45.1. Good Talk #10: Sydney Brownstone

"We have to understand the origins of those beliefs if we have any hope of making conditions better for people in our society."

Recently seen in Portland.

It’s April, y’all, and the numbers indicate in the title above that I’ve been sending this newsletter out to you for 45 straight months¹. That’s longer than I’ve held some jobs! If you’ve been reading this long, and are enjoying yourself, consider becoming a paid subscriber. 

Very plainly: your hard-earned dollars go directly to funding the work I do as a journalist. What does that look like? When you pay $7 a month, you covered at least one public records request. If you aren’t the type of person who would make public records requests on your own, rest assured that I am doing it for you. 

Also paid subscriptions are the only way for you to read my analysis of the Chad Daybell trial, which is currently happening (literally right now) in Boise, Idaho. Last week I put a dispatch out about the misogyny that tainted opening statements, which struck me as pretty sus. 

In advance of today’s “Good Talk” — the tenth! — I wanted to let you know an update from one of my past subjects, Joe Wilkins. Joe has written an amazing forthcoming novel, The Entire Sky. I’ve been devouring it in my free time, and if you’re dreaming of reading fantastic novels this summer, put this one on the top of your list. 

Speaking of conversations: this month, on Sunday, April 28, I’ll be asking questions of NPR political correspondent Sarah McCammon about her new book The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living and Leaving the White Evangelical Church. Come on down to Powell’s City of Books and ask good questions.

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When I envisioned a Q&A series for this newsletter, I wanted to create a space to talk with people who inspire me: musicians, artists, novelists, organizers, journalists. I’m delighted today to introduce you to Seattle Times journalist Sydney Brownstone — a reporter whose work breaks ground and is painstakingly reported. And Sydney is just a great human being. 

Right now, you can hear some of Sydney’s on-the-ground reporting in the new podcast Lost Patients, a joint production of KUOW and The Seattle Times created by the indefatigable Seattle radio journalist, Will James². This podcast has answered so many of my questions about the mental health system in the Northwest. But the show is also doggedly devoted to answering the question of why there are so many people in mental health crisis living on our streets. It is an amazing work of journalism. 

In one episode, Sydney’s reporting on Northern State Hospital, a shuttered psychiatric facility, takes front and center. The episode got me thinking a lot about trauma-informed reporting and how traumatizing reporting can be. I asked Sydney if we could talk all about that and … well, here’s our conversation: 

LEAH SOTTILE: 

What made you want to be a journalist? 

SYDNEY BROWNSTONE: 

When I was a little, little kid, I wanted to be a writer. That's all I knew. I wanted to do fiction. And then by the time I was in high school, I was convinced that I had to save the world. So I went to college for international relations. I hated international relations because I realized that everyone in my international relations classes were like the sons and daughters of despots and oil magnates. So I took a journalism class … and it really resonated with me, I think, because I have always had this rage towards authority and towards injustice. And this seemed like a great vehicle for that.

So that was the beginning of it. I am and was an extremely anxious person about anything, and journalism was a vehicle for me to investigate those anxieties.

LS:

I often like to say that the reason I get out of bed is my rage. And I don’t know that that's healthy, but journalism does feel like a good vehicle for it, like you say.

SB:

My fiancé says that I am at my, like, brightest and shiniest when I have a murderous rage against injustice. 

LS: 

What was the first time that you had had a rage and authority that felt like you needed to do something?

SB: 

I think it comes from some very deep places. I grew up in these very affluent, kind of right wing suburbs of Philadelphia and my family, we were some of the only Jews there. So I never really felt like I fit in with the other kids or the larger community. And Judaism — at least the Judaism that my parents kind of instilled — very much teaches you to question authority. So that questioning authority came from my cultural background. But also I was just kind of like a little punk hipster kid who just kind of hated everything the suburbs stood for. So that's probably an origin. 

LS: 

What are the suburbs of Philadelphia like? Are all suburbs the same? I grew up in the suburbs of Portland.

