Jesse: Previously on Committable.
Hannah Zeavin: Is a hotline going to, no matter what, intervene? Or is the hotline seated at a place where it waits for the caller to come to them and then sticks with the caller no matter the outcome?
Tim Wand: That's the thing. There is no evidence whatsoever to support the idea that risk assessments reduce acts of harm. This preventative detention component of mental health laws means that we can take away someone's civil liberties in advance of them harming themselves, when there's no empirical evidence to support our ability to predict acts of harm, such as suicide.
Nev Jones: What does it even mean for your whole outlook, much more broadly, like on society, when ostensibly helping institutions end up being experienced as a source of harm?
Jesse: This is Committable, a podcast about involuntary commitments. I'm Jesse Mangan. While producing season two of this podcast we were focused on one person's experience with involuntary psychiatric detentions. And during that time one of the most widely discussed changes to mental health interventions in the US has been the rollout of 988. Proposed as an alternative to 911 that could decrease the amount of police-led interventions for people experiencing distress.
But what is 988? How does it work? Does it really reduce the risk of police involvement in these types of calls? To learn more about the rollout of 988, what it is and how it works, I spoke with an Aneri Pattani.
Aneri Pattani: Hi, my name is Aneri Pattani. I'm a reporter with Kaiser Health News, where I write about mostly mental health and substance use.
I'm also a part-time Masters of Public Health student where I'm focused on learning and working on suicide prevention.
Jesse: And what is 988?
Aneri Pattani: 988 is the new number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which for years used to have a longer 1-800 number. And so the shorter three digit number premiered in July of this year with the idea that it's easier to remember and that more people could use it, especially in emergency scenarios where we know sort of by default we call 911.
But for mental health emergencies, hopefully 988 could become that easily remembered go-to. And 988 also comes with sort of an influx of federal funding to help call centers answer those calls and to bring on more staff to get them trained. And I think the long term goal from some mental health advocates is that, you know, maybe this funding and this number can start transforming the mental healthcare system more broadly.
Jesse: And so, there's federal funding coming in and they're changing the number. Where is the federal funding coming from, and then where is it going to become 988?
Aneri Pattani: A lot of the federal funding is coming from the Biden administration, from, you know, the Health and Human Services department. It's a little over 400 million that was sort of pushed with 988. And the idea was that if we're gonna have the shorter number that people can remember and more people are gonna use it, then you have to have the capacity to answer those calls. And so a lot of it has gone to the local call centers that answer these calls, and there are about 200 of them across the country.
And the idea is to give them the money to hire more staff who can be answering the calls and to train those staff. And to give them infrastructure to do things like respond to texts or web chats as well. But this is not a long term funding goal for these places. This is a one time infusion to kind of get it up and running.
When 988 premiered the idea for long term is that, when Congress passed the laws that created 988, they allowed every state the option to add a charge to people's cell phone bills that would fund 988 long term. A similar mechanism is used to fund 911. The thing is, they kind of left it up to the states to pass legislation that would actually add that bill on, and so the vast majority of states right now haven't done that.
So there's no long term funding plan in a lot of states for this system.
Jesse: One of the things that's gonna be really regional, local, is what type of response there is if there is an emergency. So, is it a crisis response team? Is it the police? Is it peer support? Whatever it is. Is there clear guidelines or criteria about what situation is going to result in whatever local emergency response there is?
Aneri Pattani: 988 has a policy that they call the imminent risk policy. To step back, 988 was created to be an alternative to 911, so the idea is that it's supposed to avoid involving police. It's supposed to be this separate system where counselors are trained to talk to people about, you know, what are their reasons for dying? What are their reasons for living? Can they connect you to social services, food, housing, resources, or therapy? But they do have this policy where if the counselor feels a caller is at, Imminent risk is the term they use. Which essentially means if the counselor on the other end of the phone says, I think this person is going to hurt themselves or someone else immediately if nothing is done, then the counselor can initiate what's called active rescue or emergency rescue, where essentially they call emergency services.
And depending on where you are, that might be a mobile crisis response team, or in a lot of the country it's going to be police. Those emergency services would respond to the person's home. That can happen if the caller says they're in need of emergency services, but it can also happen even if the caller doesn't want that, if the counselor who's on the other end of the line thinks this person is in immediate danger.
