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"Insane: America's Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness" (Encore Presentation)

Aired on Monday, April 22nd.

(Note: This installment of ST Medical Monday originally aired last summer.) It's taken a while for this particular truth to sink in, but America finally seems to be waking up to it: People with mental illness don't need to be locked up -- they need to be treated. On this edition of our show, we speak with journalist Alisa Roth, whose book, "Insane," is a well-regarded and alarming exposé of the mental health crisis now facing our courts, jails, and prisons. As was noted  of this book by The New York Times Book Review: "Chilling.... Roth writes movingly of the human toll of incarceration.... She convincingly diagnoses the glaring inadequacies of mental health treatment in prison but she is not out for scapegoats.... 'Insane' is rife with sharp, brutal details that pull the reader beyond the realms of abstract policy debates." And further, per a starred review in Kirkus Reviews: "A searing exposé about the criminalization of mental illness.... 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."

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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