SB: 

No, not all suburbs are the same. And in fact my suburbs are kind of famous. They're called the Main Line and they're known for being very affluent and segregated. There's a lot of old money. My family, as far as I know, does not come from old money. You would read a lot of stories about the Philadelphia suburbs during the 2016 elections because it was kind of like this purple area where everyone is highly-educated and it's kind of split — half of folks were going for Trump and other folks are Democrats. So it’s a really interesting area to watch during elections because it can swing either way. 

LS: 

Talk to me about your trajectory then into journalism. 

SB: 

I got an internship at The L Magazine, which is defunct now. At the time a lot of people in my journalism program [at NYU] were trying to get internships or fellowships at really prestigious places like the New York Times. And I think from a combination of knowing that I wasn't gonna get those because I wasn’t very good, and also I just wanted to write more and get clips, I decided that I wanted to look for opportunities at smaller places. So The L Magazine was this little hipster magazine in Brooklyn, and I got my start as an intern and then worked my way up to an assistant editor, mostly through doing music reviews.

I had never wanted to write about music because I like music and interviewing musicians can be very terrible. But that got me started and that was during Occupy Wall Street. 

I started kind of embedding myself in Occupy Wall Street stuff and covering that for The L Magazine. And there's definitely like a political awakening that happens with that. Then I decided to go for a fact-checking fellowship at Mother Jones out in California. And it was amazing.

It was a year, maybe a year and a half. Most of it I was sleeping on an air mattress, but I was a fact checker for some of my favorite magazine writers. And I idolized magazine writing. It was just everything I wanted to do. It was that stick-it-to-the-man, anti-authority stuff, plus just beautiful creative writing. 

I really think my journalism career starts there. As a fact checker, I was able to kind of crawl inside the stories of writers whoI idolized and see how they were built from the inside out. When I was there, I ended up working with a reporter named Gabriel Mac.

Gabriel was writing stories about post-traumatic stress disorder, and then asked me to fact check his book. And through interviewing combat vets with PTSD and fact checking his book about rape-related PTSD, I really immersed myself in the research of what Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is and was. And I think that that was like my second point of rage. One of the things that I learned through fact-checking all of the stories in the book was that the research dedicated to Post-Traumatic Stress has basically been suppressed by societal values. And I became so enthusiastic about trying to get more of that research out there and trying to inform the public about what Post-Traumatic Stress does to the body physiologically, and how it doesn't just apply to combat vets. 

After that, I ended up working at the Village Voice for a little bit as a blogger. Then I got a job at Fast Company, working for a vertical where I was blogging several times a day. I got one magazine feature that I was really proud of, but I did not like sitting in an office and typing and not being on the ground talking to people. So when a job at The Stranger opened up 3000 miles away, I was like, man, I'm gonna give alt weeklies another shot.

I went to The Stranger, and originally I thought I was going to be an environment reporter. And I did some environmental reporting, like when the Arctic Drilling rig showed up in Seattle. But I started focusing more on allegations of sexual assault. This is pre-MeToo, and there was this guy who pretended to be a porn recruiter. 

LS: 

Matt Hickey. I wanted to talk to you about this story. 

SB:

As a result of my reporting, he was convicted of Indecent Liberties, but also the first consumer fraud lawsuit from the State of Washington on behalf of sex workers.

I think my journalism career kind of took off from that point because I found a place where I could build trust with people. I could tell their stories faithfully. I did several more stories about allegations of sexual assault against public figures. 

I decided I didn't want to do anything personality-driven anymore. I had become increasingly uncomfortable with what I had been taught in journalism school, which was, ‘you need to put your personality out there. You need to develop your personal brand, you need to be on Twitter all the time.' It just had become kind of untenable for me. I decided I'm gonna make this pivot. I'm just gonna be a hard news reporter. There's gonna be no flair in my writing. 

I moved to KUOW, which is a public radio station, and then I was hired onto Project Homeless at The Seattle Times. I was a homelessness reporter for three years. After that I came to the Investigative Team. 

When I decided I was just gonna be a hard news reporter, I found out that that doesn't quite cut it for me…. Most of the jobs that I've had, I've tried to do investigative or accountability reporting no matter what my job title is. I used to think if I just put information out there, put facts out there, the world will receive it and feel the same maybe level of outrage that I do about these facts. I'm not sure that's true. 

