Here’s what could get you lobotomized at the age of 12 in 1960 here in the United States: not reacting to love or punishment, objecting to going to bed but sleeping well, daydreaming and not discussing the content of the daydreams, and turning the lights on in a room when it’s sunny outside.
These are the “symptoms” that led to Howard Dully being institutionalized from the age of four and undergoing a trans-orbital lobotomy in which an orbitoclast was inserted into his brain through each of his eye sockets.
Please don’t make jokes about lobotomies or about mental-health issues and treatments in general. And please realize that we’re headed backwards in this country where mental healthcare is concerned. Lobotomies may not be in our future, but barbaric treatments and human-rights abuses are. I pray I won’t live long enough to see them or to be on the receiving end of them.
In September 1994, [David] Bowie and Brian Eno—who had reunited to develop new music—accepted an invitation from the Austrian artist André Heller to visit the Maria Gugging psychiatric clinic. The site’s Haus der Künstler, established in 1981 as a communal home and studio, is known internationally as a centre for Art Brut—or Outsider Art—produced by residents, many living with schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders.
The acclaimed Austrian photographer Christine de Grancy documented the visit, capturing Bowie engaging with these so-called outsider artists—a term often criticised for framing artists through illness or marginality rather than authorship. For the first time, these intimate portraits will be shown in Australia, when A Day with David opens at Joondalup festival in Western Australia in March, in collaboration with Santa Monica Art Museum.
And, of note: Gugging itself carries a darker weight. Founded in the 19th century, the clinic was later absorbed into the Nazi’s Aktion T4 program, which targeted those with mental and physical disabilities, and resulted in the mass murder of an estimated 250,000 people. At Gugging alone, hundreds of patients were murdered or sent to extermination facilities.
Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, birders are calling owls “lil darlings,” and I’m here for it.
Happy New Year. Thank you all for making this one survivable.
I have to use binoculars to see the spines of the books on my high bookshelves is how I am.
I dreamed I asked someone to sign my copy of their chapbook. They were like, How do you spell your first name, Darling? Without thinking and without an ounce of humor or irony, I replied, S-A-D.
I know having a waterbed filled with zero sugar Cherry Coke that I can sleep on and drink from is impractical, but it’s what I want.
I’m stressing myself out in that way that I only am capable of stressing myself out is how I am.
Listening to Modeselektor on repeat is how I am.
Writing letters to my dead mother is how I am.
Facebook thinks I’m a library and is trying to furnish me.
Speaking the truth is not without consequences.
String art weirds me out.
More and more, I like less and less.
Oh. It’s December 20. My mother died twenty-one years ago today.
I don’t think of myself as sans serif. I think of myself as serif-free.
I bought a replica of a medieval carnival badge called “Good Harvest.” Badges like this one supposedly provided protection and ensured prosperity. The one I ordered depicts a person driving a wheelbarrow full of phalluses along a road that’s a giant phallus with legs. That’s quite the harvest. During the Middle Ages, phalluses were believed to drive out evil and confer good luck. Badges like this one were popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Google “medieval carnival badge” if you want to see an assortment of designs. There’s one that’s a vulva with legs walking around with a rosary in one hand and a phallic pilgrim’s staff in the other. That might be my favorite.
I really can’t see very well these days. I’ve needed glasses for years but have gotten around it by memorizing the eye chart right before the ophthalmologist comes in for my appointment. Today, I thought I was going to watch a program called “The Smurftown Tunes.” It was actually “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer. Not at all what I was expecting.
This new font, Sans Gender, is hard-coded to replace more than one hundred needlessly gendered terms with inclusive terms. This font is so the boss of me. I don’t know if the font would allow me to say that, but it’s true. And something has to be the boss of me. Why not a font?
I see the poet who threatened me last year has a new collection out with a press that purports to be a safe space. Congratulations all around: to the poet, the press, and the community that makes it all happen.
CNN: Quit putting Hans Nichols on your program. He’s using the term “schizophrenic” right now to describe inconsistent behavior. That’s sanist and unacceptable.
The gash in my fitted sheet created by my rough heels has grown so long that one of my calves is now stuck in it. I could free myself, but that would require a teensy bit of physical and emotional effort. I think I’m just going to stay like this all day. My heels win. The gash wins. I’m going to nap like a cruel President.
