The Boston Globe's Spotlight Team has been named a 2017 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Local Reporting for "a revelatory look at how the closing of psychiatric hospitals left many seriously mentally ill people a danger to themselves and their loved ones and led them into deadly encounters with the police." The Pulitzer is awarded for achievements in journalism, literature and musical composition.
We are thrilled for the Spotlight Team and offer our sincere congratulations to Jenna Russell, Maria Cramer, Michael Rezendes, Todd Wallack and Scott Helman.
More than a year in the making, the investigation into how the misguided policies of the Massachusetts’ mental health system are failing those in need began with reporters using the Treatment Advocacy Center’s unique Preventable Tragedies Database to explore the role of serious mental illness in acts of violence in Massachusetts. Over the months, team members turned to us repeatedly for data and other information not tracked elsewhere.
The resulting multi-part investigative series, “The Desperate and the Dead,” documents a host of failures we have long decried, from the devastating consequences of the Commonwealth’s psychiatric bed shortage to its refusal to embrace assisted outpatient treatment (AOT).
The Spotlight Team interviewed families of loved ones with severe mental illness and explored police confrontations, community care, courts, prisons and homelessness. The final article in the series examined a solution implemented in San Antonio — a collaborative, integrated approach to serious mental illness using AOT.
We thank the Spotlight Team for its diligence in reporting on this issue of utmost importance.