Last spring, Madness Network News met with a group of high school students to talk about their experiences of being queer, trans and nonbinary at Grants Pass High School. We talked about transphobia, the barriers they’ve experienced accessing mental health care, and the importance of talking to youth about gender and sexuality. We also talked a lot about the life affirming process of discovering who you are, and making friends with other queer youth.
Anti-psychiatry removed itself from other radical struggles, like prison abolition and crip liberation, choosing instead to appeal to those in ‘respectable’ professional and intellectual circles. In contrast, psychiatric abolition is built on the deep and eternal ties of solidarity between mad and other oppressed people across the world. We never wanted the support of respectable society.
In California, Governor Gavin Newsom is proposing an Orwellian solution to homelessness and the “mental health” crisis. CARE Court will vastly increase forced treatment throughout the state, and the legislation has been widely criticized by housing, disability, and human rights advocates, including Disability Rights California, the Western Regional Advocacy Project, the ACLU California Action, and Human Rights Watch.
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.
While gifts and grants from pharmaceutical companies comprised only about 25% of NAMI’s total donations, those same corporations made up 46% of the overall donor list. Meanwhile, Big Pharma accounted for 65% of those who donated more than once in 2020, and 100% of those who donated more than two times. Additionally, 75% of the pharmaceutical companies that donated last year also donated the year prior as compared to around 18% of non-Pharma donors who were repeats from 2019.
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.
I don’t know what the clinical definition of mania is but sometimes my eyes are diamond mine fields a fuse away from blowing up. Just a wink of my Wet and Wild glimmer lashes piled into barbed wire barricades and boom!
