This Space

This Space is a submissions based magazine which aims to destigmatise, without romanticising, mental health issues.

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Anxiety, Mental Health and Bisexuality

CW: rape, abuse, suicide ideation, police violence, anxiety

I’ve had depression for most of my life.  I have a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder and Post Traumatic Distress Syndrome.  But chronic anxiety was something new to me; until 2014, I’d never experienced it.  Anxiety for me wasn’t simply feeling nervous or on edge.  Anxiety felt like a blazing fire behind me, and barrels of oil around me, just waiting to explode.  Anxiety makes me want to run as fast as I can.  It makes me grind my teeth and clench my fists.

I’m invited to give a talk for a panel on LGBT hate crime at a small London police station.  I’m surrounded by white police officers, most of whom are wearing body armour.  Multiple radios crackle on the table as I clear my throat. I speak about racism of the police, of how biphobia is different to homophobia. There is a strange silence around me.  I feel very nervous, but once I start talking I don’t stop until all I’ve wanted to say is done.  The police officers are positive – they ask a lot of questions that show how little they now about biphobia.  I’m happy to answer them with a smile.

I was raped in 2014.  It was not a first for me.  I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, which carried on into adulthood and only ended when I ran away aged 22.  Shortly after the assault, I got sick.  I had severe abdominal pains that landed me in hospital twice.  The first of these admissions into Casualty happened on the first day of my new job.  I lost my job whilst in hospital.  I also had a breakdown.  Everything seemed to be happening at once.  Chronic anxiety shoved its way into my life, and it hasn’t left.

I lead a workshop for the British Psychological Society on mental health and LGBT people.  I print out webpages from a few organisations who claim they can help.  Most of these pages only ever use the word Gay.  Any illustrations are of white people.  Bisexuals are never mentioned.  People of colour are never mentioned.  Intersections of oppression are ignored.  I ask the group to look at the sheets and tell the others what they want to see changed; how these organisations could do better.  The participants have lots of ideas.  I’m happy to see their enthusiasm.  As soon as the workshop ends, my stomach bunches into painful knots.  I want to hide in a corner.  I do exactly that until someone I know spots me.

I blame myself some days for being raped.  I feel like I should have known what to do.  I should have been able to stop it.  I should have pushed them away.  I shouldn’t have been frozen in place.  I shouldn’t have waited until they left and I knew I was safe before I started crying.  Anxiety makes it difficult to breathe when I think that way.  Anxiety makes me want to step in front of a bus.  Somehow I keep on living.

Twitter and Tumblr have been lifelines for me; when I was in hospital, it kept me in touch with people I know who live thousands of miles away.  Tumblr in particular lets me see images of people similar to me, all of whom seem to live in the U.S.  Twitter is great, but it is also chock full of mean people who slip into my mentions with racist, biphobic and sexist trash.  My block hand is strong.  But my anxiety is stronger.  I dread clicking on the little bird symbol most days.  Sometimes I want to smash my computer into pieces.  The only thing stopping me is knowing I wouldn’t be able to watch Steven Universe otherwise.

I was a survivor before I started writing this.  I’m a survivor when I speak in front of hundreds of people.  Reading my smutty stories out loud in the past has prepared me well for public speaking.  But when I’m alone, the anxiety barges in to the front of my mind.  When I’m in crowds, I want to disappear into the shadows.  Bisexual activism makes me feel like a confident, competent human.  It also fills me with despair when I see how aggressive it makes (mostly lesbian and gay) people.  I stand on the edge of a knife, trying to balance the positive things my activism can do, with the hatred it exposes me to.  I feel anxiety pushing me on to the blade.

I’m invited to speak at Totnes Pride in Devon.  I accept without hesitation.

- Jacq Applebee

Follow Jacq on twitter @applewriter and read more by Jacq at www.j-Applebee.tumblr.com and www.bisofcolour.tumblr.com

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There is no shame in not taking advice that is not accessible to you

Creating these positive affirmation pieces has been an interesting journey for me, as they were very much out of my artistic comfort zone. They aren't in the style that I usually draw in and differ greatly from all the drawings in my notebooks over the past few years. 

But when I first started making them, seeing the deep emotional response from people who were sharing the most vulnerable parts of themselves with me was a really incredible experience. I knew then that this was an important project for me to take on. 

When I create these affirmations I ask myself two things. The first is: what do I need to remind myself of? These are often reminders that I need. Each affirmation is very personal. It relates to my own healing, which is sometimes very tumultuous and exhausting. And the second thing i ask is: is this advice accessible? I loathe positive rhetoric that is just coming from a place of privilege. Advice has to be accessible, otherwise it's meaningless. It has to be relevant to marginalized folks, otherwise it's exclusive and elitist and I'm not OK with that. 

I want to thank each and every person who has allowed one of my pieces to have a space in their life, even just for the brief moment that they see it. That means a lot to me. 

-  Hana Shafi AKA Frizz Kid

You can see more of Frizz Kid’s art at http://thefrizzkid.tumblr.com/ and on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/thefrizzkid/

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The Hermit, The Waif, The Witch and The Queen

CW: misogyny, gendered stigma surrounding psychotic disorders, dissociative disorders and personality disorders

The Hermit, The Waif, The Witch and The Queen. These categories represent the stigma still present against feminine-coded mental health conditions, and show the demonisation of women – mothers in particular – still prevalent in psychiatric circles. This piece was my response to the intersection of gender and mental illness.

