Notabilia

Cough-Vomiting

Have you ever tried to swallow a pill but you have to cough suddenly at the same time and you end up choking on the pill and the water and then sort of cough-vomiting all over your new refrigerator and then you get a bronchial cough for the rest of the night that feels like aspiration pneumonia setting in but you think it’s just irritation from all the choking and cough-vomiting so you drink a bunch of zero sugar soda that the new refrigerator is keeping really cold oh so cold but it’s not helping with the cough so now you’re just wired and tired and mad at everything, especially your poems and somehow also the refrigerator, which didn’t even do anything? Me, neither.

Ancestry

I just renewed my Ancestry subscription, and the first new piece of information about my father and his brother is that they performed in blackface in a show called the “Red Shirt Minstrel” in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, November 12, 1946, directed by Maybelle Conger. There are photos. There is a list of “character” names that includes some of my father’s favorite racial slurs. He would have been seventeen years old. He and his brother are listed as “Gentlemen of the Chorus.” I am screaming. I can’t stop screaming. He is in the photos. I shared a fraction of the image in the comments. I couldn’t bear to share the actual photos of the event.

Angles

A poet asked to see my manuscript Crude after praising my writing and telling me I should write a whole collection about my family history. (That’s exactly what Crude is.) After I sent it to them, they asked me if I wanted feedback on the collection. I told them I did not.

But they couldn’t resist giving me feedback they knew I didn’t want. Today, I received an email with the subject line felt like I had to give SOME kind of a response. They led by saying they were almost sorry they asked to read Crude. They then infantalized me using an image from the collection, characterizing me as a little girl who’s always ready for a fight, suggested I rewrite the collection as poetry alternating with prose, said I should add a poem about my father’s death, provided instruction about where to put that poem in the collection, and, as a capper, shared a poem they wrote based on my life and experience, titled “Oklahoma Crude,” I guess to show me how it’s done, since I apparently don’t know how it’s done.

Some of you really don’t see what you’re doing, do you? How you’re coming across? What impulses you can’t contain and how much you’re reacting to your own anima, not the women and female-bodied folks around you, who you confuse for that anima. You really think we’re just super upset out of nowhere all the time for no discernible reason, which is proof we are like children, not adults, not fully grown women or female-bodied humans. To you who see us this way, we are, as this poet said in their email, Silvia Plath [sic] drowning in Lake Texhoma [sic]. *

No we aren’t. We aren’t any of that. I’m here as a witness and as a testament to the fact that you have us all wrong and always have and always will. As long as there is past and future, you will have gotten and will continue to get us wrong.

We deal with this shit from you all the time. All the freaking time. We are tired. I am tired.

So that’s the other part of how my day is going. The first part is the extermination order directed at those who are unhoused, have mental-health issues, and have substance-abuse issues. I mean the executive order. My bad. Incarcination and institutionalization aren’t extermination. At least not yet.

Here’s the thing: You don’t get to angle to move a conversation from a public to a private space using the false pretense of wanting to read my poetry collection, use that privacy to say things that are inappropriate, then claim that private space is privileged and protected and that what you say within it can’t be called out or shared. That’s not how things work. You certainly don’t get to frame me as doing something even worse to you than what you did to me or pressure me to remove your name from my assessment and commentary about what you did. And I didn’t share what you did with friends. I shared it with our mutual writing and poetry community because it’s important for people to know what men like you are doing within that community. They can make up their own minds about you, as I have.

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* It’s Sylvia and Texoma.

The July 24 Executive Order

From the ACLU. This is appalling. Link in comments: President Trump signed an executive order yesterday directing states to criminalize unhoused people and institutionalize people with mental health disabilities and substance use disorder.

The order, titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on American Streets,” directs the Justice Department to expand indefinite forced treatment for people with mental health disabilities or substance use disorder, and those living on the street who “cannot care for themselves.” The order also purports to eliminate federal funding for evidence-based programs, like harm reduction and housing first, that save lives, and directs federal funds toward cities and states that criminalize substance use disorder, punish people for sleeping outdoors, or enforce other laws targeting unhoused people.

The order also calls for sweeping federal data collection on unhoused people and those with mental health disabilities, raising serious concerns about surveillance, privacy, and how such data could be used to justify further criminalization. Instead of funding services or support, the administration is prioritizing profiling and control.

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Headlines about the executive order and the name of the order itself are misleading. It’s going after those with mental-health issues AND those who are unhoused, not just those who are unhoused and also have mental-health issues. Both scenarios are noxious, but the latter is even more noxious. The EO encourages the involuntary commitment of “individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public” and does not specify a time frame for such commitment, only that it be “appropriate periods of time.” It also provides funds for state and local governments to implement this plan, meaning round up folks with mental-health issues. All of this should terrify you, enrage you, and be distilled as outrage that, when intersected with love, allows you to act.