Jesse: I want to take a moment to try and map out how this system works. 988 is a rebranding and simplification of the number for The National Suicide Hotline. The National Suicide Hotline is run by SAMHSA, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The agency within the US government tasked with making behavioral health resources more accessible. SAMHSA contracts with a non-profit to manage 988, that non-profit is called Vibrant Emotional Health. Vibrant partners with the approximately 200 different local hotlines that make up the 988 network.
Each one of those local hotlines is required to sign a contract with Vibrant that guarantees that the local hotline will have some form of imminent risk policy that allows for the possibility of forced interventions.
The federal government is investing about $400 million to establish this 988 network, and a hotline does not get access to that federal funding unless they sign the contract with Vibrant. But what does that look like in practice? How does a hotline operator determine who qualifies as an imminent risk? What sort of screening test is being used to determine that a forced intervention is appropriate for this collar?
Rob Wipond: These tests are not very reliable, they've been shown to be unreliable again and again and again. Even the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline's own researchers admit that this is so unreliable it really shouldn't be used, but they use it anyway.
Jesse: This is Rob Wand.
Rob Wipond: So my name's Rob Wand, one of the things I do is freelance journalism. It's been my main source of income for the past 20 some years, and I've always been interested in civil rights and the psychiatric system since it happened to my father many years ago. And that's how I got involved in it. And I started kind of researching and writing about it off and on over a long period of time.
And then in the last couple years, I've written a book called Your Consent is Not Required: The rise in psychiatric detentions, forced treatment and abuse of guardianships, where I really provide what, as far as I know, is the most comprehensive sort of look at the phenomenon of psychiatric detentions and forced treatment across North American culture today.
As far as I know, a book like this hasn't really been done since the era of asylums where people have really looked at what are all the ways in which this is occurring in our culture? Who is it happening to? Where is it happening? What are the reasons behind it? So that'll be coming out in January of 2023.
And one of the things I looked at in this is the use of hotlines as a mechanism for bringing people into psychiatric incarceration.
Jesse: If we take sort of a broader perspective and try to look at how this system is structured, we have a non-profit, Vibrant, they're getting a contract from the federal government.
What does that mean? What are the requirements here? What is Vibrant doing?
Rob Wipond: So Vibrant Emotional Health, they've changed their names a couple times over the years, but that's its current name. Have long had a contract with SAMSA to administer the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. That's been an 800 number, well, it's been a number of 800 numbers because they also run an NFL helpline for the National Football League. They run a veteran's hotline, so they run a number of hotlines and some of them in some ways also flow through this National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. So that contract has been around for a while, I posted it on my website if anyone wants to see that particular contract. And it specifies in it that they need to have a policy and practice of tracing some calls that come in for anyone that they believe might be, you know, falling into a certain category of person, shall we say, for the moment.
But in this category of person, yes, they're supposed to call 911. That's the current methodology they contact 911, or a public safety answering point it's called. And the public safety answering point has the capacity to trace virtually anybody's device that they might be contacting 988, or 911, or any of these numbers. Basically they have call tracing capacity.
Jesse: And what is this screening test? How does it work?
Rob Wipond: It's a very simple screening test, kinda like a little decision tree. They try to, if they're skilled at all, sort of flow it into the conversation, so you don't really know that you're being put through a test.
But they're required to do it if they're at all concerned, and you'll notice once you're aware of what the questions are. There's simple things like, you know, are you feeling suicidal? Do you have a plan? How might you do it if you were going to do it? You know, are you feeling different than abstractly thinking about the idea versus kind of really feeling like you might actually do it? They try to distinguish between those kinds of things, and that's essentially it. It's a volunteer often that's staffing this line, sometimes it's a professional, it doesn't really make a difference because even for highly trained professionals these tests are not very reliable. They’ve been shown to be unreliable again and again and again. Even the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline's own researchers admit that, yeah, this is so unreliable it really shouldn't be used, but they use it anyway. And that's basically how it's done.
So somebody just kind of makes a judgment call.
Jesse: It is important to note in these conversations that there are a lot of people who rely on these hotlines, who have used them and had positive experiences, life-affirming experiences. These hotlines are an important resource for people to have access to.
Which is why it is also really important for people to know how they work, what the potential risks are.
What triggers police involvement? Is it only 911 that can trace calls or can 988 do that by itself?