I created this work in response to a book named Understanding the Borderline Mother, which delineates how one can categorise women/mothers with Borderline Personality Disorder into four subtypes. I was struck by the still-prevalent stigma against certain mental health conditions which are seen as 'frightening' – namely psychotic disorders, dissociative disorders and personality disorders – and how this stigma affects how patients are regarded by doctors, families and society at large.

The names are so undoubtedly feminine-coded, reflecting the specifically gendered lens through which this condition is viewed. Although it is likely that the ratio of men: women with the condition is roughly 50:50, the actual statistic for diagnoses of BPD is overwhelmingly female, due to sexist assumptions about expression of emotion and trauma.

The masks were intended to represent the silencing and control of women's emotions by the psychiatric industry, as well as stereotypes forced onto women with mental health conditions – looking in particular at the detrimental effects of pushing cruel, stigmatising 'personalities' onto those with a condition, causing a fragile and unstable sense of self. This stigma ultimately serves to retraumatise women by branding them as 'unstable' and 'manipulative' towards others, instead of recognising that Borderline Personality Disorder is natural consequence of unmanageable life events.

- Carys Reilly-Whitehouse

You can see more of Carys’ work at caryswhitehouse.com and facebook.com/caryswhitehouse, and follow her on twitter @carystweed

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“Excerpts from 2013”: I am owning all the things you ever said to me

CW: emotional and sexual abuse

“Excerpts from 2013” is a collection of abusive things my ex partner said to me during and after our relationship. Paired with my photography, it acts as a therapeutic documentation of the relationship.

I mean let us try not to inconvenience others! We are conditioned to feel that the worst thing we can do is to offend or hurt another person, even if it allows ourselves to be hurt immensely in the process.

Emotional manipulation methodically wears down self worth and confidence. The trust in my own perceptions had been entirely warped. Remember when you slapped me across the face in first year and then went on to praise me for defending myself and hitting you back? It was all subtle, smooth, quiet and shrouded in friendly propositions and flirty apologetic messages.

But there is power in resistance and anger. I must stop trying too hard to hold myself and others up to standards that I did not set myself. Courageous men don’t make excuses. This pain has changed me but will not define me. And although it is seemingly impossible to leave the past behind and to be rid of such immense pain, I can confidently state that I am whole. I am unstoppable. 

“Excerpts from 2013”: I am owning all the things you ever said to me.

- Rachel Woroner

You can visit Rachel’s website here and blog here.

You can purchase the full zine and other works by Rachel here.

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This is how you might die

CW: suicide ideation, eating disorders, self harm

Your mother warned you not to go too far – you don’t know how to swim well yet, she says, so stick closer to the coast. Only where you can still stand. “What will happen if I go further?” you ask. She flaps her hands around her, dancing, and tells you you will drown. “You will go into the sea and your father and I won’t be able to bring you home.” So you take your child body into the water, thinking it is not the smartest idea to let a child be so close to deciding her own fate. 

You walk until your feet leave the sand, and you bop up and down, up and down. Should you kick your legs? You’ve seen people do that on Baywatch. You try it, but you feel too heavy. You try moving your arms, but you are holding the sunburned tips of emerald water, and you don’t want to move your arms downward. “This is not going to work” you decide, and you are glad. You turn back to make sure no one is watching, and then you stop kicking altogether.

 Every now and then you think about that day. Walking into the sea, dying in your favourite swimsuit and leaving your family only with happy photographs and hair accessories. Gilded gold, buried in a seabed like a perfect crab in shell. As a child you dreamt of dying beautiful and beautifully, but at 15 you got hit by a car. It ripped through your face, your arms, your legs. Your body became a stain shaped like a birthmark, and your mother dragged you to a plastic surgeon who suggested additional work to other parts of your face – you could be pretty, but you are not symmetrical. You refuse to go back. Your father asks again, after you complete months of physiotherapy and begin walking, if you’d like plastic surgery. You ask why, and he says that while you might not mind the scars now, as you grow older, you won’t be as forgiving. “Think about it,” he says, tickling your toes. You were relieved for a few months that the car didn’t kill you. Your parents told you that the prayers of poor people in Indonesia, where they’d donated cows and goats last Eid in your name, stretched that distance between life and death. Everyone tells you that the scars look horrible, what a pity, but to be thankful. Be thankful. You are such a lucky girl.

 The thoughts start to fill the room again like a filtering light and now you think about dying even more intensely, hoping it will happen soon, and softly. Like egg-drop soup. “Don’t let it ruin my face, don’t let it ruin my face, don’t let it ruin my face,” you repeat, again and again and again, looking both ways as you cross the street but not looking at all when you start slicing your legs into ribbons. Now you relapse between apologies, and you’ve retired those earlier thoughts about dying. You don’t think you can speak of ‘sorrows’ honestly, so you don’t speak about them at all. When you came to Cambridge, everyone talked about death and it surprised you – you always thought only those stupid enough to be ungrateful (like you) thought about death all the time. Thought about it like shade and shelter and fresh air to breathe. So you rearrange your features when listening to them, carefully referring only to the days or weeks or months that were better than others. You express sympathy, but your years move past their weeping and there is no point in pretending that you are not just barely a petal falling.

