The Madwoman in the Attic
(for Sue)
I am the madwoman in the attic.
A psychic cancer dwells deep in me
and I am unable to control its preying tentacles
which creep and crawl through my mind’s dark passages.
Continue reading “Sandy Jeffs”Sandy Jeffs
Sharon Jean Cretsinger
Love among Survivors: Bastille Day 2014 (July 13-16)
Day two, Tuesday, begins overcast and noisy. The racket from the various kinds of traffic on Holland Avenue is getting in my skull and rattling around with the voices that have recently rejoined me from the ward, the clinic and the root cellar. I stayed up all night with activists Kathy, Lauren and George, holding the vigil for those who have been killed, incarcerated, incapacitated and silenced by psychiatry. I walk up the street to the hotel where the other vigil participants are staying, and slide into my psychiatric patient mind. The voices are too loud. The traffic is too close. God, I need some pills. Can I get off the street before someone notices that I need to be locked up?
Continue reading “Sharon Jean Cretsinger”H.R. Gordon
Excerpt from the work-in-progress manuscript The Hollow and the Light
I could imagine a million gardens and libraries—perfect places that held magic in the air. But the beast still loomed.
Continue reading “H.R. Gordon”Sara Hobler
The following poems are from Sara Hobler’s poetry collection, E=MC^2.
Holy Lunch
Chief complaints are boredom and back pain
And Hunger, puts the body under a strain
Hungry makes arthritis hard to ignore
They weren’t lying when they said it keeps the score of your life and mentality
Continue reading “Sara Hobler”Gina Fournier
Child Witch
Summer of 1975. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was released. Elton John’s Philadelphia Freedom manned the top of the Billboard Charts. Michigander Gerald Ford was president, succeeding Watergate- disgraced Richard Nixon. My favorite jeans were vertically striped in white, yellow, green and brown.
It wasn’t Levittown, but it was similar. Livonia was a once new-ring suburb of Detroit, where I was born. Our little burg was called Devonaire Woods and carpeted with post WWII brick ranch homes. All were designed and built alike: three bedrooms, one bath, living room, kitchen and basement. If kids visited someone else’s house, you didn’t need to ask where the bathroom was.
Continue reading “Gina Fournier”Daaimah Lyon
Dear Abu
It’s a curious thing. I don’t know why when I see photos of you I must fight the urge to cry. First as a kid it was anger, then sadness, wondering why? Now as a grown woman, it’s still sadness and tears. As if my heart has been broken. As if my heart has been ripped out of me. As if there’s an emptiness inside, a void that’s never and will never be filled.
Continue reading “Daaimah Lyon”MT Vallarta
In Memoriam
September 30, 2021
Four months ago, my partner and I broke up.
We were together for six years. We met during our first year in graduate school. We clung to each other like lost children. We had sex the first time we kissed. Twenty-four hours later, they told me I was the one. I was the one for years. The one who got lost in a department store in New Jersey. The one who was bullied for being Asian. The one with the traumatic memories. The one who almost made their mother faint with their difficultness.
Continue reading “MT Vallarta”Laura-Marie River Victor Peace Nopales
what a diagnosis is
a way to justify a pill prescription,
a dull tool,
one doctor’s opinion,
an idea we can ponder
in the isolation room,
Kelly Price
“Did you two ever connect?” the message read. I was sitting in an ordinary restaurant with my ordinary family eating an ordinary meal, and “Ding!” went the phone. “Did you two ever connect?”
Continue reading “Kelly Price”Nicole Luongo
The Becoming is a brutal account of mental illness by a woman who doesn’t believe in mental illness. A lifetime of addiction, eating disorders, and trauma culminates explosively after the author begins a PhD at the University of Oxford, and while in hospital she is liberated through psychosis. Her journey from terror to self-acceptance is grueling, and she makes meaning of it by weaving reflexive narrative with classic and nascent scholarship. Part phenomenological recounting, part social critique, the text disrupts bio-medical approaches to altered states by exploring their emancipatory potential. It also illuminates how conventional mental health treatment pathologizes human suffering. In doing so, The Becoming contributes to anti-psychiatry and Mad studies projects, each of which asks, “what does it mean to be sane?”
Continue reading “Nicole Luongo”
