Maya Hollister 
Marcus, a forty-one-year-old account manager from Charlotte, North Carolina, had finally agreed to enter a residential treatment program for his alcohol use disorder. His therapist found a bed at a respected facility for Monday morning. On Friday afternoon, the admissions coordinator called with words Marcus did not expect to hear: the insurance company needed to … Read more
Priya, a twenty-nine-year-old graphic designer in Austin, Texas, had spent three weeks calling therapists in her insurance network. The eight names that had openings were either booked into the following spring, no longer accepting her plan, or specialized in something that did not match her needs. When she finally found a therapist whose Instagram post … Read more
Marisol was making spaghetti when the trooper knocked on the door of her Albuquerque duplex. Her husband Daniel, a long-haul driver, had been killed two hours earlier when a wrong-way driver crossed the median on I-40. By 9 p.m., Marisol was on her kitchen floor, unable to move her legs, certain she was having a … Read more
Tasha was a Division I middle-distance runner at the University of Oregon, the kind of athlete whose senior season was supposed to end at the NCAA championships in Eugene. Instead, in March of her final year, an MRI showed a stress fracture in her sacrum that wouldn’t heal in time. The team doctor told her … Read more
It was 11 p.m. on a Tuesday in Manhattan when Daniel’s wife called 911. He had been awake for three nights, convinced the upstairs neighbors had installed a listening device, and he had just emptied a kitchen drawer trying to find proof. The paramedics took him to Bellevue Hospital. Daniel’s wife, Iris, expected the kind … Read more
Diane had been an HR director at a mid-sized logistics company in Memphis for eleven years before the call that defined her career. It came at 9:14 a.m. on a Tuesday in March: a warehouse supervisor named Curtis had walked into the break room, set his phone on the counter, and told three coworkers, “I’m … Read more
Patrice raised her son Devin in a third-floor walkup in the Bronx, watched him graduate from a public high school, and then watched schizophrenia take him apart over five years. By the time Devin was twenty-six, he had been hospitalized eleven times, always brought in by police, always discharged within ten days with a prescription … Read more
When the family court judge in Maricopa County, Arizona, told Daniel Reyes he had 48 hours to enroll in a 26-week Batterer Intervention Program before his next custody hearing, Daniel had no idea where to start. The list the court handed him was three pages long, single-spaced, with phone numbers that turned out to be … Read more
When the Henderson family of Boulder finally sat down with an educational consultant, they had already lived through eighteen months of escalating crisis. Their fifteen-year-old son Caleb had cycled through outpatient therapy, an intensive outpatient program, two short psychiatric hospitalizations, and a residential treatment stay that ended after his insurance ran out. The school district … Read more
Diane, a 52-year-old elementary school teacher in Kansas City, had smoked a pack and a half a day for thirty-four years. When her doctor delivered the abnormal chest CT result, she walked out of the office, drove straight to a drugstore, and bought nicotine patches and gum. By the third day cold turkey, she could … Read more