Shouting Through the Walls: Memoirs of Psychiatric Incarceration

This workshop pilot invites people who have experienced involuntary institutionalization or had carceral experiences within psychiatry and the mental health system to participate in a series of four memoir-writing workshops on the subject of psychiatric incarceration. Historically, the bodies and voices of those who have experienced institutionalization have been restrained, contained, and silenced. During the workshop series, we will aim to make our voices heard through the proverbial and literal walls of the institution by shaping memoirs about psychiatric incarceration that aim to dismantle social stigma, pathologization, and criminalization by writing agenda-driven narratives that evoke understanding and empathy, in an effort to reclaim autonomy over our bodies and selves and amplify our voices.

This is a new workshop that we are piloting as part of a project called “Writing Beyond the Prison: Reimagining the Carceral Ecosystem with Incarcerated Authors,” a public humanities collaboration with the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University and the United Black Families Scholarship Foundation, initiated with seed money from a Sustaining Public Engagement Grant awarded by the American Council of Learned Societies with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

 The current opportunity, funded by Humanities NY, will allow participants to shape writing for use in this project and will contribute to the development of an open access curriculum to be used in prisons throughout the United States and beyond, with prison families and people in re-entry and more. For this reason, the workshop pilot will be recorded and segments of it will be used on the Herstory website. In addition to being a recorded and archived workshop that will be accessible to public viewership, participants in the workshop will also have their stories published and archived by Herstory Writers Network. While the four-week pilot workshop will be recorded and used for curricular purposes, there will be an opportunity to continue writing in a non-recorded workshop after the four-week pilot period, either through a continuation of Shouting Through the Walls, or by joining our ongoing weekly workshop, Making Our Voices Heard: Memoirs to (Re)Imagine Mental Healthcare.

No writing experience is required to participate in this free Zoom workshop! We will be meeting on Thursdays, July 13, 20, 27, and August 3rd from 11am to 1pm Eastern. If you are interested in joining, please sign up at the following link: https://forms.gle/B4PhjNLmoHDZvCuU7 or use the QR code at the right. Please contact jlmason1@buffalo.edu and jgagnon@herstorywriters.org with any questions.

The art piece featured on the flyer and our site was created by Gwynne Duncan.

Below are PDFs & Word Document versions of the above-pictured flyer for access.