Focus: Adults in the Room
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About This Podcast
The production team behind the Peabody-nominated "Lost Patients" returns with a new investigative series: "Adults in the Room." Episodes will come out Tuesdays at midnight Pacific Time.
Seattle, 1999. At Garfield High School, Mr. Hudson is a legend. With a thundering voice and imposing stature, Mr. Hudson — or “Tom” as select students call him — teaches biology and leads an elite outdoors program. But when teen reporters at the school paper start exploring a rumor that he sexually abused students, all hell breaks loose. Adults close ranks, and schoolmates turn on the young journalists. And then one day, a voice on the school intercom announces that Mr. Hudson is dead. Isolde Raftery is one of the students who first hears about and reports allegations against Mr. Hudson. Today, she is an investigative journalist in Seattle. In "Adults in the Room," Raftery re-reports the story to understand what really happened in 1999. Was a whole school community groomed by a charismatic predator? Or was she part of a whisper campaign that cost the life of a great teacher?
"Focus" is KUOW’s home for immersive audio documentaries. Each season zooms in on a single story that challenges commonly held narratives about life in the Pacific Northwest and reveals something bigger about American society.
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Recent Episodes
S2E7 Adults in the Room: Bad Apples
A surprise archival interview with a former Garfield High School principal reveals that the teacher abuse problem at the school extended beyond Tom Hudson. Isolde discovers that the district received…
S2E6 Adults in the Room: The Boy in the Photograph
As Isolde looks through records on Mr. Hudson from Seattle Public Schools, she comes across a document describing a photograph of Hudson and two students at a mountain lake near Seattle. All three of…
S2E5 Adults in the Room: The Bet
As adults, Isolde and Ella start re-investigating the question of Mr. Hudson’s guilt. For years, they've wondered if they spread unfounded rumors that drove Mr. Hudson to take his own life. Isolde…
S2E4 Adults in the Room: Jonathan
The Garfield community -- and, it seems, the whole city of Seattle -- mourns Tom Hudson, remembering him as a great man and teacher. One of the students who was closest to him, Jonathan Hill, spends…
S2E3 Adults in the Room: Blame the Messenger
The school district sends an investigator to Garfield to look into the allegations against Tom Hudson. Isolde and Ella feel like the entire school blames them for Hudson's suspension and the new…
S2E2 Adults in the Room: The Price of Belief
Garfield High School is shocked after learning their beloved principal is in an inappropriate relationship with a student. In the fallout of the revelation about their principal, Isolde and Ella hear…
S2E1 Adults in the Room: Mounting Danger
In 1998, a popular teacher at Garfield High School in Seattle — named Tom Hudson — falls into a crevasse while mountain-climbing in Olympic National Park. Hudson is accompanied by six teenage…
S2 Coming Soon: Adults in the Room (Trailer)
The production team behind Lost Patients returns on February 24 with a new investigative series: Adults in the Room. Seattle, 1999. At Garfield High School, Mr. Hudson is a legend. With a thundering…
Presenting: The Fifth Branch
In Seattle, police responded to nearly ten thousand scenes of people in crisis last year. And one of the only remaining paths into Washington State's largest psychiatric hospital is through jail.But…
Presenting: Hush
A story from the 'Hush" investigative podcast from Oregon Public Broadcasting. In this episode, reporter Leah Sottile explores the case of Jesse Lee Johnson, a Black man who lived for 17 years on…
S1E7 Lost Patients Live: First-Person Stories from Seattle's Mental Health Crisis
Lost Patients compares the system for treating mental illness in America to an elaborate house, where every room, hallway and staircase was designed independently by a different architect. So what is…
S1E6 Lost Patients: Disease Without Knowledge
"Something is preventing us from building a system that works for people with serious mental illness. In lieu of that, patients are often left to improvise recovery for themselves. They learn to live…
S1E5 Coming up on Lost Patients
A look ahead at the final episode of Lost Patients, coming next week on April 23. We'll explore what recovery looks like for people with serious mental illness — and what it might look like for our…
S1E5 Lost Patients: The Way Out
After 10 months at Washington State's largest psychiatric hospital, Adam Aurand is discharged onto the streets of downtown Seattle — ejected into a world shaped by decades of deinstitutionalization…
S1E4 Lost Patients: Opening
In the middle of the last century, a movement to free patients from state-run psychiatric hospitals swept the U.S. This movement — deinstitutionalization — is widely blamed for seriously mentally ill…
S1E3 Lost Patients: Nostalgia
After Carrie Davidson learned that her great-grandmother died in a psychiatric hospital, she spent years tracking down details of her life there. Was the asylum a refuge? Or a prison? This earlier…
S1E2 Lost Patients: Against Their Will
Across the U.S., efforts are underway to make it easier to involuntarily commit people to psychiatric hospitals. It's a reaction to the sight of seriously mentally ill people on the streets and the…
S1E1 Lost Patients: Churn
Heidi Aurand has watched her son Adam spiral from one psychiatric crisis to the next for about eight years, bouncing between emergency rooms, jails, and homelessness. Now, after treatment at the…
Introducing Lost Patients
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Frequently Asked Questions
Focus: Adults in the Room has published 15 episodes since March 2024, covering topics in Documentary, Society & Culture.
Focus: Adults in the Room is currently sporadic with new episodes weekly. Average episode length is 42m.
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