Rob Wipond: What I will highlight is that Vibrant Emotional Health and other mental health organizations have been lobbying the government to give the administrators of 988, i.e. these people we're talking about that run the centers, that run the helpline centers. To give them higher level powers, direct powers to do that call tracing themselves. To not have to go through 911 or the police.
And they've been using the argument, Oh, it'll just make everything so much faster. So there are enormous privacy implications, confidentiality implications, to that potentiality. And it has not yet been implemented at that level. There are some technical hurdles and because some people have spoken out with concerns about it, the government is going a little bit more slowly than they might otherwise have done.
In looking into the question of can this be done and should it be done, i e, should the administrators of the 988 number have the same kind of high level cutting edge call tracing surveillance powers that 911 has, and will continue to have? You know, there's a new next generation of technology coming out soon for 911, to do that even better.
Jesse: My recollection of some of the press talks that people involved in SAMHSA did for9 88, and some of the ads I saw for 988, I recall them saying that they don't trace calls. And so to clarify, what you're saying is while that's happening, Vibrant is going to the government to get the authority to start tracing calls without 911?
Rob Wipond: Yeah, this is one of the terrible things, you know, I call it a lie. You know, I will explain what I mean by that. That unfortunately the mental health system, and mental health organizations, and psychiatrists, and other kinds of practitioners engage in a lot. They really mislead the public. So yeah, even now, even after I've written a whole series of articles for Mad in America website about this, you know, revealing all the facts about this in great detail. And even now, when other journalists from other major mainstream outlets have twigged to this as people are talking about it on social media and said, Well, do you trace calls? They're still denying that they trace calls and technically it's correct because they do not themselves have the power, the technology to do the call tracing.
And then the other thing they're doing, even as they've been telling the public this and reassuring the public. They have been very busily, and this is all in the public record, lobbying the government very heavily to get those call tracing powers themselves. So they aren't amending their own comments to these journalists by saying, Well, we don't currently have the power to do the call tracing, but gosh darn it, we really want it and we're lobbying for it, cuz I think the public should know that.
Jesse: All hotlines accessed through 988 are contractually obligated to employ some type of risk assessment that has the potential to result in a forced intervention. Quite possibly one that involves police.
There is no reliable data that these sorts of assessments are accurate, or that these sorts of forced interventions are helpful to the people who experience them. But there is a significant amount of data indicating that forced interventions, and the forced hospitalizations that can result from them, can cause serious harm.
So if the federal government is contracting with Vibrant, and Vibrant is contracting with local hotlines, and all of these contracts require some sort of imminent danger or risk assessment policy, then is anyone in this chain tracking the outcomes? Is anyone tracking what happens to the people who do experience a forced intervention?
Rob Wipond: No, they're not tracking it. They themselves did a study of that issue, which is available on my website as well. Where that was the conclusion of the study was, Gee, we should be tracking these outcomes and finding out, is this a good thing? What we're doing, is it helping anyone? And of course, one of the reasons that that is such a big concern, and I would say I've never heard anyone in that situation not get detained, at least for some time in the hospital. You know, when you're brought in as a result of a hotline reporting you, and the police bringing you in, in every case that I've ever heard of or seen, people were detained. At least for some amount of time.
Being incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital is an enormous, traumatizing experience for most people. Suicide rates actually skyrocket after hospitalization, even among people who are not suicidal to begin with, numbers of studies have shown this. So it's enormously concerning and the hotline staff, or administrators, are well aware of this. One of them even did explicitly say to me, you know, like, “Yeah, it is a concern that we do this. That we're locking people up, we're getting them locked up. Even though we don't know that it in any way, shape, or form helps them.”
It's just kind of become policy and practice within our society. Like, well, what else are we gonna do? That kind of question follows quickly cuz they're not thinking. Cuz I think there are a lot of things we could be doing differently.
But anyway, that's the logic, what else can we do? It's an emergency, let's just get this person detained and brought up and no, there are no real outcome studies of, was the person in the end grateful? Was the person traumatized? Were they locked up for days, weeks, months? What happened? Did they die shortly thereafter Anyway?
You know, what was the outcome? And we really need that. But that's true across the board I would say too. In my book I explore this, there's really no body of evidence to support forced psychiatric hospitalization as in any way producing positive outcomes.
