Temporary Safety
“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.”
Continue reading “Alison Turner”
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.
Continue reading “Bonnie Henderson Schell”
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.
Continue reading “Making Our Voices Heard: Memoirs to (Re)Imagine Mental Healthcare, A Series of Workshops”
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.
Continue reading “The 2020 December Letters Project”
My Story: From Darkness to Light
I remember it so vividly. Sitting there, at the front of the classroom, as my heart rate began to quicken and my palms grew sweaty. The world around me started fading away, while my teacher continued Continue reading “Nicole Crevar”
There is a difference between a ‘fabricative realist’ (one who invents a reality for the purpose of manipulating or holding control over another) and a ‘deluded realist’ (one who believes in the reality that a person with more power convinces them to believe).
Neither fabricative realism nor deluded realism is realist realism: it is a situational realism that forms between two parties in a relationship that is built on a significant power differential, a power differential primarily based on access to information.
A perfect example of this might be found in the traditional therapist-client relationship. Continue reading “The Therapist and The Two Realities of Power”
Madwomen in the Attic 