Special Issue: Mental Health

Visions of Louisa (Today you play jazz; tomorrow you betray the fatherland) The room was often stuffy with people’s words and flowing stained carpets of dehydrated brains, Crowded as droplets in the rain, piling down the matter of an unforgivable storm, And small metal cases filled with pills ceased in their overtaking of your youthful days, And alcohol spilt into cushions with the bottles left on window sills, Acid pain and backwashing, lava state towards the back of your no

You say, “The best day of your life was the day you met me.” Drew says, “Welcome to the team!” We go out for dinner, and you introduce me to Ethiopian food. You pick up the check without a second thought. Drew gets me up to speed on a new project during our lunch break. We pay for our own meals. You want to cuddle on the couch while we watch TV. Drew sits diagonally across the table from me during our team meeting. You drag the trash and recycling cans out to the curb at nigh

I’m all the way at the very top of the ladder, now what? I’m supposed to be working up here, pulling merchandise to restock the sales floor. And yet, I could, I don’t know, fall off the ladder? I didn’t say jump, I said fall. Accidents happen all the time at various jobs. It is awfully high up here, and a fall would fix everything. Except what it wouldn't fix. It wouldn’t fix the mess left behind, the mess my coworkers would find, call the authorities about, that mess the fal

It was a while that I was sad in California. I thought I remembered it all until just yesterday, when I was in the shower, and a memory was unearthed of me at the prized marble table in my studio with a candle lit, fingers flapping across my laptop keyboard as I crafted an email to my then-boss containing a note from the emergency room. And my mother was there, on the lip of the bed. She’d flown in after I’d called her from the hospital phone with a plastic bracelet around my

When people talk about healing from mental illness, they talk about returning to society. They talk about reintegration, reconnection, and reengagement. Doctors say the goal is to get you back out there—back among people, back into the community. The language is always hopeful. Healing means learning to trust again. Healing means rediscovering connection. Healing means finding your way back to the world. Mental health campaigns repeat the message with cheerful certainty: huma

In a sea of social media content that is damaging to the minds of impressionable youth, hustle culture is an increasingly popular online attack strategy. Influencers have brainwashed countless young people into thinking that mental health must be ignored to maximize productivity. To that point, creators falsely claim that working grueling hours will make people too distracted to be sad. This toxic messaging, though not new, has only gotten louder in the digital age. Yet, as a