Adam Aurand spent nearly a decade of his life stuck in a loop: emergency rooms, psychiatric hospitals, jails, prison, and the streets in and around Seattle.

During that time, he picked up diagnoses of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and schizoaffective disorder. He also used opioids and methamphetamine.

Aurand’s life is an example of what happens to many people who experience psychosis in the U.S.: a perpetual shuffle from one place to the next for visits lasting hours or days or weeks, none of them leading to longer-lasting support.

This week on Reveal, reporters who made the recent podcast Lost Patients, by KUOW and The Seattle Times, try to answer a question: Why do America’s systems for treating serious mental illness break down in this way?

The answer took them from the present-day streets of Seattle to decades into America’s past.

You can find Lost Patients wherever you get your podcasts:

NPR: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510377/lost-patients

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lost-patients/id1733735613

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1avleoc5U4DA7U37GFPzIH

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Chelsea Goodrich and her mother, Lorraine, were locked in discussions with the director of the Mormon church’s risk management division, Paul Rytting. One of Rytting’s jobs is to protect the church from legal liability, including sexual abuse lawsuits.

The women had come to the meeting with one clear request: Would the church allow a local Idaho bishop who heard Chelsea’s father’s confession of abuse to testify against him at trial?

In this week’s episode, produced in collaboration with The Associated Press, secret audio recordings expose a legal playbook used by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that keeps evidence of sex abuse out of reach of authorities.

AP reporters Michael Rezendes and Jason Dearen investigate what happened after a former Mormon bishop, John Goodrich, was accused of sexual abuse—and the family pressed Mormon church officials on whether they were going to make decisions that would help Chelsea or her father.

Rezendes and Dearen also sit down with guest host Michael Montgomery to discuss a major development in the Goodrich case since this investigation was released last year—and why states across the country continue to exempt clergy from mandatory reporting laws that are meant to protect children from abuse.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in December 2023.

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When the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department in California wanted to purchase new firearms, it sold its used ones to help cover the cost. The old guns went to a distributor, which then turned around and sold them to the public. One of those guns—a Glock pistol—found its way to Indianapolis.

That Glock was involved in the killing of Maria Leslie’s grandson, and the fact that it once belonged to law enforcement makes her loss sting even more.

“My grandson was in his own apartment complex. He lived there,” Leslie said. “He should not have been murdered there, especially with a gun that traces back all the way to the California police department’s coffers.”

Across the nation, it’s common practice for police departments to trade in their old weapons rather than destroy them. Tens of thousands of old cop guns are ending up in the hands of criminals. This week, in a collaboration with The Trace and CBS News, reporter Alain Stephens traces the journey of some of those guns from the police departments that sold them to the crime scenes where they ended up.

Then Stephens brings us reporting from The Gun Machine podcast series from WBUR and The Trace. He explores the reasons why police and other law enforcement agencies have greatly expanded their arsenals over recent decades.

On a summer night in 1995, a sheriff’s deputy was shot and killed in a hotel parking lot in Birmingham, Alabama. When investigators arrived at the scene, they found no eyewitnesses and almost no evidence pointing to the shooter.

Detectives ultimately zeroed in on a man named Toforest Johnson, who on that same night was with friends at a nightclub miles away. Johnson was tried twice for the murder and eventually convicted on the testimony of an “earwitness” – a woman who claimed to have overheard Johnson confessing to the crime. He has spent more than 25 years on Alabama’s death row.

In 2019, investigative journalist Beth Shelburne began covering the case, finding details that cast major doubts about Johnson’s guilt. This week, in partnership with Lava for Good and the Earwitness podcast, Shelburne tells us the story of Johnson’s case.

Click here to hear the full Earwitness podcast.

This episode originally aired in November 2023.

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The loss of land for Black Americans started with the government’s betrayal of its 40 acres and a mule promise – and it has continued for decades.

Today, researchers are unearthing the details of Black land loss long after emancipation, and local governments across the country are finally asking: Can we repair a wealth gap for Black Americans that is rooted in slavery? And how?

This week on Reveal, we explore the renewed fight for reparations.

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Skidaway Island, Georgia, is home today to a luxurious community that the mostly White residents consider paradise: waterfront views, live oaks and marsh grass alongside golf courses, swimming pools and other amenities.

In 1865, the island was a thriving Black community, started by freedmen who were given land by the government under the 40 acres program. They farmed, created a system of government and turned former cotton plantations into a Black American success story.

But it wouldn’t last. Within two years, the government took that land back from the freedmen and returned it to the former enslavers.

Today, 40 acres in The Landings development are worth at least $20 million. The history of that land is largely absent from day-to-day life. But over a two-and-a-half-year investigation, journalists at the Center for Public Integrity have unearthed records that prove that dozens of freed people had, and lost, titles to tracts at what’s now The Landings.

“You could feel chills to know that they had it and then they just pulled the rug from under them, so to speak,” said Linda Brown, one of the few Black residents at The Landings.

This week on Reveal, in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity, we also show a descendant her ancestor’s title for a plot of land that is now becoming another exclusive gated community. And we look at how buried documents like these Reconstruction-era land titles are part of the long game toward reparations.

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Our historical investigation found 1,250 formerly enslaved Black Americans who were given land – only to see it returned to their enslavers.

Patricia Bailey’s four-bedroom home sits high among the trees in lush Edisto Island, South Carolina. It’s a peaceful place where her body healed from multiple sclerosis. It’s also the source of her generational wealth.

Bailey built this house on land that was passed down by her great-great-grandfather, Jim Hutchinson, who was enslaved on Edisto before he was freed and became a landowner.

“I know this is sacred land here,” Bailey says, “’cause it's my ancestors and I feel it.”

Union General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 15 – better known as 40 acres and a mule – implied a better life in the waning days of the Civil War. Hutchinson is among the formerly enslaved people who received land through the field orders, which are often thought of as a promise that was never kept. But 40 acres and a mule was more than that.

It was real.

Over a more than two-year investigation, our partners at the Center for Public Integrity have unearthed thousands of records once buried in the National Archives. In them, they found more than 1,200 formerly enslaved people who were given land by the federal government through the field orders – and then saw that land taken away.

None of the land Bailey lives on today is part of Hutchinson’s 40 acres. Instead, her family’s wealth is built on her ancestor’s determination to get and keep land of his own, after losing what he thought he had gained through the field orders.

This week on Reveal, with our partners at the Center for Public Integrity, we bring you the first in a three-part series in which we tell the history of an often-misunderstood government program. We explore a reparation that wasn’t – and the wealth gap that remains.

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Many Lakota people agree it's imperative to revitalize their language, which has declined to fewer than 1,500 fluent speakers, according to some estimates. But how to do that is a matter of broader debate and a contentious legal battle. Should Lakota be codified and standardized to make learning it easier? Or should the language stay as it always has been, defined by many different ways of writing and speaking? The NPR podcast Code Switch explores this complex, multigenerational fight that's been unfolding in the Lakota Nation, from Standing Rock to Pine Ridge.

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