Dr. Kendra Fleagle Gorlitsky recalls the anguish she used to feel performing CPR on elderly, terminally ill patients.

“I felt like I was beating up people up at the end of their life,” she says.

It looks nothing like what people see on TV. In real life, ribs often break and few survive the ordeal.

Gorlitsky now teaches medicine at the University of Southern California and says these early clinical experiences have stayed with her.

“I would be doing the CPR with tears coming down sometimes, and saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, goodbye.’ Because I knew it very likely was not going to be successful. It just seemed a terrible way to end someone’s life.”

Gorlitsky wants something different for herself and for her loved ones. And most other doctors do too: A Stanford University study shows almost 90 percent of doctors would forego resuscitation and aggressive treatment if facing a terminal illness.

It was about 10 years ago, after a colleague had died swiftly and peacefully, that Dr. Ken Murray first noticed doctors die differently than the rest of us.

“He had died at home, and it occurred to me that I couldn’t remember any of our colleagues who had actually died in the hospital,” Murray says. “That struck me as quite odd, because I know that most people do die in hospitals.”

Murray began talking about it with other doctors.

“And I said, ‘Have you noticed this phenomenon?’ They thought about it, and they said, ‘You know? You’re right.’ ”

In 2011, Murray, a retired family practice physician in Los Angeles, shared his observations in an article that quickly went viral. The essay, “How Doctors Die,” told the world that doctors are more likely to die at home with less aggressive care than most people get at the end of their lives. That’s Murray’s plan, too.

“I fit with the vast majority that want to have a gentle death, and don’t want extraordinary measures taken when they have no meaning,” Murray says.

A majority of seniors report feeling the same way. Yet, they often die while hooked up to life support. And only about one in 10 doctors report having conversations with their patients about death.

One reason for the disconnect, says Dr. Babak Goldman, is that too few doctors are trained to talk about death with their patients. “We’re trained to prolong life,” he says.

Goldman is a palliative care specialist at Providence Saint Joseph’s Medical Center in Burbank, Calif., and he says that having the tough talk may feel like a doctor is letting a family down.

“I think it’s sometimes easier to give hope than to give reality,” Goldman says.

Goldman read Murray’s essay as part of his residency. Goldman too would prefer to die without heroic measures, he says, and knowing how doctors die is important information for patients.

“If they know that this is what we’d want for ourselves and for our own families, that goes a long way,” he says.

In addition, Medicare does not pay doctors for end-of-life planning meetings with patients.

Nora Zamichow wishes she had read Murray’s essay sooner. The Los Angeles-based freelance writer says she and her husband, Mark Saylor, likely would have made different treatment decisions for Saylor’s brain tumor if they had.

Zamichow says that an arduous regimen of chemotherapy and radiation left her 58-year-old husband unable to walk, and ultimately bedridden, in his final weeks.

“At no point,” she says, “did any doctor say to us, ‘You know, what about not treating?’ ”

Zamichow realized after reading Murray’s essay that doing less might have offered her husband more peace in his final days.

“What Ken’s article spelled out for me was, ‘Wait a minute, you know, we did not get the full range of options,’ ” she says.

But knowing how much medical intervention at the end of life might be most appropriate for a particular person requires wide-ranging conversations about death.

Murray says he hopes his essay will spur more physicians to initiate these difficult discussions with patients and families facing end-of-life choices.

This story is part of a partnership that includes NPR, Southern California Public Radio and Kaiser Health News.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

The Los Angeles Police Department’s mental evaluation unit is the largest mental health policing program of its kind in the nation, with 61 sworn officers and 28 mental health workers from the county.

The unit has become a vital resource for the 10,000-person police force in Los Angeles.

Officer Ted Simola and his colleagues in the unit work with county mental health employees to provide crisis intervention when people with mental illnesses come into contact with police.

On this day, Simola is working the triage desk on the sixth floor at LAPD headquarters.

Triage duty involves helping cops on the scene evaluate and deal with people who may be experiencing a mental health crisis.

He gets a call involving a 60-year-old man with paranoid schizophrenia. The call is typical of the more than 14,000 fielded by the unit’s triage desk last year.

“The call came out as a male with mental illness,” says the officer on the scene to Simola. “I guess he was inside of a bank. They said he was talking to himself. He urinated outside.”

If it were another department, this man might be put into the back of a police car and driven to jail, so that the patrol officer could get back to work more quickly. But LAPD policy requires all officers who respond to a call in which mental illness may be a factor to phone the triage desk for assistance in evaluating the person’s condition.

Officer Simola talks to the officer on the scene. “Paranoid? Disorganized? That type of thing?” The officer answers, “Yeah, he’s talking a lot about Steven Seagal, something about Jackie Chan.”

Simola replies, “OK, does he know what kind of medication he’s supposed to have?” They continue talking.

The triage officers are first and foremost a resource for street cops. Part of their job entails deciding which calls warrant an in-person visit from the unit’s 18 cop-clinician teams. These teams, which operate as second responders to the scene, assisted patrol officers in more than 4,700 calls last year.

Sometimes their work involves high-profile interventions, such as helping S.W.A.T. teams with dangerous standoffs or talking a jumper off a ledge. But on most days it involves relieving patrol officers of time-consuming mental health calls like the one Simola is helping to assess.

The man involved in this call has three outstanding warrants for low-grade misdemeanors, including public drinking. Technically, any of them qualifies him for arrest. But Simola says he won’t be carted off to jail.

“He’ll have to appear on the warrants later,” Simola says, “but immediately he’ll get treated for his mental health.”

That’s the right approach, says Peter Eliasberg, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “The goal is to make sure that people who are mentally ill, who are not a danger to the community, are moved towards getting treatment and services as opposed to getting booked and taken into the jail.”

Detective Charles Dempsey is in charge of training for LAPD’s mental evaluation unit. He says pairing a cop or detective with a county mental health worker means the two can discuss both the criminal justice records that the health worker isn’t privy to and the medical records that a cop can’t access because of privacy laws.

About two-thirds of the calls are resolved successfully, he says.

“We engage them, they get help, they get services and we never hear from them again,” he says.

But there are complicated cases, too. And these, Dempsey says, are assigned to the unit’s detective-clinician teams. Dempsey says most of the 700 cases they handled last year involved both people whose mental illness leads them to heavily use or abuse emergency services or who are at the greatest risk for violent encounters with police and others.

“It requires a lot more work,” he says.

For nearly a decade, the LAPD has helped train dozens of agencies both in and out of the U.S. in this type of specialized policing. Its emphasis is diversion over incarceration, for those who qualify.

Lt. Lionel Garcia commanded the unit for seven years until his retirement in April.

“Low-grade misdemeanors, we’ll try to divert them to placement rather than an arrest,” he says.

But, he continues, “if it’s a felony in this city, they’re going to jail.”

Last year, Garcia says, about 8 1/2 percent of the calls resulted in the person getting arrested and jailed. When that happens, he says the unit tracks the person through custody and then, upon their release, reaches out to them with links to services. “It’s just common sense,” he says.

“Jails were not set up to be treatment facilities,” says Mark Gale, who serves as criminal justice chairman for the LA County Council of the National Alliance On Mental Illness. “People get worse in jail.”

Gale and other mental health advocates praise the LAPD unit’s approach and call it a good first step. But for diversion to work well, they say, the city and county need to provide treatment programs at each point a mentally ill person comes into contact with the criminal justice system – from interactions with cops all the way through the courts.

This story is part of a reporting partnership with NPR, KPCC and Kaiser Health News.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

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