So I'm trying to bridge kind of investigative with more narrative, which is hard to do. I also believe that people aren't just looking for facts. They're looking for meaning, and they want you to make sense of things. And maybe through art or through good story or themes, on some unconscious individual level, you can open a person up to more complexity and making people open to complexity is really the change that we need.

LS: 

I’m so impressed with the ways that you have had quantifiable change come from your work.

SB: 

I remember sitting in the courtroom at [Hickey’s] sentencing and women came up to me who I had never spoken to before who said, ‘we never came to you, but this was our experience too, and we decided to show up today,’ and ‘thank you for writing this.’ That filled me with such a sense of drive and purpose, and that sustained me for a really long time. 

I think someone once told me you have to be careful about what you get good at. And for better or worse, I think I became really good at interviewing people who had gone through some shit. 

I think I became burned out on that. Especially on the homelessness beat, I had sources I got close to who died of overdoses, and that really messed with me. For a while I didn't want to do anything where I had to really get to know people very deeply because I was kind of afraid to lose them in that way.

LS: 

In the podcast Outsiders, Will has a whole conversation with you about writing about trauma. I want to talk to you about that because I have to imagine that wasn't what you set out to do when you started as a journalist. 

SB: 

You get a profound sense of satisfaction professionally from writing stories that make other people feel less alone. I think that was my goal in becoming a journalist. I want to write stories that make other people feel less alone. And through covering sex work and sexual assault, I sometimes had impact. 

I very deliberately decided a couple of years ago that I needed to stop writing about anything involving sexual assault, just because of my own mental illness. I needed to take a break and recuperate. That stuff tends to accumulate over time. I wasn't doing a very good job of digesting it and integrating it and being a healthy person. 

This stuff has become so politicized, and I don't want to do “advocacy journalism” again. I want to open up people to complexity. I don't want to root for the “right side” over the “wrong side.” I think that's reductive and I'm not interested in that at all. I'm drawn towards stories where trauma may be a factor, but I have deliberately tried to remove myself from some of those stories in recent years just to allow myself to have a healthier work life balance.

LS:

I'm glad to hear that. I don't know if you got this message as a young journalist, but I definitely bought the whole “journalists don't feel anything, we just are here to observe” narrative. Like it can't affect you. I think that's insane to make young people feel like that's true or possible. At a certain point, I developed this weird characteristic where I thought, ‘I've had a good life, a relatively pain-free life, so I can take on people's trauma.’ Maybe as a way of picking up some of the weight for them. If you're coming in saying ‘Hey, let me share the trauma with you,’ you're gonna be traumatized. It took me having many mental collapses to realize, oh, I’m also traumatized. 

SB: 

What you're saying resonates totally with me. There were stories that I would be doing that I would be having the worst time on and say to myself, ‘but I have a responsibility to do this. It is my responsibility as a relatively pain-free person to do this.’ But I've been diagnosed with acute stress disorder multiple times. That has come from some of the work that I've done. 

Yes, this job exposes you to trauma. And if you are a sensitive person, it is abnormal for you to not feel anything and not carry that with you. So I'm just figuring out how I can do complex stories that really do get to complex human things in a more sustainable way for myself.

LS: 

Do you feel like you have support in doing that? So much of our industry is trafficking in trauma. Trauma is a great click.

SB: 

Yeah. And I hate that. I think a lot of capital-N narrative traffic in trauma porn, and I hate it because it's just making a spectacle of other people's pain.

The other thing they teach you in journalism is “walk someone on the record no matter what, get the story no matter what.” And I think especially after covering homelessness, my own journalism ethics completely stood against that. I tell people all the time, ‘it's your decision whether or not you wanna talk to me, it's totally up to you and I will respect a no.’ If I can see someone is struggling and not in a good place, there's no way I'm gonna walk them onto the record. Once someone has their story published, there are ramifications for them. Like for us, the story is over. We can walk away and move on to the next thing. But for that person, it's a huge amount of public exposure, and that can have real life consequences. 

