Mental Health
This is my first ever art zine.
Content warning: psychiatric incarceration and violence.
signifigant distress juxtaposes the archive of psychiatry with the repertoire of ritual from the perspective of a mad witch. The psychiatric archive, with its disinterested, impersonal tone, attempts to capture the psychiatrized person and reduce them to words on a page. This capture and reduction is a symbolic act which mirrors the actual capture and reduction which takes place in the context of psychiatric incarceration. The artist, a psychiatric survivor who also happens to be a witch, literally cuts up the psychiatric archive to free themself from it. The words are then resituated from the sterile pages of the psychiatrist’s note keeping, to the powerful, energetic setting of the witch’s craft. Scenes from the artist’s actual spiritual practice reveal magic to be a welcoming space for madness, a space which can hold madness in all its complexity and wisdom. The violence done to the mad body in the context of psychiatry is here witnessed and addressed in the context of witchcraft.
The Dangerous Powers of Witches: Spirituality, Autonomy, Community and Literacy
This quartersize, 20 page zine is an essay about the Essex Witch Trials. Informative and educational, it goes beyond the historical facts to explore the political implications of the witch trials. Rather than simply considering the event as a persecution of ‘witches’, this zine looks at the construction of the category ‘witch’ and how it was used to justify the torture, murder and oppression of poor, disabled, old and otherwise marginalized women. It explains how even the smallest forms of organization and resistance were considered to be and treated as major threats.
Navagating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness: a Reader and Roadmap of Bipolar Worlds by the Icarus Project
Panic a guide to recovering from panic attacks with resources for managing long term anxiety
multiplicities
this is a tiny zine about having something like mulitiple personalities, only not split, and learning to cope and heal and help them work together
multiplicities 2
writen by someone with something like multiple personalities, this is about ways different part of the self deal with sex and desire and the meaning of love, and how we can feel many conflicting things at the same time.
The Adventures of Cublet Dvorsky
Sweet writing about crushes, mental health, frienship. Also a thoughful story about violence, mental health, anarchism and trauma – being a queer, trans, female socialized young person from a working class background, and looking at how their ideas about non-violence and fighting back are changing – including protesting.
Better Days: Stuff that helps with all this anxiety
cute drawings chronically the things sarah does to help with anxiety, from holding her pet hedgehog to staying up late, to focusing on a friend, finding some structure, and more. Inspiring. Makes me want to make one too.
Maranda Elizabeth
Telegram #35 is about suicide, borderline personality disorder, and friendship.
content note: suicide, gender stuff, self-injury, overdoses, ambulances, emergency rooms, coma, psych wards, ignorant cis people, doctors & nurses, traumas, transphobia, ableism, violent, violent thoughts, invalidation…!
This zine is a document of three admittances to the emergency room at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Ontario within a one-month time-frame, as well as another suicide attempt by overdose, resulting in a coma and almost heart attack, and yet another week on yet another psych ward. Notes on conversations with doctors, psychiatrists, nurses, blah blah, and experiences of transphobia, ableism, and invalidation.
Also, negative post-suicide-survival feelings! Psych med withdrawal, the desire but lack of motivation to make crucial changes in my life, the desire to stay the fuck away from hospitals but not knowing where else to go, the desire to focus on individual friendships while trying to get away from radical spaces but also still not knowing where else to go. Failures of mental health care systems, failures of radical communities. Etc.
In 2013, the DSM-5 came out, with a bunch of changes to the diagnostic criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder. I’ve included the more recent details of the diagnosis in this zine, and compared it to the previous diagnosis, which I wrote about in Telegram #23 back in September 2011, after being diagnosed while on another inpatient psych ward; also, a tiny brief examination of the “invalidating environment” believed to be a major cause of BPD, and how just about all environments (institutions, social circles, etc) are or can be invalidating so maybe I’m doomed to be sick forever!
I’ll write something more posi one day, I promise.
Telegram #35 is quarter-sized, 24 pages, 4,200+ words, black & white.
Telegram zine issue 37 parts A and B split
I made a split zine with myself! It’s 12,000 words / 48 pages long!
Telegram #37 (part A) is about complex-trauma, resisting & (re-)imagining recovery, creating new boundaries, abandoning identity, navigating the city of Toronto with a cane, the ways the body remembers trauma when the mind cannot, winter survival & disability, embracing the present while mourning the past, self-protection, & gratitude.
{content notes: trauma, chronic pain, inaccessibility}
Telegram #37 (part B) is about learning how to stay present in my body, choosing compassion rather than empathy, learning about and practicing yoga, naming & learning how to embody my values, how MDMA made me want to stay alive, understanding suicide, & trauma recovery.
{content notes: psychedelic drugs, chronic pain, suicide, ableism, madphobia}
Telegram zine issue 36
Telegram #36 is about being uncool, walking under full moons, fighting cynicism, defining & becoming a peptimist, perpetually letting go of resentments & jealousies, recovery, Tarot, talking to psychics, being offline, chronic pain, hermit summer, night owls & early birds, dumpsters, exile, poverty, and death.
