You know, it is. I think connecting these two existences together, this dystopian satire and this dystopian absurdness of it. And (and) I feel like it’s very easy to see the dystopian nature of I think it is equally important to observe and witness the absurd nature of it, right? Because sometimes chaos doesn’t make sense. And like, it produces really strange experiences and collisions, historically, culturally, and personally. I don’t know if I said this to you recently, but like to me, grief and joy exist right next to each other. Grief is a state that you can feel a bunch of things and it can be a bunch of things. These states can express how you are being, like joyfully sad, joyfully angry, or even joyfully rageful. And those two states circling each other – grief and joy – is madness. Everything exists in that. And sometimes joy is like this humorous satire of absurdity and you’re like “What the fuck?” And you’re laughing, right? Like, it’s so horrific.
On the walls, in the scrawls, our mad voices bleed, our heads break and our brains scatter and splatter
back against the medical records, horror’s paint.
This past spring, academics, activists, clinicians and psychiatric survivors came together for a unique online conference entitled “Psychedelics, Madness, and Awakening: Harm Reduction and Future Visions.” In a conversation spanning topics such as colonization and disability justice, we spoke with conference organizers Erica Hua Fletcher, Tehseen Noorani, and Lalita, a psychiatric survivor and member of the conference’s accessibility support group.
Silencing her questioning stream of daily chatter, her ballet dreams. In her, innocence she had spoken for me, muted and crashed by endless sizzlings. Inches away, I did not hear her silent call As she slipped into death’s embrace.
Image Description: A drawing of a sun and moon with faces and a hand in the center with an open eyeball in the palm.
As well as a person intended to be a mad woman breaking free from a straight jacket raising a fist in the air and screaming.
Text reads Madness Network News a multimedia platform of the psychiatric survivor/mad/psychiatric abolitionist movement. http://www.madnessnetworknes.comArt by: Emily Hochman
Image Description: person wearing a ski mask holding bolt cutters.