 It was in the turning of winter into spring, as clouds began threading garden-tangled trees in courtyards, when you began to feel certain: it will happen when you grow tired of pulling fingers like rabbit-tails from a hat. It will happen when the sharp sun streams down your throat, sprouting flowers from seaweed, and you have to call the plumbers twice. There will be no third time and it finally won’t matter what you soil. Time already made its black and blue knot. When you came to uni, you thought you were so smart you could trick the knot by loosening the buttery muscle around it. But the weave kept moving in opposite directions, and eventually you got so confused you fastened your flesh around it like a candyfloss cradle instead.

 You are a child sleeping only when she passes out, suffocating into her pillow, counting down seconds into jewelled minutes. You are a child rushing into the kitchen on Eid to burn her legs on the oven door, the sides of her palms on the stove, an ear on a big metal pot. You are a child reading Foe and dreaming for weeks about Friday, about being lowered into a film of water so dense your screaming would take on shapes you could juggle. ‘But she is so quiet’ you imagine your mother thinking. ‘How can she be drowning when she doesn’t make a sound?’ And then you see her flapping her arms, dancing in the sand again, her ruby coloured cover-up curling in the breeze. You wonder how you ever believed she could keep you safe: this was a woman who’d never even seen someone hold their breath. God gave you to her, knowing this.

 And as you fantasize about all the ways life might end, you hope you wrote this as a patient ghost in a grave opened like a mirror.

- Nami H

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It’s Okay

Excerpts from a zine.

Drawing from Tara Brach’s book “Radical Self Acceptance”, It’s Okay is an exploration of self care, self affirmation and self love. It serves as a reminder to be kind and patient with yourself, and to recognize suffering with great love and mindfulness. 

- Rachel Woroner

You can visit Rachel’s website here and blog here.

You can purchase the full zine and other works by Rachel here.

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Feeling

CW: detailed description of self harm, depression, anxiety

The last couple of things I wrote about depression were accompanied by some extremely terrible (if well received) doodles. Thank you for your grace with regard to my lack of artistic talent. I’m not sure I can do many drawings for this. Partly because they’d be a bit graphic, but mostly because hands are damn hard to draw.

This blog/story/piece of writing, lacking any apparent structure or purpose, is about self-harm and the void it momentarily appears to fill.

(Note: please do not read this as necessarily speaking for my life or mental state, as it is now or at any defined point in the past - I’m not putting any kind of time frame on this. Just know that I am, at the time of writing, making use of another widely-used and trusted coping technique: some voids are best filled with cake.)

The first thing to say might be that, for the longest time, it did not cross my mind that I was self-harming. It was like those ‘I had no idea I was pregnant’ stories you read about in trashy magazines, where you silently yell ‘How the hell could you not know?’, internally smug that you would never be so stupid.

The second thing might be that I’m kind of scared that nobody will want to speak to me anymore. Not that people haven’t been great (and I mean really, really great) and understanding before, but this seems different.

If you’ve experienced depression, anxiety or any ‘mental’ illness, you’ll know that the experience can have an extreme physical dimension. But for others, self-harm may bring what was before simply a concept - something that existed in theory, in its own ‘mental’ dimension - crudely into the physical realm. It is much easier to be repelled, even repulsed, by a physical fact than an idea; now there is something ‘real’ to back away from.

   Please don’t.

  I have always been a coward. Even though I declare that Jesus has saved me and that He loves me, lives in me and makes me brave, the gulf between His heart and mine is wide and deep. Although I have His love, and He pursues me unerringly across the gulf, I turn my back and almost unthinkingly abuse my heaven-sent body, enslaved.

Even the way that I’ve hurt myself is cowardly. No sharp blade, no searing pain, no pooling blood.

No.

When the voices inside my head compete and become so loud that they are all drowned out and I have no emotion, only the ache that courses the length of my body and drags me to the floor, I search for a sense. I search for a feeling.

My hands are knives and I bring them up to my head and beneath my hair. When they come back down again, my fingers are streaked with blood and the soft sting of my violence reminds me that I am alive.

I search for a feeling.

A few weeks ago I wore a long necklace with a heavy pendant to work. Walking home is often when I find myself becoming empty, a kind of ‘walking void’, if you will. Something to do with a sudden lack of distractions and interactions, I guess. Anyway, I began walking home as usual, and the ache of the void arrived. It doesn’t seem to make much sense to be both feeling nothing and in pain from this nothingness, but perhaps that’s what makes it seem inescapable.

I search for a feeling.

As I search, I begin to walk faster. My necklace bobs against my torso, and as I speed up, it swings more violently against me. Thud, thud, thud. There is something sharp on my pendant. Oh, sweet feeling. There are small bruises on me when I get home.

     It goes in cycles.

Sometimes it’s not there. Sometimes there’s brightness to the sky and an excitement in waking up. I dance around a lot on those days.

Otherwise, there are crying times and nothing times.

The first time I knew I was depressed, back in the second year of uni, it was because I realised I had cried every day for multiple months. Those stretches can go on for a while.

Now I find myself in a nothing patch.

Some moderately crappy things have happened over the last few months, and I cannot cry for them. There is only the pain of empty, and no satisfaction to be found in mourning.

