Maya Hollister 
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
Priya, a 27-year-old paralegal in Minneapolis, did not think she had a problem until the night she found herself crying in her bathroom at 1:30 a.m. after three hours of doomscrolling. The trigger had been small: a coworker’s vacation post. The spiral had been long: comparison, news, more comparison, a strange wellness influencer’s diet routine, … Read more
Dr. Anita Rao practiced anesthesia at a Level I trauma center in Cleveland for nine years before the diversion started. It began with leftover fentanyl in syringes that should have gone to waste. By month four she was injecting between cases, hiding the evidence in the drug return system. The OR pharmacy noticed the discrepancies … Read more
Marcus had been driving for Uber and DoorDash in Phoenix for almost three years when the panic attacks started. He was making decent money, around $52,000 a year, but he had no health insurance because he assumed contractors couldn’t afford it. After his third trip to the emergency room in two months, an ER social … Read more
Diane in Atlanta opened the envelope and stopped breathing for a moment. The bill was for $147,300. Her son Caleb had spent 28 days in residential treatment for opioid use disorder, and even though insurance had covered most of the inpatient psychiatric stabilization, the residential program turned out to be largely out-of-network. The total billed … Read more
Robert, a 61-year-old retired electrician in Cleveland, walked into the emergency department with crushing chest pain, a troponin level off the chart, and a clear command from his cardiologist that he needed immediate cardiac catheterization to prevent a fatal infarction. He refused. Not in a confused, mumbling way, but firmly, with eye contact, telling the … Read more
Robert, a 58-year-old accountant in Cleveland, was six weeks past his triple bypass surgery and could not understand why he felt worse than before the operation. The surgery had gone well by every cardiac measure. His ejection fraction had improved. But he was waking at three each morning with chest tightness that the cardiology workup … Read more
Marcus walked out of the Cook County Jail in Chicago on a Tuesday morning in February, carrying a paper bag with three days of antipsychotic medication and a bus pass that expired by Friday. He had been incarcerated for fourteen months. During that stretch, a jail psychiatrist had stabilized him on a long-acting injectable for … Read more
Annika Lindholm grew up taking weekly sauna sessions with her grandmother in a small lakeside cabin outside Duluth, Minnesota, where the family had kept Finnish customs alive through three generations. She did not think of it as therapy. It was simply Saturday: load the wood stove, sweat for twenty minutes, walk the gravel path down … Read more
Hannah, a thirty-one-year-old paralegal in Boston, kept a small spiral notebook on her nightstand. For nine months she had been tracking the days. The pattern was unmistakable. Eight to ten days before each period, the world would tilt: a kind of hopelessness that arrived without warning, intrusive thoughts about not waking up, sudden rage at … Read more