PULITZER 2006: In Oregon, They Helped Turn the Tide

By: Miki Johnson When Oregonian associate editors Rick Attig and Doug Bates came upon a room filled with canisters of past patients' "cremains" during their tour of the dilapidated Oregon State Hospital, they knew they had found a cause that needed to be championed in the newspaper's pages.

Once Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski, who in 30 years hadn't visited the mental hospital ? which was the setting for the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ? took a tour and announced the facility would be replaced, Attig and Bates knew the tide was turning.

And when the AP finally moved the results of the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing on April 17, naming them the winners, the duo knew they would have to stand in the newsroom's central "well" before their families and peers and say a few words ? but they weren't happy about it. "We were dreading our speeches," Attig says.

So they stuck to the basics, thanking the numerous people who had contributed to the 15-part series: editors, reporters, photographers, and the patients and families who had eschewed privacy and risked retribution by sharing their stories.

The writers, both Oregon natives, heard about abused adolescent patients and crowded, dirty buildings overseen by frustrated, overworked staffers. They sought out struggling, abandoned patients in the House speaker's own district and compared them to those at clean community centers and a brand new state facility in Kansas in strongly narrative, descriptive pieces. "We were looking for ways to make them more human and more powerful and more readable within the confines of an editorial," Attig notes.

The editorials, along with a cresting wave of community action, convinced the state to remove adolescents from the mental hospital, to replace the facility, and to allocate record funds for "community bed" care. Probably the greatest triumph came when the mental health parity bill passed 59-to-1. Attig and Bates had been told outright at the beginning of their fight that the legislation would simply never pass.