Some things I know to be wonderful have also happened lately, but the joy cannot seem to penetrate my skin.

I want to cry for my dead dog, ill mother, boy who stole my heart across the sea. And I want to laugh as hard as I used to at your drunk dancing, friend.

I search for a feeling.

(Save me a beer, I’ll be there shortly.)

- Elise Morton

You can see more of Elise’s writing and comics on her blog.

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A Little Dusk Dementia

I rescued the Plath's

hardcover from the tentacles

of your dementia,

where spittle has congealed into

the small cracks of its leather bound.

With an abundance of new

questions that remained blissfully

ignorant to the simple act of

you folding your hand in mine,

I felt the tenuous stitching

along the toothed dunes beneath

your fingers, as if against my touch,

yours was an ireful heaving

across the gentle moras

of ambient spa water.

Besides you, time hauled long and taut

with me tracing eyes of

amber-blue over

the half-world of your winter:

my halting calm amidst

the deterioration of your sensory.

On days like this when December cold

left claws on the pale downpour

engulfing all our hopes and promises,

like a golden naiad felled

from an early kingdom,

you raised your arms skyward,

mouth gushed words toward some

lucent celestial beings

only they alone could pick through.

While I, wrapped myself around

you, a stranger, made home about

your unknowing arms.

- Lana Bella

A Pushcart nominee, Lana Bella is an author of two chapbooks, Under My Dark (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2016) and Adagio (forthcoming from Finishing Line Press), has had her poetry and fiction featured with over 200 journals. See more of Lana's work here. 

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This Space Relaunch: Call for Submissions

After some time out, we are pleased to announce that This Space is relaunching! We’ve got lots of exciting plans, including new collaborations, editors’ blogs and a summer relaunch event.

But most importantly, our relaunch means that we are calling for submissions. If you are interested in creating anything related to mental health, from poetry to prose, from personal accounts to scientific pieces, and from comics to fine art, please get in touch. This Space is entirely dependent on submissions, and we’d love to hear from you!

Submissions can be sent to [email protected].

You can find out more about submitting and read our editorial policy here. To find out more about This Space, click here.

We look forward to hearing from you.

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Finding Salvation in the Beatles after a Breakdown

CW: nervous breakdown, anxiety, depression, insomnia, negative experiences with anti-depressants

Five years ago, following a string of disappointments and difficulties, I had a nervous breakdown. Mounting anxiety caused by a toxic job, financial insolvency and a botched romance gave away to chronic insomnia, which escalated into daily panic attacks that made me fear I would not last into the impending New Year that was 2010.  

Desperate for relief from the pain that had made my life unbearable, I sought help from a revolving circle of psychiatrists and specialists. I even consulted a cognitive behavioural therapist for assistance in weaning me off my short-term dependency on Ambien. Some were helpful while others, which included a nurse practitioner who prescribed an anti-depressant that turned me into a brain-atrophied zombie who could barely walk a block down her busy New York City neighbourhood, let alone perform her job, were not.

But there was one aid for my woes that became an elixir for my anguish, soothing me in a way that the confluent medication and nonstop therapy sessions didn't – and that was the Beatles.

John, Paul, George and Ringo.

And it wasn't just their music that was a salve to my mental malaise. It was anything in the Beatles canon or lore, be it books on the Fab Four that I'd spend hours poring over at the now-defunct Barnes and Noble outlet at Lincoln Center, or previously aired TV documentaries posted on YouTube that I'd watch and listen to on a headset at work when I was either on a down time or engaged in some monotonous drudgery.

The Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Check. The Beatles performing in Shea Stadium at their landmark 1965 concert. Check. The Beatles recounting their history in interviews, whether together or separate. Also, check.

It didn't matter what it was. Every day I’d grab my Beatles fix with an appetite I could not muster for Ativan, Lexapro or any of the other infernal pills that doctors would insist I take as if they were dishing out peanuts and I was their ongoing human experiment in a cage.

Not that my affection for the Beatles was an aberration or a sudden overnight occurrence. During the summer of 1974, almost 41 years ago, when I was teetering between childhood and adolescence, I had “discovered” them with a friend Melanie. Every day, either she or I would go to each other’s house, play the LPs until one of our parents would cry out for mercy. We would then stop and talk Beatles. We read Hunter Davies’ bio of the Beatles and voraciously consumed every Beatles-related article we could find.

She developed a crush on John Lennon, finding an affinity with his brooding introspectiveness and acid wit while I gravitated toward Paul McCartney because, well, he was cute.

And when one of them was on TV, we'd alert each other immediately as if relaying an important news bulletin and then rehash and dissect the event the next day with a gravity of purpose that pundits often reserve for economic summits. We were proud and unabashed Beatlemaniacs, the second generation.

By the time Ken Russell's over-the-top movie adaptation of The Who's Tommy was released a year later, our Beatlemania subsided. We had found new music idols to worship. She loved the anarchic antics of The Who's wildman drummer Keith Moon while I adored frontman Roger Daltrey, in all his blond rock god glory, because well, he was hot.

But I never forgot my early love for the four lads from Liverpool and neither did Melanie. Shortly after the murder of John Lennon, we commiserated with each other in a long telephone conversation – even though at that point in time we were both attending college and had long been out of each other's orbit.