The EO also requires those receiving funding to “share such data with law enforcement authorities in circumstances permitted by law and to use the collected health data to provide appropriate medical care to individuals with mental health diagnoses.” In other words, a registry of those with mental-health issues that must be created at the local and state level and shared with the federal government.

This is a criminal state criminalizing those harmed by the criminal state.

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The executive order applies in part to those with mental-health issues who are deemed unable to care for themselves. You want to know one of the things that makes folks with mental-health issues unable to care for themselves? Overmedication, especially with high-dose neuroleptics or polypharmacology that leaves folks living inside clouded, plodding bodies and minds.

This approach to treatment is exactly what the EO will reward local and state entities for foisting on people with lived mental-health experience. It will create a cycle that justifies continued institutionalization for the rest of people’s lives. This kind of overmedication is sometimes called chemical restraint. It’s basically moving the architecture of control and coercion inside the patient rather than having it surround the patient within a facility.

This EO wants both: chemical control and coercion, as well as external control and coercion. Look who will benefit from this dual approach. It’s not those living with mental-health issues. It’s not their families. It’s not their loved ones. It’s not our communities. It’s not our institutions. It’s not our arts. It’s not our places of worship. It’s not our spiritual centers.

It’s business, big business. We are what’s being manipulated, destroyed, within big business. And, oddly, within a government that’s getting bigger and bigger under this newfangled Republican rule. Police states are always big. They have to be.

Documenting Social Death

There’s a lot happening in this paragraph from Shuko Tamao’s “Picturing the Institution of Social Death: Visual Rhetorics of Postwar Asylum Exposé Photography.” The observation about women and Black Americans being portrayed as anonymous others is spot on, as is the description of their “social dead” status, but the idea that the asylum system shouldn’t have be reformed and should have instead abolished actually had merit, as did the “visual rhetoric of unfreedom” that post-war journalism in the United States gave rise to, despite that not being their goal. People should never be out of sight, out of mind, and many folks are advocating for an end to forced treatment, no matter how humane it looks on the surface.

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Despite well-intentioned goals, these exposé photographs had the unintended effect of portraying asylum residents—especially women and African Americans—as unsettling, anonymous others whose long-term institutionalization was an additional exclusion from the body of the citizenry, signifying their socially dead status. For example, journalist Albert Deutsch frequently mentioned how attendants gathered naked asylum residents together, treating them as if they were animals (1948, 42). His writing was meant to sell a sensationalistic narrative, ultimately aiming to win the public’s approval for improving asylum-based care. He hoped that a series of reforms would transform asylums into hospitals. Thus, he meant to use the photographs of restrained women with no treatment, therapy, or recreation to argue that they deserved medical care so that they could eventually live outside as productive members of American society (Rose 2017). However, these photographs of asylum residents in physical restraints communicated what I call a “visual rhetoric of unfreedom” that elicited a powerful emotional reaction in readers, forcing them to question the validity of the asylum system itself.

On Civil War Photography

As with the much larger corpus of Civil War photographs, which as Keith Davis asserts, become endlessly “new” in a continuing process of rediscovery and interpretation, this subset of medical images too seemingly becomes endlessly new. As we will show through analysis of selected but representative examples from the archival collections of the successor to the Army Medical Museum, Civil War medical photographs became medical research materials; evidentiary documents to support disability and pension claims; a commodity to be sold or traded for personal, commercial or institutional gain; occasional worthless scraps; historical artifacts; and fine art images. Along this path of varied uses many social issues such as race and gender, personal privacy and patient anonymity, sexuality, memory and identity, nationalism, warfare and death are encountered. This exploration thus raises many emotive and perplexing issues that the images’ creators and original guardians could not have foreseen. Or did they? As we will argue, it seems an inescapable conclusion that, at times, the photographers and their subjects knew that they were participating in more than a simple, objective visual recording of a biomedical condition or injury.

‘Socially Dead’ Others

Disability researcher Shuko Tamao on using photos of patients in an attempt to bring about reform in postwar asylums in the United States:

Devoid of any opportunity to communicate their personal experiences, these asylum residents became illustrations on popular magazines and on the front pages of newspapers, serving as vehicles for eliciting the pity of readers. Because the reformers elicited pity for their cause while simultaneously inciting a morbid fascination in their readership, these photographs had the effect of giving their subjects the status of socially dead other, whether that meant a mad other or a racial other.