Jesse: One thing that sort of strikes me about this concept, or this setup, is if there are people within the call centers, presumably there are people probably within Vibrant, maybe within SAMHSA as well, who would acknowledge that forced hospitalization or even just police showing up at your home, is not inconsequential. It is not necessarily a guarantee of any positive outcome.
So, we're acknowledging that there's a consequence here, but it seems like it's not a consequence anyone wants to deal with and they're just shifting the blame. Cuz you're calling the call center, the call center operator can acknowledge, I don't like doing this but sometimes I have to, I don't know what else to do. So they shift the blame to the police. The police come and pick you up. Police say, I'm not qualified to do this, I'm gonna bring them to the ER. They bring 'em to the ER, they shift the blame, and the ER is not qualified to handle someone in emotional distress. They shift them to a psych facility.
I don't know how to view it other than people just passing the blame from one group to the other and not even tracking what the outcome is.
Rob Wipond: Yeah, that's a disturbing way of describing it, but I think unfortunately probably pretty accurate, that it is that. The first person in the line just kind of goes, Well, I'm worried this might happen, I don't want to be responsible for it if it happens, and I know for a fact I can stop it now. Right? If I send the police around, no matter what, that person's not gonna be able to do whatever I think they might or might not do. So that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna act on that basis.
And that kind of makes sense if that's all you're thinking about, is that immediate intervention. But if you think a little bit further and you start out asking the what ifs, and then if you look at the little bit of research we do have on what does in fact happen once that person ends up at the end of that line you described. Which is pretty much how, I interviewed everybody as well at every stage of that and that's pretty much what they said to me, is exactly what you said. Well, you know, I don't know, I'm not qualified, so I'll pass it to the next person. And so then you finally end up in the psychiatric hospital and often that's what they're saying too, is, well, I don't know if you will or won't kill yourself, but I think it's safe then that you just stay here.
And so they often incarcerate people for days, weeks, until whatever, something happens that makes them go, okay, we're just gonna get rid of you. Maybe they need the bed for someone else who they clearly think is worse off than you, or whatever it may be. Or they convince themselves that you start telling them and assuring them that you're fine. You know, you're no longer suicidal, whatever it is, something will get you freed.
Just the outcome issue, right? As you're saying, it really is a problem. And I would say that that's across the board, in all of the mental health system right now. There's a stunning lack of actual real world outcome tracking.
Jesse: With the rollout of 988 the federal government is spending about 400 million dollars to help set up and support the network of local call centers that are working with Vibrant. All of these local call centers are contractually obligated to utilize some form of risk assessment that allows for the possibility of a forced intervention, but that is not the only type of hotline.
There are hotlines committed to never initiating a non-consensual intervention. And because of that commitment these hotlines are not able to access any of the funds being distributed.
To better understand this type of hotline, and how they might be impacted by 988, I spoke with Yana Calou.
Yana Calou: So my name is Yana Calou, I use they/them pronouns, and I'm the Director of Advocacy at Trans Lifeline. Trans Lifeline is a peer support and crisis hotline that offers crisis and peer support to trans people. We’re run by and for trans people, so that means every time somebody calls they will be speaking to another person who identifies as as trans or non-binary. So, somebody with shared lived experience.
And we've been doing this since 2014 without the use of any partnerships with 911 or police because of a couple of different reasons. One, because we know that police often make situations worse and shouldn't be the people who are responding to situations in which people are experiencing difficulty, suicidality, mental health crisis.
And secondly, because we also know that criminalization, or corrections, or police, aren't the answers. Also, there are many trans specific things that can happen to people within these contexts, and we know that in general forced treatment around suicidality makes things worse, it doesn't make things better.
So in our effort to get cops out of crisis calls, we also really include force hospitalization in that effort. It's not just no police, but also really giving people agency over the kinds of supports that we either refuse or or accept.
Jesse: I started the conversation with Yana by asking about what trans-specific concerns, or trans-specific impacts, should people be aware of when discussing these sorts of forced intervention policies.
Yana Calou: I guess I'll start by saying, you know, I really believe that forced hospitalization hurts a lot of communities and people with intersecting lived experience and identity. So a lot of the things I'm gonna share do apply to other folks. But there are some trans-specific, oftentimes unintended, consequences of forced hospitalization that impact trans people really intensely.
