Madwomen in the Attic is excited to announce that during the upcoming MITA year, we will launch The Barbara Project.
The Barbara Project is a mental health literacy and advocacy project that aims to bring readers and reading into psychiatric facilities. Continue reading “The Barbara Project”
Her gorgeous eyes stare at me
from a computer screen
as the headlines scream
Amy Winehouse, dead at 27 Continue reading “Giovanna Capone”
In 2017, while I was incarcerated against my will in a psychiatric institution in Buffalo, NY for ten days, I shared a room with a woman named Barbara Warren-Jones.
She was Barbara to me at the time, although on one occasion, I asked her for her last name and I wrote it down in my composition notebook. Tonight, I looked through the pages of that notebook for her name. I have not been able to bear to look at what I had written during my time in hell with my friend until now. I found what I could handle reading for tonight. Three words:
Barbara Warren Jones.
Barbara, a retired hospital administrator, a colorectal cancer survivor, a proud African American woman, and a devout Christian in her mid-eighties, was on dialysis at the time that I met her. She was brought from a retirement home or some kind of rehabilitation center/home to the worst of all area psychiatric hospitals, and she was admitted and labeled with some form of severe psychiatric illness – probably psychosis. In other words, Barbara was thrown away into a snake pit. Continue reading “Justice for Barbara Warren-Jones”
Eulogy for the Green-Skinned Space Babe
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
– Shakespeare (1606), Marta (2268)
We still don’t know exactly why they sent Marta to the asylum. Continue reading “Jarrah Hodge”
Madwomen in the Attic is seeking featured writers for The Featured Writer Project’s 2018-2019 writing year, which will begin in September 2018 and will end in August 2019.
Open reading period: April 20 – June 20, 2018. For women and queer-identified (or non-binary) individuals. Continue reading “Call for Featured Writers 2018-2019”
What Is Gaslighting?
Gaslighting: manipulating someone, by psychological means, into doubting their own sanity.[1] This may involve saying something and later denying having said it, making you question your memory, making you feel that everything is your fault, and even outright lying to you (and possibly those around you). Continue reading “Gaslighting”
Madwomen in the Attic will be hosting a FREE screening of George Cukor’s 1944 film GASLIGHT, based on the 1938 play GAS LIGHT by Patrick Hamilton and starring Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, and Angela Lansbury. The screening, held at The Screening Room on April 3rd at 7PM, is free and open to the public, and the space is accessible. We ask for small donations from those who can make them to help cover copyright and space/screening costs. Snacks and drinks will be available for purchase through The Screening Room. A brief community conversation will be held immediately following the film. A crisis services volunteer will be available for additional support.
Operation YOU
Every year around this time, we discuss the courage, character, and determination of hundreds of women who paved the way for us to have access to equal rights and for our voices to be not only heard but regarded as well. Continue reading “Christina Foster, Heart DR”
When you’re ill, and you reach the threshold of what you consider ‘enough pain to warrant treatment,’ you can do a number of things: you can continue to live with the pain, you can try at-home remedies, you can seek out holistic forms of treatment that exist outside the medical realm, or you can go to the doctor.
Pain is a matter of perception. Continue reading “On Being Well”