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I don’t know that I agree with the conclusions this researcher draws, but she makes important points. I think the way we receive and perceive visual information is contextual and socially constructed, so it’s fluid and can change over time. The point about not allowing patients to tell their own stories is important, as is the way these patients were used to sell magazines and newspapers, which is another form of dehumanization and objectification. Still, I see value in these images, and I feel each person’s humanity when I look at them. But their use and reception in 2025 is different from the way they were initially used and received in the 1940s.

This article includes a photo taken in the back ward at Central State Hospital in Norman, Oklahoma, where my mother began working a few years later.

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From “Picturing the Institution of Social Death: Visual Rhetorics of Potwar Asylum Expose Photography,” published in Journal of the Medical Humanities, September 30, 2021. Link in comments.

Midnight Dana

3 a.m. Migraine. I can’t wait to see what Facebook tries to sell me in this compromised, throbbing, barely awake state. Also: asthma, brought to you by weeks of wildfire smoke. At least I’ll survive it, unlike some of our wildlife and some of our trees and whatever else suffocates, which is both an act (dying) and an acting upon (causing to die). Maybe this is why Facebook shows me jiggly boobs. Maybe it’s tyring to help me out of what suffocates and what is suffocated, out of my own sentences, out of Midnight Dana and her (is her pronoun her, I wonder for real) pounding worldview.

Me: Midnight Dana, what are your pronouns?

Midnight Dana: I only know fear and pain. What is this place, this world a pox, a terror? Leave me here in the dark with the things that hide under the bed. Monsters got nothing on humans, on family. Where’s my mommy?

Me: So, like she or they or …

Midnight Dana: My pronoun is her. I am of her. I am hers. Where is she? You look like her, but you’re not her. I want Smurfs. I want a bird who sings to me. I want something shiny to carry in my left hand, something only I know I have. I want her, but she’s not mine.

Me: OK. Midnight Dana. Let’s see how Facebook markets to that. I mean to you. Let’s try to find you an inhaler. I’m going with she/her for your pronouns.

Midnight Dana: I die and cause to die.

Me: Where did you hear that?

Midnight Dana: From you, just now.

Me: That’s not what I said.

Midnight Dana: That’s what I heard.

Pinfeathers

There are some things you can’t show, things you can’t share once you’ve seen them, so you turn them into a poem, and you can barely do that. Because they happened in the state you’re from. Because they happened in the state mental hospital where your mother worked. Because they happened while everyone looked away. Because we were not much better here in the United States than the Nazis were where those sent to mental hospitals were concerned.

Because in a day room in Taft, Oklahoma, we let a little boy sit wet with his own excrement or urine or blood or all three, a strip of white cloth cinching his arms to his neck. Because he’s not the only boy or the only man in the photo. Because this is what we did to human beings in the 1940s but also now or again or now and again with a new face, a new flavor, a new reason, from a new hatred, a new greed, a new form of consciouslessness.

What did I leave out? That the boy was Black. Everyone in the photo was Black. This was at the State Hospital for the Negro Insane. That’s what they called it. Are you sick yet? Do you want to turn away? You already have, from all of us, as the cages are built in Florida, as we find new reasons to cage. Will PETA come to the rescue? People are animals, too, and being treated worse than animals.

People who cage people are animals in a different sense of the word. They should start an organization called People for the Obliteration of People. POP for short. It has a ring to it. It’s weaponized.

Here, drink from this metal cup. Here, sit on this wooden bench. Here, look through this barred window for the rest of your life. Here, here. Here, here.

The photos I’m looking at include one of the back ward at the hospital where my mother worked in Norman, Oklahoma. These are not easy images to see, but this history matters. What’s been happening to people like me has been happening to people like me for a long time. This country could learn a lot from this history as its pinfeathers break our democracy’s skin.

The Oklahoma History Most Oklahomans Never Learned

On the desegregation of American psychiatric institutions and structural racism in American psychiatry. Link in comments.

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Oklahoma,1964: Taft State Hospital was an all-Black facility, with an all-Black staff, located in an all-Black town. In 1940, its 738 patients were cared for by three psychiatrists (including the superintendent), three nurses, and an unknown number of direct care staff, who apparently all lived in one room. In 1949, Oklahoma consolidated the state hospital with the Institute for Colored Blind, Deaf, and Orphans and the Training School for Negro Girls, creating one large facility for Blacks with all manner of clinical needs. Oklahoma desegregated its public facilities in 1964. Rather than admit white patients to its state hospital for Black patients, as most of the other states would do, Oklahoma transferred the Black patients to its two other (all white) state hospitals. Taft was closed in 1970 and converted into a correctional facility, thus confounding in the public’s mind people with mental illness and criminals. (Some state hospitals have converted some of their units into correctional facilities, leading some people to think that psychiatric patients are being held behind multi-layered, barbed wire, razor-topped fences.)