So it was hardly surprising that when I was at my personal and professional nadir, I reached out to the Beatles for my salvation. Perhaps in immersing myself in all things Beatles, I was looking to reactivate an innocent, simpler time, when life didn't seem to be about money, status, career, relationships and other pressure points that can make adulthood a brutally harsh experience.

I did recover from that breakdown, but it was a slow and laborious process. More so than any medication or therapy session, it was the Beatles that offered me the same sheltering comfort in 2010 as they did the summer of ’74. Except this time, they were a special bridge back to a period when hope, in the form of a still-unmined future, stretched out before me like a limitless expanse, vast and welcoming. All you need is love indeed.

- Iris Dorbian 

When not writing personal essays, Iris is a business and arts journalist who has written for a wide variety of outlets that include Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Venture Capital Journal, DMNews, CFO.com, Playbill, Theatermania and Back Stage. She is the author of "Great Producers: Visionaries of the American Theater," published by Allworth Press in August 2008. Her personal essays and short stories have been published in Blue Lyra Review, B O D Y, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Embodied Effigies, Jewish Literary Journal, Gothesque Magazine and Skirt!

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The Probable Answer

CW: schizophrenia, coprophilia, hospitalisation

A Purifier from New Haven 

Whippoorwill

sometimes here, sometimes there

poisons everything.

I suspect myself in small amounts.

You could be a juggler of discs

dying in February,

a person without shoulders,

monsters after midnight.

As we know, destruction

is no simple thing.

I have nothing more to say

so there is nothing more to be done.

Neither alive nor perished,

my sanity is a discarded wrapper.

As of now,

I cannot confirm or deny

the appearance of madness

at my window bars.

You are an old hospital,

striving to cure

the purity of scarification

the surety of mutilation.

You are a new prison, in ample amounts

a terrible calling in woods.

The Probable Answer

Here he is,

hopping around the room in a soiled hospital gown

telling me he’s got far more serious problems

than the diagnoses listed in his chart.

It’s not the schizophrenia that he’s worried about

nor the coprophilia,

he’s just trying to prove that the university

didn’t give him due process when they let him go

after they found him intentionally clogging toilets

so he could more easily collect specimens.

Though it’s been difficult, he thinks he’s finally

figured out a way to show the deans and chancellors

how his study of recent human coprolites

directly relates to teaching classical literature.

On a spreadsheet filled with graphs and cryptograms,

hangman puzzles and anagrams,

are the lyrics from the Go-Go’s song “Head over Heels “

and the line

I must be losin’ it, ‘cause my mind plays tricks on me

is circled so severely that the paper has torn through.

He lets me study his work for a while and then

eagerly asks what I think of his solution.

I point out the line

…no time to think, looks like the whole world’s outta synch.

He nods slowly, solemnly, then produces a pen he’s had

concealed somewhere on his person

and begins a furious restructuring of multiple theories.

I turn to leave. He asks if I’m leaving

because I have to use the bathroom.

He tells me his toilet is broken

but it’s fine if I have the urge to go.

Silverfish lie exposed. The entire planet has shifted

out of alignment one foot

to the left.

- Richard King Perkins

Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He is a three-time Pushcart nominee and a Best of the Net nominee whose work has appeared in more than a thousand publications.

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What can be said

CW: depression, anxiety

Yesterday my granny talked to me

on the phone

about depression and anxiety.

She didn’t tell me about

not being able to leave the house

for a time, when my mum was small

She didn’t tell me about

that blackout;

she didn’t tell me

about

the younger times before she knew the name.

  But she was excited to connect

myself to herself

in a way I resented

and liked.

  She didn’t tell me off

for not replying to her emails.

She didn’t know about the stutter

that falls over me now -

now and then -

the throes of a wave

that smothers towards silence.

  She told me things I know,

in a way that said

- you are not the only

only

- It Passes (by, under, through, etc.)

- not forever, and returning

  turning up in the mornings,

did I find that? The morning

was the worst

when finding it still there and looming

like dust in the air

  no faults at fault, she said,

And were there people?

Do I have people?

  I think yes,

somehow, I think,

they stick -

stir up the sludge

so water flows

before the sediment falls.

  - Good,

and do they understand?

  This is not a thing that can be answered,

Granny,

I don’t think they can

if I don’t want them to,

and if they do, how sad for them,

playing stuck in the mud with me.

  But if you want to know,

do they allow for it,

do they have their own experience,

then yes -

  for the most part, they know

heads are various

and don’t always play ball.

And they know thoughts

scrunched into bombs aren’t always lies

but being a destroyer of worlds

can happen when you lose sight of

the whys and the what nexts.

  And day to day, they

look for me when I peter out or fade,

so allowing for

(a cliché)

that greatest of human drives,

which urges us to turn our faces upward.

  We are coming to the close of the call.

A perfect end is not possible

because the cure is not the end

but the keeping going

- Jesse Haughton-Shaw

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Dream Nation: Be Well

CW: manic depression, stigma surrounding mental health

Last year, I discovered that people with mental health problems can be successful. Specifically, I discovered that people with mental health problems can be successful professionals: capable, ambitious and influential. I owe this discovery to Kay Redfield Jamison.

