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.

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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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