In June, investigative journalist Lila Hassan co-won the Livingston Award for national reporting honoring her work on season 4 of Bodies, a documentary-style podcast that explores medical mysteries. Lila's reporting covered topics that are steeped in shame: the growing trend of early-onset puberty, the little-known mental illness called postpartum psychosis, and the fight for abortion training in a Post-Roe America. Lila gives us a peek at how she navigated sensitive topics, feelings of shame, vulnerability, and anonymity along the way.

How did you get people, especially children, to open up to you about these intimate parts of their lives?

It was a joint effort with the other producer and host, Allison Behringer, to identify people who have had the related experiences of the issues we were looking into. I say that because it often takes a team to make great journalism and I hope that collaborative reporting is a part of our collective future as storytellers. We both acknowledged from the outset our biases and our strengths of diverse perspectives in finding people. 

Having said that, it was all about following breadcrumbs and trails and often what other producers who work in longer-form storytelling do. We looked at advocacy and research groups on these issues, spoke with people mentioned in articles or academic journals, scoured social media for posts or groups, and - at every turn - put out feelers, whether that was through the Bodies Facebook group or creating TikToks (this was to find kids to talk to, because that’s where they are every day! Funny enough, we found a mom instead).

Much of the success of getting them to open up was the nature of the podcast. It was already one that was eager for marginalized voices and looked to offer understanding, empathy, and context for what could otherwise be embarrassing or even traumatizing issues. We both had a very human-first approach and emphasized consent and awareness. This sincere approach builds trust, which is what makes conversations more rich and vulnerable without exploiting someone’s sadness or conditions for soundbites. 

What roadblocks did you face while reporting these episodes? 

Finding people was the hardest part, and, on a personal level, interviewing someone and not being able to promise that I’d use their story after they’ve already opened up to me. I’m a multimedia journalist but I would say the majority of my work is traditional reporting or investigative work - even when in documentaries - and radio is so different. I found it so difficult to conduct pre-interviews because both myself and the interviewee would have an exchange with genuine care but ultimately later in post and editing have to make hard decisions about who is good to champion the information for the podcast, instead of being satisfied with their story alone. 

Other roadblocks were the issues themselves. With early puberty, all the science and medical literature had the tone of “issues” and “problems” but without concrete information about why this trend was ongoing - all the while freaking out kids and problems. It’s a condition that affects Black and Hispanic girls disproportionately, and children end up being subjected to early sexualization and treatment. All the while, they’re just kids. So even though we had an issue and the people to speak to it, finding an angle that was fair to them was challenging.

And in the medical training episode - balancing anonymity and getting residents on the record was so tough. They could be expelled for being found out, and they’re the lowest totem on the pole of hierarchy in medicine, so they don’t have a lot of protection despite the prestige and necessity of their careers. Talking to us was putting that on the line, and we knew we had to be super careful about sharing enough information to outline the stages - particularly in rural and Southern areas -  without exposing them to backlash. 

What do you hope the impact is of visibilizing these undertold stories? 

I don’t know that our stories would change laws or effect mass change or impact in the traditional investigative sense, but I don’t think they need to. These stories, and the podcast more generally, just humanizes what are often shared experiences of shame, hurt, mysteries, and more. There’s no reason to be embarrassed about being human, and there’s no reason why any medical-related anything, especially those out of our control, should be stigmatized. There’s no progress without knowledge and shared understanding, and I think that’s what this kind of storytelling does. Even if the only gain is making the participant feel heard and understood for the first time, I’d say that’s impact enough.