The chair of psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma in my hometown was a consultant for MKUltra. My friend told me this today. I’m super weirded out about it. My mother may have known him. He also killed an elephant at the Oklahoma City Zoo with a large dose of LSD.
There are pyrrhuloxias in Oklahoma. Hot damn.
The Nazis used the font Fraktur and its variations for their propaganda, including Mein Kampf, but banned it in 1941 for being “judenlettter,” which translates to “Jewish letters,” meaning it was linked to Jewish printers and writers, so an edict was issued to replace the font with Roman styles, which were required for all Nazi communications throughout Europe.
Now, the ousted font is one that’s accessible to people with disabilities. And its replacement is a Roman style. This is significant. This is eerie. This is history repeating itself.
It’s good to know fascism has a font. I’m still on the font thing.
Literary journals and presses that require all submissions to be set in Times New Roman may want to rethink that requirement. It’s not an accessible font for those with reading issues and learning disabilities. And now it carries an ugly political connotation to boot.
Dear Leader, I found a readable font family called Sans Gender that works for me as a dyslexic nonbinary individual, and yes I am buying it. And no, you can’t stop me. Take your Times New Roman and be on your way.
Keep your hate font away from me.
Well, I know what font I won’t be using moving forward.
Walan the wombat has stopped having panic attacks, has started doing zoomies, and is now shaking his head back and forth, which is a sign he feels happy and secure. He’s also been playing with other baby wombats. I’ll tag you on his latest video if you want to see it. And no. I’m not crying. Not even a little.
I am going to Thomas Merton myself into hermitage until I no longer say and do all the wrong things.
Yesterday in Utah, a skier had to be rescued from a crevasse, and a hiker had to be rescued from quicksand. This is why I say inside.
Hacking my gut microbiota with apple cider vinegar is how I am.
Dear New York Times: Cookies are delicious, but “cookie” is not a season. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Department of Injustice
Watching a video of a nudibranch pooping is how I am.
Apparently, the FDA is practicing evidenceless-based science now.
In the Oklahoma birding group, someone posts a photo of a dead white-throated sparrow they’ve found at their campsite, hoping to get an ID. Someone IDs the bird. Someone posts a quote from the Bible: Not even the sparrow falls to the ground without God’s notice and care. Someone posts a painting they created based on that Bible verse, an unassuming sparrow looking up into a shaft of light. A funeral of sorts is held for the sparrow. A space opens up in the group for mourning and love. This is deep birding, not the run-of-the-mill look at my beautiful bird photography skills found in other birding groups.
Sometimes, all I can say about a poem is that it exists.
I just misread a headline as “Hummus: A Monstrous History,” and everything I thought I knew about hummus flashed before my eyes before being supplanted with a darkness I could only imagine and barely fathom. But no worries. It was just humans in that headline. Not hummus. We’re all good. Enjoy your hummus, monsters.
The rock fracture at Yosemite National Park is actively occurring. Meanwhile, I am passively occurring. We all have our way, Yosemite.
As an aside, look at this glorious language. Geologists dispatched to the area of the fracture said they could hear it cracking like a frozen lake that wasn’t consolidated. That description must absolutely be used in a poem.
TFW you wake up in the morning and suddenly remember you shared one of your poems on Facebook the night before.
I’m totally involved in the life of a sick baby wombat named Walan is how I am.
I’m buying a humane catch-and-release bug trapper is how I am.
Mental illness has an architecture. That’s part of the story of asylums and treatment in this country. Central State Griffin Memorial, the hospital in my hometown, wasn’t laid out like this, but it had that same grand feel juxtaposed against the lives of those who inhabited the buildings.
Throughout its history, which spans more than a century, Central State’s story has been one of hope, ignorance, dehumanization, and harm: the same story from the asylum era to era of deinstitutionalization to today. I can barely tell any of it but have to before that history is lost. My mother worked there as a nurse and was treated there as a patient. Her relationship with Central State spanned more than three decades. That architecture was in her body, her bones part of the structure of those buildings and that land. Now, we need to make sure these places don’t come back with a new story: one of coercion, exploitation, profit, and greed.
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Source: PBS Utah video about The Kirkbride Asylum, which was the template for many other asylums across the country.
Matthew Yglesias today, on the heels of the July 24 executive order and its implementation in states like Utah: … there is a non-trivial population of chronically homeless people who suffer from addiction and other illnesses who probably should be coerced into treatment.