In her memoir, An Unquiet Mind, Jamison describes her wonderfully successful career in academic medicine alongside her experiences of manic depression. Before this, people with mental illnesses were always the unfortunate, the dangerous or simply ‘the other’. Over the last two years, I have met (and sought out) numerous people whose stories have challenged these common depictions and I found that it is not a contradiction to look well, do well and be well and have mental health problems.

With this in mind, I joined Dream Nation, as their mental health editor and worked with them to produce Be Well, a seven day mental health campaign to raise awareness of mental health issues among practical dreamers. These are people who dream big, aim high and put in the work needed to get to where they want to go. The campaign explored the ways in which our mental health can interact with different aspects of our identity, career and relationships as well as how we can look after ourselves and support each other. We concluded the week with a live discussion, where I was joined by four panelists, including Megan Dalton, the founder and editor of This Space. We were also joined by the Twittersphere with people tweeting in questions ranging from how to manage mental health problems at work and discussing mental health in schools, to our favourite self care routines.

In An Unquiet Mind Jamison simply states “Moods are complicated and very much a part of who we are. People would be very boring without them.” We all have mental health, just like we all have physical health. Sometimes our health is good and at other times it is not. Sometimes we can manage our own health, and other times we need support. Sometimes, poor health has a trigger and can be quickly remedied, while at other times poor health is chronic and we oscillate between experience periods of wellness and periods of ill health.

So when we talk about mental health, we are not simply talking about the 1 in 4 who will experience a mental health problem at some point this year, we are talking about the 4 in 4 who have mental health that can be in a good state or a not-so-good state. This means that wellness should be an aim for all of us. And yes, this includes the capable, the ambitious and the influential.

Check out the Be Well Campaign at dreamnation.co.uk/bewell  or on Twitter #DNBeWell.

- Samara Linton

[thisspaceblog]

We should talk about the elephant in your room

CW: depression, eating disorders, memory loss, hallucinations, mania

It stumbles in one morning, sometime between breakfast and waiting for 9am Oprah to start. It makes itself comfortable right away, sits in the corner and starts to slowly sip at your leftover coffee. You don’t mind much. You’re 14, it’s the holidays and everyone else seems busy. You’re surprised when it stays the night - staying even after Oprah ends and the next day’s Oprah ends. It stays even when school re-opens and you don’t quite trust to leave it at home, but you know you can’t bring it to school. It curls your hair in the mornings, straightens your clothes, makes tea. It helps you clean house, slowly making castles out of your belongings, propping them like memories high against your wall - your first striped tube top, your second-hand wallet, the cards you used to get for birthdays. Friendship bracelets. Your plastic comb. 

There are times you come home from school and you don’t know how to feel when you only see empty drawers. This is not your room. This is not your house. You’ve forgotten where the cutlery is, where the toilet paper is, where your files and books and music hide. The last time you asked it about all your stolen things it just gestured about, pointing here and there - the ceiling, the window sill, the dustbin. You know things don’t misplace themselves, so you go to where it smears like a smudge in the pocket of your room, near your bed. You demand your stuff back. All of it. Now. You need these things. You’re running late. You have a movie to catch. It laughs at you when you raise your voice. This is when it stands up, slowly stretching – alligator skin unfolding tight, moving like lace across branches. It is much taller than you are, and you suddenly realize: you forgot to watch it grow. The next year you spend all your time home after school, careful careful, biting your nails and watching it closely. It stares back.

Before, people used to come over. Your friends, family, people you knew. But after it started to take the window chair hostage, hog all the cushions, they came less and less. This was when you start to apologize for everything. You apologize for the dirty cups. Apologize for not having food in the fridge, for a room that is always too cold. You don’t think people feel welcomed, so you try harder. And still, they stay away, wondering why you have a pile of stuff in the corner, and nothing on the shelves. You want to tell them there was a thief, but you didn’t think it would make sense. So you don’t say anything. You just sit still and watch your love turn strange. That year, on your birthday, you eat a whole cake in the dark. It helped you lie about it, keeping crumbs underneath tissues and wiping your mouth. It scooped toilet water back into your throat when you couldn’t vomit anymore, and you let it wrap its arms around you as the blood vessels in your eyes burst. It is your birthday and God lit the sky with fireworks. 

When your mother comes over, she sits on the edge of a chair by the door. She sits there and doesn’t ask you anything, pretends not to notice that there is never any mess. She keeps guard. She is more suspicious of thieves than anyone you know. You think it is maybe because it slept in her room before stumbling into yours. She doesn’t talk about it though, and you never ask. She tells you dinner is at 6, 6, always at 6, and you should come. You know she wants to cut it down. But she only knows how to feed it.

It starts to leave on its own sometimes. Comes and goes as it pleases, always already arriving only when you’re convinced it’s left. It becomes more like wallpaper in your room, or a lamp, or an old clock. It’s there, it’s just there, not a stranger or a chokehold, just a rug or photo frame or jewellery box. When it no longer scares you, that is when you fear it most. What is it? Will it ever go? You find books and things on the internet, but nothing tells you how to make it stay away. You try new hobbies. A new school. You start going on holiday every few months, and in every hotel you choose a room where you can see every corner.

