Mental Health

In her new book, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration, Christine Montross writes that in the U.S., people with serious mental illnesses are far more likely to be incarcerated than they are to be treated in a psychiatric hospital — despite the fact that incarceration often makes mentally ill people worse.

MIT professor Sherry Turkle was 27 when she learned that her estranged father had conducted psychological experiments on her when she was a child. She looks back on her childhood in a new memoir.

Baker supplies nearly all of the guitars, drums, synthesizers, banjo, and mandolin on her new album. It's a confessional and frequently beautiful record about mental distress and addiction.

Fresh Air celebrates Mother's Day with stories of mom from past interviews with Noah, Scorsese and filmmaker Albert Brooks. Plus, Lorna Luft remembers her mother, Judy Garland.

In 1989, 15-year-old Yusef Salaam was one of five Black and Latino teenagers who were wrongly accused of assault and rape in the so-called Central Park jogger case. Long after he’d served a seven-year prison sentence, DNA evidence confirmed that a serial rapist and murderer had committed the crime, and acted alone. Salaam's new memoir is 'Better Not Bitter.'

The first time actor Antony Ramos saw In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda's Broadway production about a Latinx community in New York City's Washington Heights neighborhood, he was floored. Now Ramos is starring — and singing and dancing and rapping — in the film adaptation of In the Heights.

MacDowell plays a woman who appears to have an undiagnosed mental health disorder that leaves her in a near constant state of mania. MacDowell says she feels particularly attuned to her 'Maid' character, because her own mother also struggled with mental illness and alcoholism.

Maureen Corrigan calls 'The Last White Man' a deft, if narrow, Twilight Zone-type fantasy about identity.

Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide have risen in recent years. NY Times reporter Matt Richtel says we lack the therapists and treatment centers to care for teens who are suffering.

Public Health researcher Arline Geronimus makes the case that marginalized people suffer nearly constant stress from living with poverty and discrimination, which damages their bodies at the cellular level and leads to increasingly serious health problems over time. Her term for it is "weathering."

Novelist Judith Viorst has written humorous books for children and for adults and is also a contributing editor to Redbook. Viorst spent years studying at the Psychoanalytic Institute in Washington, D. C. before writing her new book, "Necessary Losses." The non-fiction work's subject is coping with loss.