This is my red line, and it’s one of the areas in which I’m most in alignment with Mad In America: Coercive treatment isn’t treatment. It’s often abuse that takes myriad forms, and that abuse can happen even in something as short as a three-day hold. I know because it’s happened to me, but I’m not using inductive reasoning here. There’s data from studies and accounts from those with lived experience with mental-health issues that backs up my claims about forced treatment being harmful.
There’s also what I saw as a child in the psychiatric hospital where my mother worked as a nurse. And there’s my mother and the treatments that were forced on her and nearly killed her.
I’m not saying Matthew Yglesias is a terrible journalist or human being. I’m saying he doesn’t know what he’s saying. This is privilege at work, the privilege of not knowing and not having to know about these kinds of issues and experiences, which results in his slipping an incredibly dangerous statement into a longer piece about whether prisons have replaced mental hospitals. I’m not talking about the piece as a whole. I’m talking about that statement because it matters. He can’t even commit to it, as evidenced by that probably. Probably should. Probably should be. Probably should be coerced.
Yglesias probably. Probably should. Probably should be coerced away from privilege. Oh, wait. We would never coerce anyone in that way or in any way unless we don’t see them as fully human and therefore entitled to the same human rights as everyone else, would we? Link in comments.
I want to talk about the concentration camp being built in Utah, where I live, that will warehouse people who are unhoused and force treatment on them for real or perceived mental-health issues and substance-use issues. I want to compare it to the Topaz concentration camp that was built here in 1942 and operated until 1945 under Executive Order 9066, whose name I know because I have to know it. To survive. To advocate. To resist. To not repeat the past even as we repeat the past because others don’t know the name Executive Order 9066 or what it did, what it made our country and its people: ugly, cruel, inhumane. Those who don’t (or don’t want to) know about EO 9066 also may not know that another EO made this new concentration camp in Utah possible, the one written July 24, 2025, whose official title I won’t mention because it doesn’t describe what the order does, what it enables. It would be better if it just had a number, not a misleading title. It would be better if it didn’t exist at all.
But I can’t talk about the concentration camp because my language isn’t welcome, especially among those who also have lived experience with mental-health issues. Those I most want to communicate with will attack me for using the diversity model to give context to what I’m conveying. Those of us with lived experience with mental health have different experiences and use varied frameworks for communicating our experiences. We are and should be polyvocal. Yet there’s a growing push for monovocality—for one way of speaking, for one way of perceiving and communicating human experiences. So I’m not talking, not the way I want to be or to the audience I want to talk to. At least I have this loose take on the haibun.
The age of pastures is over. Detention is involuntary.
Your right to exist on your own terms ends now. You belong on outskirts.
Get used to the word stern. Your life is a concrete slab if you’re lucky.
Say no and go to jail. What is this if not jail by another name?
Like a rose. You think you’re like a rose when really you’re a line item
in a multi-million dollar budget. You’re our ticket, our future.
Containing you is business. Here’s a pill. We’re sorry it’s come to this.
Swallow. Concentrate means gather. We gather you today for Holy
Capital, for the bottom line. You’ve lost your right to leave, so don’t try.
These are photos of the sculpture at Glore Psychiatric Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri, that I incorporated into a poem titled “The Sculpture.” (It was first published in Muzzle’s 2015 mental-health issue as “The Letter.”)
A patient at Glore made the piece when the hospital was still in operation. I’m visiting the museum in the spring to document the writing on each piece of foamboard along with a diagram that shows where the pieces are situated in the work.
One of the museum’s employees took these photos and sent them to me. I haven’t seen the piece in person since 2015. I’m happy it’s still on display and in good condition. Anything can outlive us. Anything can matter after we’re gone, just as we matter while we’re here. These words are not “worthless,” as the sculpture’s creator says on one of the foamboard strips.
“Nothing about us without us.” That’s a guiding principle in the disability-rights movement. It applies to the mental-health justice and recovery movements as well because mental-health issues are often disabilities for those of us who live with them—sometimes because they are truly disabling and sometimes because our cultures disable us, our communities disable us, and those around us disable us because they don’t understand us (or try), don’t include us (or try), discriminate against us (often because of unexamined or dismissed bias), and subject us to their versions of who we are, which happens daily through language and actions and the way real and conceptual spaces are structured.
