“Racism is complicated, but this I know: If you’re white, and a person of color says something you’re doing is racist, they’re probably right. Not you. If a lady tells me I’m being a misogynist, or if a gay friend says I’m homophobic – I apologize, think about how they’re right, and try to change.”
—Heems (of Das Racist)
November 2011
84 posts
I just ordered Mind Over Matter Zine badges, so that I can give one away free with each order. I’m also considering a fun way to make the covers colourful and appealing.
I am way too pleased with myself about that. Small pleasures, I guess.
Also, thank you for the pre-orders I have received so far. It’s going to make printing an easier task!
Being a good ally
I had an interesting discussion with a patient about the pitfalls and difficulties of being a good ally to oppressed/marginalized people, particularly when it comes to calling out and confronting oppressive and bigoted people on their phobias and “isms.“ We went on for a while about “other people and their isms” until it dawned on us simultaneously that we needed to rephrase what we were saying from “their isms” to “our isms.” Because as liberal-minded allies we can never ever lull ourselves into thinking that we are 100% unbiased or lacking in prejudice, even if it’s only from some small and deep dark fearful recess in our mind or from our early social conditioning. Being a good ally must always include continual self-assessment and monitoring for when our own oppressive ideas, phobias and isms rear their ugly heads. It’s heartbreaking to know that after all the work I have done on myself and with this issue that I am still only human and prone to coming from a place of fear and misunderstanding.
Yes yes YES.
Play
So it seems I was under the impression that I was editing a book, and I’ve formatted enough zine pages for about 2 or 3 issues… In that case, issue #1 will come out this month, then I’ll drop issue #2 in January. Awesome!
Awesome :) How do I get my hands on it?
I’ll set up a bigcartel next week when the first batch is printed and put a link here. printed copies are £2 and you can pre-order with the ‘donate’ button on the home page here. l’ll also make a pdf copy available to download for free :)
When will the zine be available? I can't explain how excited I am, I have honestly been looking forward to it for ages haha
BLESS YOU. I’m waiting on an overdue pay cheque from my last job, then I’m getting it printed up hopefully next week. I’m looking into taking it to a local printer rather than photocopying, as I want it to be awesome quality… but we’ll see what my enquiries reveal!
I think all of the best zines are made in the dead of night. Should be finished with the master copy tonight.
An explanation of the new ‘donate’ button on the home page of mindovermatterzine:
When I started the blog for this zine, I had about 5 followers. Within a year, this has exploded to over 5000. I was initially planning to publish the printed zine on a run of about 50, but I’m getting e-mails every day from many people expressing interest in getting hold of the printed zine, and I soon realized that 50 wouldn’t be enough.
I want to make the zine accessible for all, with a pdf copy available online for free, and printed copies for £2 - just under enough to cover paper and printing (I’ve had a quote from a printing company, which will work out 0.75p per sheet cheaper than photocopying down my local post office and comes out at £2.10 per zine). To make a print run to meet demand, I’m going to have to create several hundred copies at least, but I don’t have the capital to do that, and it would be very difficult to print a single issue off each time someone buys it.
I don’t want to raise the price of the zine, because I think that would compromise accessibility. I also can’t set up a kickstarter.com page, because I don’t have a US bank account. Thus the donation button on the blog homepage.
Please don’t feel obliged to donate. If you want to just read the pdf zine online for free, I’m cool with that. That’s what it’s there for! If, however, you would like to donate a little to help me get the printed zines out there, that would be greatly appreciated. If you enter your address with the donation and it’s the price of the zine or over, I will send you a copy for free, so I guess it’s more of a pre-order than anything.
As it stands, I am currently on track to start printing before Christmas. It’s going to be a really chunky zine, with submissions by others and articles written by me. I’m determined to find a way to make it happen regardless, but I thought I’d create a donations button and see if anyone might want to help me on my way.
Thanks,
F.
ask @rethink on twitter
Ah yes, good idea. MIND also probably have a good list.
Is there anywhere I could find a list of books on mental illness, from medical and alternative sources, that you guys would suggest?
Hmm, that’s quite an open-ended question! if you give me more of an idea of what kind of thing you’re looking for, I can probably make some suggestions: 5 years of studying has given me some exposure to some great books! What disorders? What issues? Therapeutic / neuroscientific / psychological / psychiatric perspectives? Social issues? medication issues? Treatment isues?
[Trigger Warning: Discussion of suicide]
“ Some people protest carrying signs. Some people protest by making activist radical music. Sometimes people try to just make it through a day and not kill themselves, and that’s their activism for right then, because that’s all they have.”
- Kathleen Hanna
When I started working for a non-profit I found that I was one of the few people who had never volunteered, interned, or otherwise engaged with a non-profit before. I was surrounded by kids who had the luxury of not needing paying jobs, had the money from parents to study abroad or who were able-bodied enough that they could volunteer and balance a full load of classes.
To these kids, I was seen a mercenary. After all I had a paying job from the time on was 15 on. I “chose” to take more classes instead of building wells in South Africa with my church (I didn’t have a church either but … that’s a different story).
No matter how I tried, I couldn’t make them understand what it was like, at 19 years old, to suddenly be unable to trust your own body to carry you through even the simplest things. What seemed to them as blatant selfishness was a desperate struggle for survival for me. And they were too young, too sheltered and too assured of their own greatness to see that I was no less caring than they were.
And so we get me, four years later, being the last individual that anyone thinks will end up in a heaven. I do stuff to get paid, I would rather someone give us $1,000 and volunteer their time. So I don’t say what I’m thinking. That they are spoiled. That they can be kind to the faceless, nameless poor people of Africa but when faced with suffering in front of them, they turn the heads and refuse to see.