So, one of the things is just thinking about disabled communities, trans communities, communities of color, where employment discrimination is so high, meaning that people from our communities are more likely to be unemployed. And since health insurance is tied to employment, often in our country, sticking somebody with an ambulance bill, or an ER bill, or a psych hospital bill, who's uninsured can often cause more stress. Especially since debt and financial instability are huge indicators or huge reasons why people are in crisis in the first place, right? So for trans people, 14% of trans people are uninsured, and so this makes this a massive financial burden for support that we didn't ask for.
In terms of what happens inside of facilities, oftentimes trans-affirming healthcare gets withheld. People who have been forcibly hospitalized, who are trans, have reported having their hormones taken away, or not having access to those, or not not being given those. When often trans-affirming healthcare is really preventative in terms of suicidality. And then, I think oftentimes when we're not looking at the structural causes of suicidality and we're not treating it as actually a very, very normal response to not having the safety, belonging, financial stability, safe houses, schools that are affirming, families that are affirming, all of these kinds of things. Suicidality is actually a really normal response, or feeling suicidal to not having what we need to survive.
And so oftentimes when people are misdiagnosed, or forcibly medicated, for just going through those things, when in actuality it's some of those structural factors. Or experiencing a lack of gender affirming care, right? So diagnosing somebody as something else, prescribing for them rather than saying, Oh, like maybe you need trans-affirming supports, or potentially medically related transition care if that's something somebody wants.
So unfortunately trans people are often placed in solitary confinement in hospitals and psych wards. And oftentimes it's said that that's for safety from others, or their own safety, despite solitary being considered a form of torture. So trans people are more often put there or they're put in the wrong gender facility, right? So when there's gender segregated psych wards in hospitals, putting a trans person on the wrong gender unit can also be really, really distressing.
Certainly if somebody is trans and under 18 and discloses the fact that they're trans to a clinician, sometimes those clinicians can, in those kinds of settings, can out those youth to unsupportive parents. At a time when anti-trans legislation is so incredibly high across the US and the supports that we need outside of our homes are being eroded in schools and healthcare. Than outing youth who might be suicidal because of having really unsupportive home, outing that youth to an unsupportive caregiver can be really, really dangerous.
And trans people are at higher risk for both sexual and physical assault within hospitals, there's a lot of data on that. In terms of what this means, I think there's studies showing that trans youth who are involuntarily hospitalized are less likely to seek support in the future. And post-hospitalization, we're gonna be less willing to disclose feelings of suicidality. So if we want people to reach out for support when they're really struggling, we want to be support that people can trust isn't gonna lead to further harm or trauma. So if you want people to reach out, you need to be really transparent and open about what support you're providing. What kinds of things might be triggered if things are shared. And we really want people to be able to share how they're feeling and be able to say how terrible they're feeling without the fear of that triggering something that they might not know about or might not want.
Jesse: An often underemphasized aspect of crisis hotlines is not simply the opportunity to acknowledge someone's distress, but to talk about the sources of that distress. To identify a person's needs and explore the possibility of connecting that person with community based resources that might help address those needs.
So, I asked Yana, are these the type of things that a person can ask about when they call Trans Lifeline?
Yana Calou: Yeah, absolutely, you know, sometimes a phone call isn’t all that somebody needs, right? Sometimes we do need an in-person response, and we do need local resources, we need local community. And if people are wanting that we absolutely connect people with the kinds of, you know, whether that's healthcare, whether that's peer support group, whether that's housing, whether that's finances, all of those kinds of things in their area.
We also recognize that sometimes the most important help that somebody can receive in crisis, aside from emotional support, is financial help. That's often, you know, some of the reasons people are in this. So we run a micro granting program that puts money directly into trans people's hands for different types of needs. And we also trust trans people to use those funds as they need. And so we don't ask people to like, provide a receipt saying this is what you spent it on, but really trusting people and knowing that some of these structural factors are actually what's at stake.
