MT Vallarta

In Memoriam 

September 30, 2021 

Four months ago, my partner and I broke up. 

We were together for six years. We met during our first year in graduate school. We clung to each other like lost children. We had sex the first time we kissed. Twenty-four hours later, they told me I was the one. I was the one for years. The one who got lost in a department store in New Jersey. The one who was bullied for being Asian. The one with the traumatic memories. The one who almost made their mother faint with their difficultness. 

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Diane Renee Tomasi

And a Cherry on Top

It was a brisk January day, the sun was bright and shining. It was the kind of day when I look out the window and the sun convinces me Spring has come early, I go outside and then have to immediately zip my jacket all the way up, pull my collar high around my neck and shove my ungloved hands into my pockets: ridiculing myself for being naïve. 

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Glynnis Reed-Conway

“Why Do We Whisper Our Stories?”: Disability Frameworks and Multiply Marginalized Subjects 

I start this essay with the question posed by Jennifer Eisenhauer (2010) in their article “Writing Dora: Creating Community Through Autobiographical Zines about Mental Illness”: Why do we whisper our stories? They propose this question in response to a student with a mental health disability who approached Eisenhauer after class, speaking of her hospitalization in hushed tones. Those hushed tones address the shame, invisibility, and silence suffered by neurodivergent people in the quiet, in the dark, in the back, unseen, and rarely heard in their own voices. I begin my writing with this quote because my own silences about my personal experiences as a neurodivergent person have come to their limit and I am now in the place where I choose to speak louder, to articulate more of my truth. Why do we whisper our stories? Because we are shamed by the normative, ablebodied world to the madnesses we inhabit. 

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Summer Starr

Decolonizing mental health: an animist manifesto

The Hearing Voices Network fundamentally changed the approach to what had previously been called auditory hallucinations. The idea of the network is that, when approaching these phenomena in an affirming way, rather than labeling them, a person is empowered to establish a better working relationship with the voices, which has been shown to have better therapeutic outcomes.

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