You went to school those few years and this one girl tells you it came by her room, stayed the summer. And then left. This other girl mentions that some weeks she sees it in the corner, but it leaves as soon as she fits into her jeans. Someone else recounts the time she was 13 and it paid her a visit but now it’s gone and it’s been gone for a while. Since her father left the city. Be stronger they tell you. BE STRONG BE STRONG GET UP GET UP. Be brave. Kick it out. You take their advice a few nights after you pass out in the school bathroom, determined to rip it from the walls. Chase it with bleach. You unweave it from everything you own, until your fingers are raw flesh braided thin to your bone and that night you sleep the best you’ve slept in years.

Then you wake, and it whispers good morning as you turn towards the sunlight. You see it bloom black and blue bubbles across every vein in your body. As you turn 18, you realize it’s too late to call this a burglary.

[thisspaceblog]

This Brilliant Eunuch

CW: autism, being gendered and sexualised/de-sexualised by others

This piece is part of a short collaborative series featuring submissions to ‘Disability/Sexuality’, a zine exploring the intersections between the two. You can read about the zine here.

I have, since the age of 7 1/2, had a diagnosis of Autism. Specifically, it was Asperger’s Syndrome but that particular subcategory has fallen out of favour in recent years. This has marked my whole adolescence and therefore the dominant part of my sexual development. The social obstacles it can cause are fairly well-documented so I won’t go into excessive detail in covering them; it is simply sufficient to say that it caused awkwardness and shyness. I have a relationship with it which is fairly mixed. I wouldn’t, if I had the choice, get rid of it as that would be negating a rather large and complex part of my personal history. Nor would I celebrate it without reservation, as parts of my life would have undoubtedly been easier without it. Its role in my sexuality is not remarkable in the sense of my own awareness, but in the moulding of how I was gendered, sexualised and de-sexualised in the eyes of others it was a prime mover.

The creation  and development of sexuality is no Genesis moment, regardless of how Adam and Eve saw each other after the eating of the fruit, but a Nicean Council - a discursive, lengthy and some might say stunting process denoted by authority. To be Autistic was to be in the eyes of the council (consisting of pop psych magazines, peers and some more conservative parts of the medical establishment) to be distinctly unsexual. For the wish fulfilment savant type, there is no time for it. For the sensitive and nervous type, there is no taste for it. Any variation is an outlier in this model. I would point to my experiences attending a special school and my interactions with others there to disprove this, but one of the few things more pernicious than pop psychology is armchair anthropology. Instead, I turn to my own life. For part of my schooling I went to a mainstream secondary for GCSEs, and gained first hand insight into an outside view of my condition.

“She likes you”, one boy said to me in school, gesturing to an acquaintance. I felt a flutter. She was attractive, and seemed genial, and I wasn’t accustomed to being liked.

Then I soon found out that they were dating, and he was simply having me on. People tried to push my buttons, see if I was sexless or some kind of pervert. I was both a weird savant above it all, like Plato’s ideal of older men with passions like still water, or a sad wallflower who needed coaxing or coaching, to go from innocence to experience. I thought I was simply some kind of brilliant eunuch to them, but it wasn’t quite that simple. Did I need teaching a lesson in the vulgar, or was I a lonely pervert who needed dating tips? All of the above, I think. These contradictory positions were held in the minds of my contemporaries so that only in leaving that place could I become something other than an ascetic scholar, or a hermetic onanist.

That isn’t to say it gave me any sense of sexual identity or certainty. To become accepted, assimilated, I observed and I imitated. Jokes, attitudes, I internalised all of them. I became a dude, a bro, and that ghastliest of chimeras, the dudebro. I like a great deal of different sorts of people, but I would not be friends with the person I was at that time in my life. My memory, my aptitudes that were in part good and in part because of my disability, made me a chameleon in a junkyard. This persisted while I gained some sexual experiences  - all of them heterosexual. I was afraid to give any credence to anything gay that may have popped into my head or heart over the years - until I came into contact with feminists and feminist theory. It began to click, bit by bit. I started to unlearn what I had learned. Over the years I learnt instead gentleness and softness, and that a man could do both and it was fine. I learnt that it was ok for men to explore sexuality, and I did so, coming out piecemeal but without definitive labels. Most recently, and perhaps most importantly, I learnt that being a man wasn’t the only option.

I learned these codes of conduct, these ideas that weren’t mine, to shrug off the labels and preconceptions others had of me, simply to take on others which were even more toxic and coercive. Couldn’t I just be a man, I thought, that was a simple way of doing things. Conditional acceptance, given a few hundred conditions. I set my sights low then, perhaps as I was just trying to survive adolescence which is fraught enough anyway, and followed where others pointed. I saw only their signs, their paths. With the indepencence and hindsight of adulthood, I now come to a point where I can look, and I can choose for myself. It is exhausting enough just to imagine me being honest with myself back then, so the bravery of teenagers who feel they can question these things at that age is beyond my comprehension. I would say that all this has had a happy ending, but this is no ending. I am not a fixed point, as much as I tried to be. I am a traveler. The paths go on for many miles and in as many directions. I will go with them, until I find myself tired from the journey, and I shall lay down and rest.

-Nick Blake

This is part of a series of pieces from ‘Disability/Sexuality’ published by This Space in the run up to the zine’s publication. You can now read the zine here.

