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Air Dates: March 15-21, 2021

The intersection of America’s criminal justice system and mental health is long and, often, misunderstood.  Christine Montross tells us that America’s largest mental health institution isn’t a psychiatric hospital, it’s Cook County Jail in Chicago, Illinois.

Dr. Christine Montross is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction and Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.  She is also a practicing inpatient psychiatrist and performs forensic psychiatric examinations.  She completed medical school and residency training at Brown University, where she received the Isaac Ray Award in Psychiatry and the Martin B. Keller Outstanding Brown Psychiatry Resident Award.  She received her undergraduate degrees and a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from the University of Michigan.  Montross’s first book, “Body of Work,” was named an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times and one of The Washington Post’s best nonfiction books of 2007.  Her second book, “Falling Into the Fire,” was named a New Yorker “Book to Watch Out For.”  Her latest book, “Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration,” was named a New York Times Book to Watch For, a Time Magazine Book to Read in July and an Amazon.com Best Book of the Month. She has also written for many national publications including The New York Times, The New England Journal of Medicine, Time Magazine, The Washington Post Book World, Good Housekeeping and O, The Oprah Magazine.

“Story in the Public Square” broadcasts each week on public television stations across the United States. In Rhode Island and southeastern New England, the show is broadcast on Rhode Island PBS on Sundays at 11 a.m. and is rebroadcast Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. An audio version of the program airs Saturdays at 8:30 a.m. & 6:30 p.m. ET, Sundays at 3:30 a.m. & 11:30 p.m. ET on SiriusXM’s popular P.O.T.U.S. (Politics of the United States), channel 124. “Story in the Public Square” is a partnership between the Pell Center and The Providence Journal. The initiative aims to study, celebrate and tell stories that matter.