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Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale

Eliza Fawcett.. Earl Wilson
2026 Nova Media Fellow

The Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale aims to enhance the power of collaborative public-interest journalism. Rooted in the idea that accountability-centered reporting is critical to a thriving democracy, we seek to deepen coverage of criminal justice, climate change, migration, mental health, and other themes, through experimentation with team-driven methods, pursuit of public records, new forms of multimedia storytelling, and more.

Media Fellowship Project

The Criminalization of Mental Illness and Its Upstream Alternatives: Investigating Access to Early Psychosis Interventions

Examining how the criminalization of mental illness intersects with broader system failures, and why some of the most effective interventions for psychosis remain out of reach for many Americans

People with serious mental illness in the United States face an elevated risk of homelessness, incarceration, substance use disorders, and premature death. Over the past two years, the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale has documented the devastating downstream consequences of these systemic failures through Starved for Care, an investigation into deaths due to starvation, dehydration, and neglect in local jails. 

This project will both deepen the Lab’s reporting on the criminalization of mental illness across the country and venture further upstream, asking what it takes to intervene before people with mental health issues reach the criminal legal system—and why so few people have access to some of the most transformative evidence-based treatments.

Led by reporter Eliza Fawcett, the Lab will examine effective approaches to supporting people with early psychosis, which have been shown to reduce hospitalizations, improve quality of life, and positively alter the course of serious mental illness. Yet access to these models remains limited due to uneven insurance coverage and inconsistent state and federal investments. This reporting will illuminate the profound challenges patients and families encounter when seeking care, while also investigating the structural barriers that prevent many Americans in crisis from reaching life-saving interventions.

Project Team

Eliza Fawcett (she/they) is a journalist focused on mental health, public health, and the criminal justice system. They are a reporting fellow for the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale, where they’ve contributed to investigations including Starved For Care and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Felony Murder Reporting Project. Eliza’s work has appeared in the New York Times, where they were a fellow on the National Desk, as well as in New York Focus, the Hartford Courant, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, KFF Health News, and other publications.

Media Fellow Publications

Selected Honors
  • Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for Sarah Stillman’s reporting on felony murder in “Sentenced to Life for an Accident Miles Away” (The New Yorker) and the Felony Murder Reporting Project
  • National Headliner Award for Journalistic Innovation for Starved for Care, a multimedia investigation of dozens of deaths due to starvation, dehydration, and neglect in local jails
  • Shortlisted, Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Documentary Short Film – “Cashing Out” by Lab program manager Matt Nadel
  • Finalist, National Magazine Award (Video) – “Cashing Out” by Lab program manager Matt Nadel
Selected Publications
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Healing is facilitated through safety, persistence, and trust.

  • Persistence: “People did not simply progress through this sequence and experience healing. The healing journey was a recursive, back and forth process. They found helpers, used the skills/resources that those helpers provided, found other helpers that provided more resources and used those skills and resources. As this process continued, people experienced a gradual amelioration of their suffering. Although many despaired at times, all demonstrated the quality of persistence—they refused to give up.”
  • Safety & Trust: “To connect to helpers, it was essential for people to feel safe in those relationships and able to trust that the person would be a helper and not a barrier to healing. Persons whose wounds included a violation of trust were especially careful about testing the safety of new relationships.”

Resources support us as we heal. They include reframing, responsibility, and positivity. “Making connections enabled participants to acquire and refine resources and skills that were essential in their healing journey. People also brought their own personal strengths to the journey.”

  • Reframing: “A particularly important skill was the ability to reframe—that is to look at suffering through a different lens.” This does NOT mean minimizing trauma or pain, but rather it often means the opposite: understanding what happened was wrong, unfair, or uncontrollable and that we are not to blame for it.
  • Responsibility: While we don’t have control over what happened to us, we are the only ones who can help ourselves heal. “A third essential resource that people acquired or refined was the ability to take an appropriate amount of responsibility for their healing journeys. They participated actively in the process of healing. Once again, some participants already had developed this skill, and some acquired or refined it from their helpers.”
  • Positivity: “Another resource that people acquired or refined during their healing journey was choose to be positive—that is to have some optimism about their situation.” People have varying predispositions to positivity. In the study, positivity was important in helping people heal. This doesn’t mean a toxic positivity, but rather simply finding some good in life and feeling hopeful about our situations.

“Connection to others was an essential part of all the healing journeys.” Humans are social creatures, and even the most introverted of us need close relationships. Friends and family add meaning and value to life and help support us, in good times and bad. 

When we experience relational trauma, relationships can feel scary, but reestablishing safety and trust in relationships is where the healing happens. (To be clear, we do not mean reestablishing safety and trust with abusers, but rather finding other healing relationships.) 

“When safety and trust had been established, people were able to connect with helpers. The nature of the behaviours of helpers that fostered healing ranged from small acts of kindness to unconditional love.”

  • “Moving from being wounded, through suffering to healing, is possible. It is facilitated by developing safe, trusting relationships and by positive reframing that moves through the weight of responsibility to the ability to respond.”
  • “Relationships with health professionals were among these but were not necessarily any more important to the healing journey than other kinds of helpers, which included family members, friends, spirituality and their God, pets, support groups, administrators, case workers and supervisors.”

Healing probably means different things to different people, but one definition that emerged from the study is: “The re-establishment of a sense of integrity and wholeness.” 

Healing was an emergent property that resulted from each individuals’ complex healing journey, a result of bridged connections between resources and relationships. “…they gradually found relief from suffering and began to exhibit emergent characteristics: a sense of hope, self-acceptance, and a desire to help others—the immediate precursors to healing.”

 In varying degrees, “they were able to transcend their suffering and in some sense to flourish.” 

  • Helping Others: We find meaning in helping others. “Understanding that suffering gives the strength and experience to help others in similar situations.”
  • Hope: We begin to have hope that we will not always feel this bad. A Crohn’s patient said, “I think gradually I realized that I was going to feel better. I did have days when I actually didn’t vomit, when I did feel better. And I think gradually I came to believe that maybe I could have a normal life again.”
  • Self-Acceptance: We see our inherent value and understand that we are not to blame for our suffering. A participant living with HIV said, “I’m really proud of myself. I think that now I still want to live. I don’t want to die, and I really love myself a lot. I have a lot of comfort in myself.”

Suffering is the ongoing pain from wounding. 

There is some debate about whether people always experience suffering on the path to healing.

Wounding happens when we experience physical or emotional harm. It can stem from chronic illness or by physical or psychological trauma for which we do not have the tools to cope, or a combination of those factors. 

“The degree and quality of suffering experienced by each individual is framed by contextual factors that include personal characteristics, timing of their initial or ongoing wounding in the developmental life cycle and prior and current relationships.”

Characteristics: How predisposed someone may be to wounding/how many tools and resources someone may have to deal with trauma/illness.

Lifestages: Developmental timing plays an important role in the impact of trauma — young children often do not have the same resources as older adults.

Relationships: Relationships can provide solace and support for those suffering, while lack of healthy relationships can prolong suffering.