Rob Waters - Journalist Profile | Connect with top journalists

Beats

Biography

Rob Waters is the founding editor of MIndSite News, a digital publication focused on mental health that launched in Sept. 2021. An award-winning journalist and travel writer, Waters has been writing about health, science, public health, criminal justice and world culture for more than 30 years. He write frequently for Health Affairs and has been a contributor to STAT, Kaiser Health News/California Healthline, Craftsmanship Quarterly, NEO.LIFE and other publications. He covered biotechnology for Bloomberg News, was a senior editor at WebMD, contributing editor to the Psychotherapy Networker and editor-in-chief of the Tenderloin Times, a four-language San Francisco community newspaper. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, Mother Jones, the Atlantic, BusinessWeek, San Francisco magazine, Salon.com, Sierra, Columbia Journalism Review, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. He co-authored From Boys to Men, published in 2004 by Simon & Schuster. He is based in Oakland and is a member of the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto.

Content

Total articles 192

• Available on paid plans

  Chaos at SAMHSA: Inside America's mental health agency

  By Art Levine, Rob Waters

  Mar. 14, 2025

• Available on paid plans

  A transformational approach

  By Ben Seal Verified, Rob Waters

  Feb. 27, 2025

• Available on paid plans

  Abortion bans erode trust between clients and their therapists

  By Gina Jimenez, Rob Waters

  Feb. 26, 2025

As seen in

Company Info

MindSite News

A long-festering mental health crisis has been building in the United States for many years, created by a fractured health and mental health system, a pattern of discrimination and bias against communities of color and other disadvantaged groups, and a historic and profoundly damaging trend of criminalizing mental illness. The failure to bring to scale effective prevention, early intervention and treatment programs has left millions of people struggling without the services that could help them. These problems exploded during the pandemic, with dramatic impact on the most vulnerable groups. It is the mission of MindSite News, a nonprofit digital publication that launched in late 2021, to cover this terrain and amplify awareness of these issues by the public and policymakers. As the only news site dedicated exclusively to reporting on mental health, we focus our work in two vital areas: 1) Investigating and exposing the failings and flaws of our fractured mental health system. 2) Bringing to light innovative solutions that have the potential to address these issues and bring effective programs and policies to scale. The mental health crisis in the U.S. has been unfolding at a time when newspapers and other media are downsizing, eliminating journalism jobs. MindSite New is helping to fill this void by creating a national vehicle for rigorous, in-depth reporting on mental health, bringing focus, expertise and deep journalistic experience to an area of growing public interest and concern.