Not all the new generation of activists are like this, nor do I think that they are all from privileged places. But activism is a privilege and one not everyone shares access to.
So this quote was nice to read. Someone finally said what I hoped was true, that I’m good enough, activist enough, and that my struggle just to survive counts for something.
Relevant to discussions where ‘armchair activism’ is maligned.
[Trigger Warning: Eating Disorders] possible triggering language →
red3blog.tumblr.com
While I agree that it terrible that people with ED that don’t fall below the set BMI don’t get treated as seriously or not given priority, and that doing so would probably actually be the ambulance at the top of the cliff rather than the bottom, I can sort of see why they’re not, at least I can within my own country. In my country, the health system is not privatised. This is great in that we don’t rely on health insurance in order to pay hospital bills, but it also means that our health services are stretched pretty thin. People with EDs whose lives are not in immediate danger as it would be for those with low BMIs would not be able to receive the same level of treatment as the services are just not available. It would be great if they were, but the same issues exist across the board in all areas of healthcare. That’s just my take on things from my experience anyway.
You cannot tell from glancing at a person’s body type if they are starving to death.
[Trigger Warning: Eating Disorders] possible triggering language →
red3blog.tumblr.com
[Image: A screen cap from what I presume is a show like Jerry Springer or Oprah or something. A pale skinned fat person with long hair looks into the camera. Below them is a caption ‘Donna fears she may be anorexic’. Someone else has written below ‘SHE’S NOT. I checked.’]
Stuff like this makes me so angry. Anorexia and skinny aren’t synonyms. Anorexia is an eating disorder. It has nothing to do with what you look like.
Nothing about this is funny. Instead of laughing at other people insecurities, try to understand them.
Smh at everyone.
100% agree with the sentiment here, but I do think there is an important point to make about how fat people with ED get treated. From a clinical stand point, it actually DOES matter what you look like in getting diagnosed with anorexia. A fat person who meets every single clinical definition of anorexia will not be diagnosed with it because the clinical definition in the DSM-IV also includes body size. Instead, they get diagnosed with a catch-all, EDNOS (Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified).
Now, it must be said that many professionals are very good with treating EDNOS patients, but I’ve spoke with enough fat people who were diagnosed EDNOS (or not at all) to know there are also far too many exceptions who just don’t treat that diagnosis seriously and may even withhold treatment/diagnosis entirely. From their stories, I find myself very concerned about how we may stigmatize persons seeking treatment who exhibit all recognized anorexic behaviors but don’t have all of the diagnostic symptoms. That includes thinner people, too. I’m not entirely sure why our colloquial understanding of anorexia as being a set of behaviors is regarded as invalid for diagnostic purposes which rely exclusively on symptoms resulting from those behaviors. Additional symptoms certainly impact urgency, but I find myself deeply concerned about the results of the current approach on some patients who are labeled EDNOS entirely because of their BMI. The system is absolutely failing far too many fat people with eating disorders, and there needs to be a way to address this.
These are really important points. It really bothered me in my studies when I was always taught that, to meet the criterion for Anorexia, a person must have a BMI below 17.5. Let’s ignore for the moment the fact that the BMI is an archaic and bloody useless concept and look at how this means mental health services are treating fat people with EDs. It’s a really interesting and important area to look at; one that I haven’t quite managed to navigate through to a satisfactory conclusion myself yet.
i definantly agree with the thoughts behind this and how ppl who may not be seen as severely underweight don’t get appropriate treatment or taken seriously enough. as someone who is not severely underweight with an eating disorder i know how that overal stigma makes me feel and it’s horrible. it’s also alowed my disorder to get worse at times bc no one took it seriously. i’d like to say tho that saying these ppl are ‘fat’ may not be the best phrasing and could be very triggering for some. i know it was for me while i read it. i’m not saying it will do that to everyone but thought i might mention it in hopes to make things better for all involved.
My bad, I personally identify as fat and I know red3blog promotes semantic reclamation of fat (they are a brilliant fat activist and I thoroughly recommend their blog). I did put an ED trigger warning, but perhaps should have been more expansive.
Well it seems like this issue has been resolved but I’ll add my two rambling cents anyway.
Raising awareness is a form of activism and Tumblr is a platform that reaches a lot of people. I’m interested in the way words are misused/stigmatize shit in general so I think the content of this blog is valuable. Gathering examples and discussing it all is a sort of intellectual exercise that has helped me explore how I feel about various terms and the broader picture of how everyday messages affect the way others & I view mental illness. I wrote earlier about how I feel about the phrase “she suffers from mental illness” - its not nitpicky and waste of time, it helped me realise how I feel about myself when that’s used as a discription and made me think about a term I’d like better (“struggles with mental illness” or “lives with mental illness”).
YES.
Language also reflects society, if it’s alright to use a word like that the prejudice is bigger and more hard to fight, it’s important to know that oppressive language show us that the way we treat a group is wrong.
YES. e.g. the fact that ‘psycho’ and ‘homicidal person’ seem to have become synonymous terms in the media. That says a lot about how the public view people with psychoses. It’s not ‘just a word’.
Truth, truth
I need to czech myself before I wreck myself because I can’t deny this
the media’s perpetuation of archaic stereotypes is ever-prominent in our society (and has been, forever) and the words and images they used to portray the mentally ill are just all sorts of wrong
and who DOESN’T pay attention to the media? it’s everywhere, it’s our lifeblood
I do agree
these are not “just words”
Ok now I’m laughing because my dad rang me today and rapped ‘chiggity check yourself before you wreck yourself’, Ice Cube style, down the phone to me. Thank you.
</cool story bro>