And oftentimes the harm that we see happen specifically on crisis hotlines that do engage emergency responders, that then can mean force hospitalization or police violence, or criminalization, right? The kinds of harm that people are experiencing aren't necessarily on the crisis hotline themselves, right? It's the emergency infrastructure that we have in our country that is oftentimes making things worse. So it's the agencies that people interact with afterwards, whether that's police or EMS, or emergency room staff, or psychiatrists, or doctors. This is what we have in this country are police, jails, emergency rooms, and psych ward, right? That is the infrastructure that exists. And so for crisis hotlines to actually be able to provide more options in terms of resources for people, than those resources really need to be funded in order for them to exist, right? So really thinking about the need to fund more peer-based supports, peer respites, peer-based support groups, and things like this, as part of suicide prevention. Aside from just dumping money into emergency responders for this kind of work.
Jesse: Those are all of my questions, is there anything else about 988, about Trans Lifeline, or about this issue that you think people should know?
Yana Calou: I think it's really important that we as people who might seek support services have all of the information we need about what kinds of services we're gonna access. And really push 988 to be really transparent about these practices. Whether they're geolocating themselves or they're just doing that through 911, right? That's still happening on those calls. And also about their requests to the FCC to be able to do this.
I think it's important that people advocate for funding for these alternative peer based models, if that's the kind of care people want.
One of the things that we are doing at Trans Lifeline is gathering stories from survivors. You don't have to be trans, from anyone who has survived a non-consensual emergency responder intervention. Can be on a hotline, can be not on a hotline. But we're really looking at what does it mean to bring together all of those survivors and center that expertise and advocate for the kinds of safety and transparency and agency that we need?
So if people are interested they can go to translifeline.org and click on Safe Hotlines, which is our campaign that's really trying to get police out of crisis care and ensure the safety and transparency that people need. And hopefully urge more hotlines to shift those policies and practices and show them that that's possible.
And I think it's really important for survivors to be the ones leading the way in terms of what's actually helpful in crisis situations. As a country we just really need to look at our emergency infrastructure in general and really get to the underlying issues of why we're in crisis to begin with.
And the best thing that we can do for suicide prevention is to give people money, and houses, and jobs, and safe schools, and supportive communities, right? That's what's actually gonna prevent suicide, not just not just having a line. You know, as somebody who works in an organization that provides a listening ear, that emotional support is really important. And it's also not gonna get to the underlying reasons why somebody might be having a really, really hard time
Jesse: When we began this series, we were trying to understand one person's experiences with police intervention and involuntary psychiatric detention. Our questions quickly led to broader interlocking systems, systems not clearly designed around evidence, at least not evidence of positive outcomes for the people being pushed through them.
And we learned of all too common practices, laws, and systems that routinely bring a serious risk of harm to people who may be in one of the most vulnerable moments of their life.
And now we're left with more questions than when we started.
How do these systems operate? What protections are you supposed to have? How do you make sense of a system this complicated after you've been forced into it? And is there anywhere where you can feel safe knowing that someone else views you as Committable?
Coming up in season three of Committable.
KC Lewis: Aid and Assist is not a restoration to health, it is a restoration to competency. They get to the point of being able to aid and assist, they send them back to the county that they came from, where often they will wait in jail for weeks or months to be able to be taken to trial. Then once they get back to the courtroom, they're not able to aid and assist again because their mental health has been deteriorating in jail.
Luciene Parsley: I don't believe that forcing them into treatment is gonna solve the problem. And there's no way that individuals are going to engage in treatment if they're forced. They'll probably do it for the period of time that they're in the hospital until they figure out what they have to demonstrate to get out.
Elizabeth Satchell: They're usually put in solitary confinement, which makes things worse. Sometimes they're stripped down and put into what's called a pickle suit. Sometimes they're strapped to a chair. So really they can be tortured, in my mind, it's torture.
Ian Pettycrew: They're just in like a high school cafeteria, and there's no separation between the men and the women usually. And that's, you know, where people sometimes spend three to four to seven days. They're given like a blanket. That's it. Maybe a pillow if they ask for a pillow, but they wanna make it as safe an environment as possible. So pillows are sometimes not deemed to be safe.
Nancy Murphy: Life doesn't stop because this is happening. It's not planned, so they're just plucked out of their life and put in a hospital with no idea of how long they're gonna be there, when they're gonna get out, what their rights are. It's not that they don't have a voice, it's that nobody's listening. It's not always the voice that's the problem, it's the ear. There’s nobody there to hear it.
Jesse: This episode of Committable was produced by Michelle Stockman, Cassidy Wilson, Jim McQuaid, and me, Jesse Mangan. All music is from the song Reasonable, by Christopher G. Brown.