Mental notes

• She was mad to be glad-o.
• She was glad to be mad-o.
• She wouldn't diagnose her.
• She was a born digresser.
• She was a bored cross-dresser.
• She was a hired class-crosser.
• She was a hip engineer.
• She worked just for her welfare.
• She was an organizer.
• She was a class-conscious hire.
• She was an urgent seer.
• She met a transabled sire.
• She preferred werewolves and ghosts to 1990s vampires.
• A sign of bipolar is "snappy dresser."
• "Fen you god a gompleggs, zum dimes id giffs you an eddypuss. You zpeak a bisl Yiddish?" Mosiac Man by Ronald Sukenick (Normal, IL: FC2, 1999), p. 138
• The collective nouns for OTTER are bevy, family, lodge or romp.
• Mentalism is to the general public and the medical establishment as sexism is to patriarchy or racism is to slavery; the term has variant and unstable usage.
• Psychophobia is literally "abnormal fear of the mind."
• Transabled is a person who wishes to be (or who perceives him- or herself to be) (but who is not or would not need to be) disabled. What is a person who is newly disabled?
• Ableism is discrimination against persons with disabilities.
• Dual-diagnosis refers to persons who are both chemically dependent and otherwise mentally ill.
• Mental illness diagnoses have negatively replaced profession and assimilated European immigrant groups and branches of Christianity as sources of belonging and identity.
• Labeling, branding, mark(et)ing, targeting, scapegoating, victimizing, pigeonholing, programming.
• Revising, rewriting, reworking, rephrasing, researching, drafting, editing.
• Readings

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MEMORANDUM:

RE: �Go Gay (or Not) & Make a Mess of the Mess We're In�

[...] I'm writing prose drafts at Ana Verse for the month of May for Mental Health Month. Diagnosed people, who are sometimes (mis)represented by "advocates" and not organized and often isolated or closeted, are finding it difficult to "join up" with any other group: Even disability has its hierarchies, starting in the top half with physical disabilities. The "recovery" community of drug addicts and alcoholics rejects mental illness as false labeling if it applies to them and shuns people who take medication and so forth. The Mad Pride movement rejects conventional medical treatment for mental illnesses [based on mistreatment by that system] while the news media play "good doctor" in reports on the "bad doctors" of psychiatry and Big Pharma and the lay population goes about "de-diagnosing" friends (armed with news articles) and "diagnosing" others using the DSM-IV in a system where it is perceived that ---> outside dx = freedom and inside dx = captivity.

The best word I've found to apply to this state of affairs is "psychophobia," which literally means "abnormal fear of the mind." "Psychopharmophobia" may have its uses as well.

"Straight but not narrow."