, until the year 2026. Because they weren't considered reliable or trustworthy.

Today we talk to Morgan Shields, a professor of public health, who has launched her career by asking who rates psych wards, if not those receiving the care? Who holds psychiatric units accountable? And why do their North Stars seem so wrong?

Morgan knows of what she speaks because as a teenager and young adult, she was both voluntarily and involuntarily admitted to psychiatric hospitals. Her knowledge and work could vastly improve mental health care in the nation's psychiatric hospitals.

You can find out more about Morgan Shields, and her work at her Washington University webpage.

Find the link to the eye-opening study results she discusses about human rights and civil that was published in JAMA here.

In the episode, she read the last four lines of a poem that she wrote about her experience in a psychiatric hospital. It's entitled "The memory of being killed" and she put it in her dissertation, dedicating it to all people who were or will be admitted to psychiatric hospitals. Find the full poem and dedication here.

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This episode was edited and co-produced by Kate Rusk-Kosa. Theme music comes to us from Paul Swartzel. It was executive produced by Frank Kosa and Janet Yang.

Find out more about this episode and the Brain Stories documentary series at www.BrainStoriesProductions.com.

This show is a copyright of Brain Stories Productions and the SamoBé Corporation. The use of this episode or any of its content in any form or way for Artificial Intelligence, its development or training is copyright infringement, and expressly prohibited without prior written agreement.

When you get an infection, you're liable to take a 7 day course of antibiotics. Get a mental health issue and you might take an hour of therapy. But what if instead, you got 7 full days of empathy -- with people who have been there. That's the promise of peer respite. Lindsay Mesa tells us how it works at Rosewood Cottage, a peer respite program in Vermont. In their first year, the results have been astonishing. And at much lower cost than a psychiatric hospital.

To learn more about Pathways Vermont in general, click here. Our last episode highlighted another of their peer-based programs, Soteria House. Find that here!

To find out more specifically about Rosewood Cottage Peer Respite, click here. See the preliminary findings of their first year evaluation here.

To read an excellent feature piece by MindSite News on a peer respite program in Georgia, click here. MindSite is the only national news organization dedicated to covering mental health.

Oh, and this episode is released on October 10th, World Mental Health Day. We hope you take some extra time today - and every day - for yourself or your loved ones.

Subscribe or follow Brain Stories so you never miss an episode. The next episode will be released in two weeks.

This episode was edited and co-produced by Kate Rusk-Kosa. Theme music comes to us from Paul Swartzel. It was executive produced by Frank Kosa and Janet Yang.

Find out more about this episode and the Brain Stories documentary series at www.BrainStoriesProductions.com.

This show is a copyright of Brain Stories Productions and the SamoBé Corporation. The use of this episode or any of its content in any form or way for Artificial Intelligence, its development or training is copyright infringement, and expressly prohibited without prior written agreement.

California, 1971: A project called Soteria launched to study if people with psychosis fared better in psychiatric hospitals, or an environment that put listening and relationships first, medication and diagnoses second. The results were astonishing. In today's episode we talk with Betsy Hoekstra about the only Soteria House currently running in the United States today.

Betsy works for Pathways Vermont, the agency that runs Soteria House. She was on-staff at Soteria for three years, and has experienced "psychiatric incarceration" herself. She lays out what sets Soteria apart from traditional hospitalization, why having a shared understanding of reality actually isn't that important, and how her own experience with state sanctioned violence radically changed the course of her life.

To learn more about Soteria House, you can check out the Pathways Vermont website here. To see the semi-autobiographical book written about the very first Soteria House, Soteria: Through Madness to Deliverance, click here.

Find a 10 minute video of Soteria residents in Vermont telling their stories here.

For a webinar on the past, present and future of Soteria, click here.

Here's more information on some of the resources Betsy mentioned during the interview:

• Mad in America
• International Society for Psychological & Social Approaches to Psychosis (ISPS)
• Hearing Voices Network

Subscribe or follow Brain Stories so you never miss an episode. The next episode will be released in two weeks.

This episode was edited and co-produced by Kate Rusk-Kosa. Theme music comes to us from Paul Swartzel. It was executive produced by Frank Kosa and Janet Yang.

Find out more about this episode and the Brain Stories documentary series at www.BrainStoriesProductions.com.

This show is a copyright of Brain Stories Productions and the SamoBé Corporation. The use of this episode or any of its content in any form or way for Artificial Intelligence, its development or training is copyright infringement, and expressly prohibited without prior written agreement.