Mental Illness

When I was younger, I used to joke that I came from a long line of crazy women, and I viewed myself as one of them, attached to the destiny of crazy forever by blood. We, I believed, had an unadulterated insane gene. This belief of mine was borne of the behavior I saw in many of them (rage, violence, suicide) and of the persistent feeling that I didn't belong. Anywhere.That my thoughts and behaviors were somehow so outside the norm (many of which I learned by observing the women in my family), so strange and unacceptable, that the only possible sense I could make of myself was to align with the women who came before me, who gave me my DNA.

I also found that the literature I was drawn to had been written by so-called crazy women: Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, to name a few. I started to question why.

After a long journey of working to understand my own mental state at various times of my life and in various settings and of becoming more aware of my environment, of all the systems of which I was and am a part, from my family of origin to my culture and all in between, I have learned to re-contextualize my concept of sanity and insanity. I now understand them as concepts that shift and change depending on context, on who is doing the defining, and as a natural reaction to a world that seeks to label and categorize us all based on a stifling and impossible norm.

I have also come to realize that the crazy women who came before me were highly intuitive and creative women who had no outlet for their gifts. They were not insane. They imploded, which as far as I've been able to discern is a sane reaction to the insane circumstances in which they found themselves.

In theory, defining certain behaviors and people sometimes makes sense, but in reality, sanity is on a continuum, and its agreed-upon characteristics change over time. Even the DSM (the American Psychological Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) revises its definitions of so-called personality disorders on a semi-regular basis.

Mental health, or the perceived absence of it, can be an elusive thing. And many who have needed help with a diagnosable mental illness have been abused by the very system that exists to help them by way of unnecessary and/or prolonged electroshock therapy, incorrect and/or prolonged medication, and misdiagnosis. Organizations, such as Mind Freedom International, were created to support and advocate for those who have been abused by the system.

My intention for this issue was to publish both creative and scholarly work on the subject. I had hoped to receive submissions from those who are survivors of the system, those who are practitioners in the system, as well as those who have an interest in and affinity for a greater understanding of mental illness.

This issue is a thin one, and without prior planning, is an issue consisting solely of poets. Whatever your relationship with mental illness, I hope you will take pause to think about its true meaning and about its persistent stigma in our culture, and I hope you enjoy the poems found herein.