Nick Welsh

I started as a general assignment reporter in Santa Barbara on April Fool’s Day 1983 for what was then a workers’ owned and operated journalistic collective. At the time, I figured I’d stick around for a year, get some clips and move up the journalistic food chain. Lucky for me, none of that happened. The collective didn’t last, the paper was bought, sold, merged and morphed. And I stayed. I got married, had two kids got older. Despite exalted changes in title, I remain pretty much a general assignment reporter for a weekly paper that’s trying hard to be a daily.  Oil spills. Drought. Development. Courts, crime, murder. Mental health. Politics. City councils. Jail. Elections. Dead people. A weekly news column. Along the way, I have received several awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, plus various water and land use planning organizations. One assignment, however, has totally overwhelmed me. That’s health care. It’s overwhelmingly vast. I’ve nibbled around the edges, but the challenges are too dire for nibbling. In my immediate and extended family, mental health concerns have proven disruptive in the extreme. Not surprisingly, one of my project proposals involves a mentally ill juvenile now being charged as an adult for attempting to kill his mother. The assault took place immediately after he’d been released from the local ER, despite vehement warning from psychiatric professionals and the mother herself that violence would ensue. He was released anyway;  there was no place, it turns out, to put him. His father happens to be an English doctor and I hope to exploit the vantage point the father offers to explore how other countries treat those dealing with severe mental illness and criminal behavior. Other than that, I studied history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, grew up in the suburbs of D.C. and plunk around on various stringed instruments that I have yet to learn to play.