I bought a clicker, one of those old-fashioned ones that employees at the academic library where I worked in college used to track how many people came in each day. I’m going to use it for two weeks and track how many times I encounter instances of sanism, both in real life and on social media. I started doing something similar last week by making ticks on a piece of paper. But I like the idea of using a clicker in part because it’s an object I can hear and feel as I operate it, in part because it fits in my hand, and in part because it’s a bright color. I have the kind of sensory processing that appreciates those things. The clicker also feels more formal and official, and I can use it even when I don’t have a pen and paper with me, which makes it more practical. I may include notes about each instance, including the context, date, and time.
OK, I actually bought six clickers in an array of colors because they came in a set, but that’s beside the point. You may think that’s too many clickers. I don’t. I’m mildly tachycardic right now just thinking about their arrival. There’s a black one and a green one and a pink one and a red one and a white one and a yellow one. I’m actually trying to humanize myself in this paragraph and the last one because I made some big assertions in my opening paragraph, the kind that make people (in this case me) unlikable mostly because they fall under the information you didn’t ask for that I think you should know category but also because they may apply to you or those you know rather than some far-off “they” that we can all join in both hating and distancing ourselves from together.
“Nothing about us without us.” I take this principle seriously. It’s like no taxation without representation, only it’s like no characterization, no proclamations based on misinformation, no policy decisions, no representations in the arts and the media, no casual or formal conversations, no application of diagnostic labels especially when used in a pejorative manner, and no limited or completely erroneous lay insights without our representation. That means we are centralized, not marginalized. We are present, not absent. We are heard, not talked over, not silenced, not discounted. It means if we say there’s an issue, you listen. You don’t shift in your seat or put up a wall or fail to respond or shift blame to us.
I’m no longer entering rooms where there are frictions only I appear to see and concerns only I appear to discern, one thousand frictions that are invisible to those who are not queer or neuroatypical or living with trauma or serious mental-health issues. That doesn’t mean those frictions don’t exist. It just means they may not exist for you, and if that’s the case, I’m happy for you. I’m glad a room is just a room is just a room. But your inability to see what others see, feel, and experience in those rooms—your failure to cultivate literacy about the things those who are oppressed and marginalized have to see in order to survive every day—is part of why rooms continue to not be the same rooms for you that they are for others.
These rooms are exhausting. Click click click (click click). If in addition to instances of sanism, I count instances of trans erasure (click), ableism (click), neurotypical bias (click), discounting of women and those who are female-bodied (click), jokes about diversity (or the lack thereof) in a space (click), and more,* there will be no end to the clicking in too many rooms, even rooms full of poets.
It’s impossible to know which rooms will be full of frictions. I’m trying to figure out what clues I can look for ahead of time and to develop a matrix I can use so I know when to call any given room quits. I no longer believe I can change hearts and minds with my presence, my words, or my work. I feel like, more than ever, I’m in a box called “crazy” and that terrifies people, no matter how I live, what I accomplish, how I treat others, or how wonderful folks think I am before they learn I have a DSM diagnostic label or that I’m queer or that I’m neuroatypical in numerous ways. I’ve seen that semipermeable membrane more times than I can count: the one where inclusion becomes exclusion and being part of becomes being removed from.
I feel like my attempts to address frictions only lead to more frictions, many of them in the form of irritation, denial, resentment, and even fear and disgust. But I will do what I can until I realize I can’t do any more. Then I’ll leave before I accept my own erasure and even start erasing myself. I can’t abide that or any other form of complicity.
I’ve mainly seen this level of friction in Utah. At least in other places, my experience has been that I become more human when I talk, when I write, when I take part in things. Of course, I was largely in the closet about my bipolar until two years ago. That may be part of why people accepted me as a human being and not as an amalgam of their stereotypes, biases, and misunderstandings about bipolar. Who knows what those places are like now, in this new world that has us all doing the work of marginalizing and dehumanizing others on some level.
The rooms with poets are the ones I must approach with care above all the others because I need to believe in poets, even if that belief is misguided. I’m not ready to let go of that yet. I know better. I think I know better. I want to know better but, more than that, I want to be wrong. I want to believe in poets the way some people want to believe in God. It’s like that for me.