Telegram #36 is 5,000+ words, black & white photocopy, quarter-sized, 24 pages.
Telegram: A Collection of 27 Issues
In the Telegram: A Collection of Twenty-Seven Issues zine anthology Maranda tells tales of daily adventures, friendship, gender identity, falling in love with bicycles, getting tattoos, moving out, going crazy, and their experiences with inpatient hospitalizations. They also write about their relationship with their twin sister, and learning how to take care of their mental health within and without conventional institutions, identifying as genderqueer, getting sober, living a creative and meaningful daily life, and finding reasons to keep on going.
At its heart and in its guts, Telegram is about seeking magic in the smallest things, staying crazy in a world that wants us to fake sanity or die, and learning how to take good care of ourselves and each other.
5.5×7″ paperback, B&W, 447 pages
Witches in the Weird World #3
Epically thick zine about “being a mad witch but what living that life is like in terms of our oppression as mad people, how to heal and maintain mental health, what it is actually like to be mad, how people can be allies, dealing with suicide and the search for life” (from the intro)
Brian J. Solem / Brianna Dearest
The magic of being in a band with folks who are relatively new to their instruments and learning together, being a second generation punk, pain and abuse, support and what it looks like, stories about their dad, friends, bikes.
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“I think disclosure’s frightening for anyone telling anyone (else) about their past…” Struggling with suicidal thoughts, therapy being pushied on them after their father died (age 13) and later attending radical mental health collective meetings. Surviving a sexual and emotionally abusive relationship trying to access therapy and it being shitty. Finally finding a good therapist who understands how trauma lives in the body, how to listen to our inner voices, embracing imperfections.
Typed on a beautiful handwritting manual typewriter. Writing about therapy and developmental trauma, and trying to let in good feelings like the beautiful moments from Girls Rock Camp
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Motor City Kitty Issue #22 / 20 pgs / 5.5″ x 4.25″
Written in late July of 2013 and assembled while on a Greyhound bus headed towards the third annual DC Zine Fest, this tiny (but text heavy) issue focuses on a breakdown and a breakup. Bri discusses dealing with months of depression while moving several times, traveling, and having her heart broken.
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Issue #21 / 20 pgs / 8.5″ x 7″ /
“Tour zine! This one is half-legal size and falls somewhere between perzine, tour diary, and comic. I know how much work went into it, because I saw Bri diligently writing and drawing (and agonizing) at the Tulip Farm over the course of her five-week stay here. It’s all about touring via Megabus, zine readings and friendship, depression and anxiety, navigating trying situations as a feminist and a survivor of abuse, and makin’ it through yet another winter.” (Description by Amber Dearest)
Issue #20 / 40 pgs / 5.5″ x 4.25″ /
“Bri put this issue together just before embarking upon a zine tour, which brought her from Cleveland, Ohio, up to Montréal – to see me! Some of the main themes running through this issue are friendship, family, and the future, with Bri answering questions from Telegram #25 about her goals and her ideal life. She writes also about being a survivor of abuse, while also being involved in a relationship with someone who is going through an accountability process – I can only imagine how difficult this was to write, and how vulnerable she must feel sharing these thoughts with us. I know that it’s something so important to talk about, too. Like, once a person has been called out, what is the next step? And what does it means for those who are close to them? How can we end cycles of abuse?” (Description by Amber Dearest)
Issue #19 / 48 pgs / 5.5″ x 4.25″ / $3 US PPD
“I love this zine. It’s collected stories about her family and her relationship to them, and different forms of grief, plus some lighter stories about music love and fandom. This zine has a really brave and powerful story about her father dying of a heroin overdose when she was 13 – and about their relationship – stories about him, about realizing he was an addict, and her working to accept his death.” (Description by Cindy Crabb)
Issue #18 / 56 pgs / 5.5″ x 4.25″ /
“This is a MIGHTY issue of Motor City Kitty. It mostly chronicles Bri going on tour of the midwest US with her then-partner’s band. It’s written mostly in the form of a journal, type written with drawings and pictures scattered around. There are stories of more or less successful shows, eating on the road, idiots and nice people and much more. There is also a piece on Slutwalk Cleveland and a goodbye to Kent, Ohio, where she had been living for the past seven years.” (Description by Tukru)
Issue #17 / 24 pgs / 5.5″ x 4.5″ /
“This little but full zine has writing on the cultural influences Bri feels [she] has inherited from her parents, the second part of an article called ‘Feminist Killjoy’ about [arguing] with a sexist person (don’t worry though, you needn’t have read the first part, which is in Motor Ciy Kitty #16), tokenising isms, things Bri likes and dislikes about herself, and attending an emotionally charged gig on the anniversary of her father’s death. This zine is wonderfully written, intimate and has one of the most beautiful layouts I’ve seen in a long while: typewritten, some handwritten and some wonderful drawings throughout. Every page a delight!” (Description by Em)
Activist Journeys 