LS: 

I was just reading something you wrote about your Northern State Hospital project, and you said you went with Will on a date at a cemetery. This is the best beginning of a relationship I've ever heard. 

SB: 

I didn't know Will when we did Outsiders, and then he moved like a block away during the pandemic. We would take long walks together and talk about journalism and burnout and stuff. One of the things we were doing very early on in the relationship was going on road trips all around the Pacific Northwest, oftentimes to sites of violent labor history, but also we just decided to visit an abandoned mental institution. 

One of the things we heard all the time from people is, well, didn't deinstitutionalization start homelessness? It was one of those questions that really irked us because it's more complicated than that. That was the impetus for Lost Patients. We went to Northern State Hospital on a date, and I was particularly struck by the cemetery. There was a guy who happened to be rooting around in the cemetery, and I was like, ‘I gotta talk to that guy.’ So that's how the Northern State thing got started.

LS: 

As a person who loves to hang out in cemeteries, this was amazing to me. Cemeteries are just history. If you like museums, then you would like cemeteries. I don't know why they have so much stigma. 

SB:

The Northern State cemetery gripped me because there were only initials and numbers on the gravestones visible on the surface. And so for someone who grew up in a Jewish family, I come from a community where people were dehumanized and literally identified by numbers on their forearms. That cemetery just kind of shook me to my core. And then realizing that all of these gravestones were either sinking into the earth or had been misplaced, or people had been buried in mass graves, or they were just ashes sitting in food cans underneath a cement block in an unknown location. There's something about people being forgotten that made me obsessive and activated my rage.

I think especially having been a homelessness reporter — those are people who are being forgotten in plain sight, right? I think most residents of any city develop a kind of dual consciousness. Like walking down the street, I have to get from point A to point B, and if I see someone in crisis or someone who is experiencing homelessness, I just have to ignore them to get through my day. I think our society has organized itself that way, and it isn't just dehumanizing for the people experiencing those difficulties, it’s also dehumanizing for us. It diminishes us and our humanity. I just became captivated by this idea that it was my responsibility to make people remember. 

Very early on in my research about rape-related PTSD, I read this book called Trauma and Recovery by Judith Lewis Herman. She has a line in there that says “It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.”

But that is so easy, right? To forget. The perpetrator asks nothing of us, whereas the survivor asks us to remember it, they demand engagement. That line was really kind of ringing in my head because you have these facilities all across the United States that are just shuttered. Totally abandoned. People walked away from them. And we have a homelessness crisis right now in many American cities. We as a society, I think, are inclined to forget or not remember.

The conversations in many cities are, okay, well the reason we have this mental health or homelessness and mental health crisis is because of deinstitutionalization. Therefore, the solution is re-institutionalization, or expanding involuntary treatment. And having been a homelessness reporter, I knew it was way more complicated than that. I also thought it was a willful misremembering or forgetting of the past. I was really driven to resurrect it and connect it to the present day, so maybe we could gain some lessons from it and not repeat it.

LS: 

I just have to say, I'm just so glad people like you exist. Especially in journalism. It’s just filled with so many people where I'm like, what are you even driven by? Why are you doing this? To uphold norms?

SB: 

That's not interesting to me. And I think it comes from this very teenage place of wanting to shake everyone around me and being like, ‘no, the world is more complicated than that.’ 

LS: 

I literally have a poster on my wall right here that I ripped off a bulletin board when I was at Gonzaga. So this would've been like the year 2000. It's a poster advertising a documentary called, This is What Democracy Looks Like. It's a documentary about WTO and the entirety of what happened there. That event was an early inspiration for me to question norms. I remember everyone around me at my school, when that happened, they were like ‘these people are idiots.’ But I didn’t see it that way. And I think questioning norms can be a very lonely path.

I'm gonna have to put a spoiler alert here because several episodes into Lost Patients, you have this moment where you realize the words you were using in your articles had been used in articles you were finding in the archives of The Seattle Times from — what year? 

SB: 

From 1981.

LS: 

You asked these questions like, 'what are we even doing in journalism? Why are we doing this?’ I'm really curious where you have landed, or if people have heard that and supplied you with the answers you needed.