I also can’t help but see something else in those rooms, wherever they’re located: a kind of arts-driven traveling medicine show meets multilevel marketing network. It’s not quite either of those things, but it does feel like a system that created itself and now uses its existence as a way of validating itself, one that enriches the few and relies on the many, and one that’s unhinged from actual oversight or governance by the institutions many of these poets actually work or once worked for, which means those institutions will not act based on anything that happens, up to and including sexual assault, in or near those rooms. It’s hard not to see it like that, especially after some of my personal experiences in such rooms, which makes it even harder to find spaces that are safe and poets who are doing good work in those spaces.
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* I’m just listing ones I’ve encountered recently.
Days of Bruising in the Sunflower State. Kansas City, Kansas, June 19, 2015.
You want me dead, Brian Kilmeade? Trust me, there’s a psych tech in Kansas who couldn’t agree with you more. This photo was taken three days after leaving KU Medical Center in 2015 with bruises all over my body after being beaten by a psychiatric nurse who also put me in a face-down hold, despite that position being illegal in most states and despite my having asthma. He threatened to hurt me even more if I ever “tried anything.”
What I had “tried” was getting my inhaler because I couldn’t breathe. The staff refused to give it to me, saying it was expired by one day, and they didn’t have orders for another one. I’d just been diagnosed with common variable immunodeficiency by the lead immunologist at KU Medical Center, but the staff in the psychiatric unit said I was making my diagnosis up. I also had thyrotoxicosis at the time, but nobody at KU Medical Center did the simple test necessary to reveal that was the case, even though it’s in their algorithm to test the TSH level of anyone who presents with symptoms similar to mania. The psychiatric unit’s former director implemented that policy.
Photos of these bruises are also on file at Shawnee Mission Medical Center, where social workers from KU Medical Center and a local organization for women took me to document what had happened to me. Of course I never did anything about what happened. Lawyers weren’t interested in my case. The state human rights organization wanted me to tell my story over and over again, which was retraumatizing. And my records from KU Medical Center were not accurate. This incident, for example, didn’t make it into the record. Nor did the EKG they had to do while I was blacked out, which I’m only aware of because I woke with a node still stuck to me. Nor did my being undressed, washed enough to be wet all over, and dressed again, but without my underwear.
The staff withholding my medication didn’t make the record. Nor did the staff throwing food on the floor for me to eat. Nor did two male techs standing in the doorway laughing at me. Nor did a female nurse dogging me in the hall outside my room while saying “I didn’t do anything to you,” as if this absolved her from everything that was done. Nor did the staff hanging up the phone on me while I was trying to call my immunoglobulin company, which I’d been instructed to do to set up my infusion deliveries after I left the unit,* or important organizations like the one that was trying to advocate for me, or my friends, or my family members. Nor did their crushing me in the doorway to the room where the phone was located while trying to remove me from that room. Nor did their playing violent movies in which women were being beaten. There are more nors, I’m sure. But you get the idea.
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* Having these infusion deliveries set up was a condition of leaving the unit. The staff repeatedly refused to let me use the phone or hung up mid-call in an attempt to keep me from being discharged.
Two years ago today, I came out of my medication-induced blackout at the inpatient psychiatric unit and began working on an elaborate origami project that involved making the Sydney Opera House with a theater and stage inside it. I used paper placemats and pages from a colorful book for this purpose. I was given a copy of the Book of Mormon by the staff, but I didn’t use its pages in my project. It sat in my room idle as I worked.
I wrote and performed rap songs with another patient named H— to the delight of other manic patients on the unit. Those with severe depression were not moved by our artistry. We were good at the rapping, and our antics provided a counterpoint to the aimlessness, the hall-wandering, and the five-minute interfaces with the psychiatrist each day in which he blamed us for having depression or bipolar.
I used a deck of cards to map out human networks that are responsible for abusing and trafficking others. The kings and jacks were big players in those networks, and they were also stand-ins for my father and his best friend. The networks were very organized and knew how to hide other cards, and themselves, as needed. My father’s name was Jack. He was a jack of all trades, even ones that weren’t legal.
I wrote short poems and made notes about my stay using a tiny pen that only sporadically worked. Pencils, Intermountain. Give patients on B-Ward pencils.
In my chart, the staff noted that I was well-behaved and posed no threat to anyone. I did throw paper at one point, down a long hall, overcome suddenly by how dehumanizing psychiatric care is. Nobody noted that in my chart, but one tech did scream, If you do that again … without completing the threat.
I declare today, September 10, the Day of Origami and Rapping forevermore. Long live folded paper and battled song.
Dana Henry Martin 