How Two Florida Papers Partnered for a Harrowing Probe of State Mental Hospitals

In an unusual partnership the Tampa Bay Times and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune rolled out a joint investigation this week exposing horrific conditions in Florida’s public mental hospitals.

The stories are devastating: staffers alone on the wards being brutally beaten or stabbed by patients; patients with no protection being killed—in one case stomped to death—by other patients; patients with life-threatening injuries ignored until it was too late to save them; 1,000 patients who have injured themselves or others over five years; and the relentless bureaucratic neglect amid draconian budget cuts that enabled it all. Not to mention the “wall of secrecy” protecting the hospitals and abusive workers that the two papers spent more than a year trying to penetrate.