SB: 

That moment in the podcast has had a lot of response that I was not anticipating from listeners. I think it's one of the biggest things that people have responded to. And at first I thought it was like, okay, well, yeah, journalists obviously can relate to this. But it's been non-journalist listeners too. People who aren't in journalism read the same articles all the time too. I don't know if someone has supplied me with an answer. I'm not sure I believe anymore that putting facts out repeatedly will make a difference. If it does make a difference, it might make a difference on the very margins. A podcast allows you to go a little bit deeper than the surface level. And one of the reasons I wanted to do this podcast with Will is because it allowed us to kind of explore the deeper rot at the heart of our societal values. Which is something that I don't think most journalism does often. 

LS: 

Uh, no. Definitely not.

SB: 

I think it's important to maybe take a little departure from strict newspaper format sometimes and tell people what you observe as a journalist and how you make meaning as a journalist. You can have deeper conversations with people … about what it means to be a human in the world, living amongst other people and what your responsibilities are to those other people. Increasingly, those are the types of conversations that I want to have. And I feel like those conversations are buoyed by stories that have bigger universal narrative themes underneath. I still believe in storytelling as a vehicle for change, but I think it happens on a much deeper individual, more unconscious level that just maybe slowly opens a window in someone to complexity.

For example, a relative of mine came out to visit and I decided to take this relative up to Northern State Hospital just because it's a really cool place to visit, and it explains what I've been working on. On the way up this relative was like, ‘just to play devil's advocate: does it not make sense that a certain percentage of people just aren't productive and we shouldn’t take care of them? They basically are not able to function and we should just give up on them.’

I flipped out in the car at this relative. I was screaming ‘that's eugenics!’ But that is the kind of conversation that I want to have. It’s very important to talk about local politics and policy. I also want to have a conversation about the beliefs that underpin those policy decisions. But I do want to have conversations with people about those belief systems. Why do we believe this as a society? Where does that come from? I want to understand. Because to me it's not a given. Those beliefs come from somewhere. Those beliefs come from history. We have to understand the origins of those beliefs if we have any hope of making conditions better for people in our society.

LS: 

I think America has always thought of itself as the most moral and the most good. At the heart of what you're looking at is a morality story about the ways that we draw boundaries that can excuse letting people go and just saying like, ‘we'll just let you drift.’

SB: 

To take that kinda one step further, one of the things that I'm learning through doing all this research about mental illness and the prevalence of schizophrenia in America and the way that we respond to it versus the way other countries diagnose and treat serious mental illness. There’s something about America itself that is a vector for serious mental illnesses. Schizophrenia, for example. One of the things that researchers discovered is that some groups of people are more vulnerable to developing schizophrenia. And one of those groups is specifically new immigrants to the United States, which is just so fascinating to think about it. What is it about the experience of being a new immigrant in the United States that is so destabilizing to your brain that makes you at risk for developing schizophrenia? 

We know that extreme poverty and extreme stress is a catalyst for schizophrenia. I think it's important to pay attention to the research that says this is not entirely biological. It's not just like more people are suddenly developing schizophrenia and on the street. It's what we are doing as a society.

LS: 

Do you have advice for how media can do better when covering vulnerable communities?

SB: 

I think prize culture creates really perverse incentives around covering trauma. That's where a lot of like trauma porn comes from, and it makes me kind of sick when I see it. Obviously no one knows how to fund media, and in the absence of adequate funding, prizes become a way of funding and prestige becomes a way of funding ourselves. I think becoming fixated on prizes is so corrosive to doing anything good. 

I think we should invest in that kind of hyper-local need-to-know coverage more. I still very much believe that local journalism is important. I think it's also a counterweight to some of these frenzied national partisan conversations that are happening. Specifically in coverage of vulnerable people, I would encourage people to look at history. Because odds are someone 40 years ago has written the exact same article you have, and you should ask why.

1. I use decimal points for any additional posts I make in a certain month, in case that isn’t clear. Honestly, no one cares but me.

2. Also Sydney’s fiancé.