Tag: health

Elise Boria

Within Sterile Walls

For so long I could still see the hospital from my dorm room. With its concrete structure perforating the landscape as an incessant reminder. The windows that crawled up its sides like ants, with each one seemingly whispering to me, and I’m repulsed. I can always feel the visceral response welling in my body when I see it, somewhere between comical and infuriating. Now in the mornings its form haunts me, and in the evening when I close the curtains, it still manages to live in the dark and silent room. It swallows tranquility, spitting back up a mocking tar like mass that attaches itself to my skin.

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Alison Turner

Temporary Safety

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“Look at me,” you say, holding out your hands. We are separated by a desk with a high ledge that you put your elbows on before the person in front of you can move her purse. Your hands are swollen and a darker shade from exposure, darkest under the nails. “I need to shower, but they wouldn’t let me yesterday. Look.”

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December Letters Project ~ 2023 Call for OWLS

It’s that time of year: December Letters Project preparation time!

We invite you and/or your families, clubs, organizations, schools, and communities to be part of MITA’s annual December Letters Project. This is MITA’s annual local literacy project, but we encourage others to run a December Letters Project in their local communities. The project’s goal is very simple: to send connection, support, and solidarity –in the form of cards and letters– to our neighbors who are in psychiatric institutions during the winter solstice! We do this by making secular but festive cards and letters, with messages of love and encouragement, during the months of November and December, and delivering them to local psychiatric hospitals at the end of December, on or near the solstice. November is the month to prepare for the project, so we invite you to join us in being part of our December Letters Project or to hold a project in your community.

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Betty Aubut

Jody

“Hi, I’m Jody. I’m a lesbian but don’t worry, it’s not like I’m going to attack you in the middle of the night.”

            I spun around to see a stocky woman with close cropped hair standing a bit too close for comfort. Jody appeared to be 20-something, like me, and wore tattered dungarees, left-overs from the 70s, like mine. I had been unpacking and quietly checking out my new digs on the unlocked unit of this prestigious, private, psychiatric hospital south of Boston. I think I did feel a bit attacked as Jody’s booming voice jolted me back to reality. I likely jumped a mile.

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Bonnie Henderson Schell

That’s It

By Bonnie Henderson Schell

Strange things were happening to me, and I was scared. I knew that I had developed tardive dyskinesia and torticollis. The skin around my lips was chapped because my tongue hung out of my mouth, making a circle, licking my lips. I drooled all night on my pillow and down the front of my clothes. It was difficult not to walk to the left because lately my neck and body were painfully twisted in that direction so that the necklines of my sweaters and tunics fell off my left shoulder. I had stopped going to lunch with anyone and turned down phone calls using Facetime. I avoided the mirror over the sink.

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G.B. Lindsey

Look Up An Inch

Climbing out, it turns out, is much the same as falling in. The pit has insidious walls. They reverberate like plucked piano wires. Every minute is a sound, and every minute that hits them bounces back, resounds and resounds until that minute, that moment, that second becomes endless, infinite. Each echo darkens the dark, and each sickly, sickening thought that you beg not to think glares brighter and brighter until it rewrites itself against the flesh of your brain. Until it blinds utterly.

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Making Our Voices Heard: Memoirs to (Re)Imagine Mental Healthcare, A Series of Workshops

You’re invited to join a two-hour weekly writers’ workshop resulting from a collaboration between Madwomen in the Attic, Herstory Writers Workshop, and the Coalition for Community Writing. This workshop, facilitated by Jessica Lowell Mason and Janelle Gagnon, will bring together storytellers who want to write a changed, reformed, or new mental healthcare model into existence by tuning into their experience and wisdom in order to explore, share, and shape stories and deep truths that speak back to power structures and compel a care system to care.

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The 2020 December Letters Project

This year, we faced some additional challenges in preparing for our annual December Letters Project, due to widespread school and business closings related to Covid that made it impossible for us to gather together for the project, but our OWLS came through from satellite locations to deliver cards and letters to help foster community and share love, solidarity, and fellowship.

We are grateful to all of our OWLs, past and present, in Canada, Australia, and the United States.

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