[thisspaceblog]

Intersections: Disability/Sexuality

CW: chronic pain, depression, body image, sex and sexuality

When I was struggling with an undiagnosed chronic pain disorder it seemed to alter my entire personality. I became bitter, angry, a shell of my former self, and seemingly as a side note to that, my capacity for any kind of sexuality had altered. I already had a diagnosis of severe depression and this simply complicated matters; my body each day was the thing I hated most. I looked at myself as each month passed, my posture shrinking and hunching, and thought: this illness has almost entirely claimed any sense of control I could have over my body, and with it, my sexuality.

And then I also thought: I cannot be alone.

The terms “disability” and “sexuality” both have the possibility to encompass so many different meanings and lived experiences. I have long subscribed to the notion that “disabled” exists as a political term that you can describe yourself as, but that even if you don’t use it, your illness probably falls under it. It can be ever so empowering to know this. The term “disabled” isn’t “just” for those with physical disabilities; it is a term to be claimed by people with mental illnesses, specific learning difficulties (SpLDs) such as autism and dyslexia, and more. And there’s a large chance that your experience of any of these conditions – whether you refer to them as a disability or not – has affected how you approach your sexuality. I again use the term sexuality broadly: it might be your queerness, your asexuality; it might be your approach to sexual acts themselves.

And despite this richness of experience, people simply do not talk about the way disability and sexuality interact. Disabled bodies are rendered void of all sexuality by the media, our inner lives are irrelevant to our outward “struggle”. Or alternatively, we encounter the “manic pixie dream girl” trope, the hypersexualisation or glamourisation of certain forms of mental illness. From this frustration came my desire to document my own feelings and perhaps even the feelings of others, as a small act of reclamation, writing about my own body, in my own way. Creating a zine felt the right way to do that.

From the limited exposure I’d had to zine culture at that point, I knew they were small self-published works usually revolving around an original theme (poetry, politics, riot grrrl…). So many of those that I’d seen favoured cutting and sticking and edgy aesthetics, looking and feeling both gorgeous and unattainable. I knew that I didn’t have the creative ability in me to produce anything of that calibre, and I was happy to settle for cleaner lines and much more accessible formatting.

And so I began to create this zine. It is still very much open to submissions, and in terms of deadlines – it will be done when I consider it done. I’ve had a wealth of submissions of photography, line drawing, poetry, ramblings and articles, and I hope to welcome many more. I want this zine to reveal truths about our own experiences of our bodies and sexualities, and from what I’ve seen so far, I am already achieving what I’d hoped to.  

- Jessica

@smalltownmoon

This is part of a series of pieces from ‘Disability/Sexuality’ published by This Space in the run up to the zine’s publication. You can now read the zine here.

[thisspaceblog]

It’s No Game

CW: depression, stigma, social isolation

A depressed patient once told me he was alone. “Not literally,” he added, “but effectively.” He did have friends; they just didn’t understand what he was going through. “They mean well,” he said, “but they don’t get it.”

For example, one night they invited him to a party. When he tried to explain that he couldn’t bring himself to go, they were bewildered.

The underlying assumption was that his depression was on some level a choice, and that by declining their invite he was just being difficult. For an exhausted friend or exasperated clinician, that assumption is easy to slip into. I remember a medical school classmate saying that while he appreciated the idea of psychiatry, it wasn’t for him. “I talk to a depressed person,” he said, “and eventually I want to say: pull yourself together! Snap out of it!”

I get the frustration. It’s tough to wrap your head around depression, to understand, not just intellectually, but viscerally, that it is more than sadness. It is a place, a pit with steep walls, and climbing out is no easy task.

I sometimes show curious medical students David Foster Wallace’s “Good Old Neon,” a short story in which a man who has committed suicide explains why he did it. In forty dense pages, he excoriates himself systematically, laying bare his guilt, his fears, his insecurities. By the end, even if you’ve never been depressed yourself, you feel as though you’ve caught a vicarious glimpse of something unspeakable.

Yet “Good Old Neon” is only a narrative description. You empathize with its depressed protagonist, but you don’t become him.

Depression Quest, a computer game from independent developer Zoe Quinn, lets you do just that. Billing itself as “an interactive (non)fiction about living with depression,” it opens with a few bald words of warning. “This game,” we are told, “is not meant to be a fun or lighthearted experience.”

In Depression Quest’s matter-of-fact second-person narrative, you are “a mid-twenties human being” who works at a job “that is a little boring, but pays the rent.” Ominously, you sometimes struggle with “motivation issues” that you believe are “probably your fault.”

The game plays out as a series of branching vignettes, each punctuated by a series of choices that will influence your ongoing story. As the game progresses, and your depression worsens, some of these choices become grayed out. Inevitably, these unavailable choices seem reasonable, even ideal. If only you could make yourself take them.

At one point in the game I attended a party. The first choice listed was to “enthusiastically socialize,” but I couldn’t select it. I settled for “awkwardly stand[ing] in the same spot, unsure of what else to do.”

I thought of my patient — the one who couldn’t make his friends understand why “enthusiastically socializing” was something he was powerless to do. Perhaps Depression Quest might have helped him explain himself. Perhaps not. Either way, I think it could help him — and others like him — feel less alone.

- Amandeep Jutla

Amandeep is a psychiatrist and writer in Los Angeles. Visit his site here.