The mad and the bad: against pathologising mental illness

Type
Polemic
Category
Mental health
Trump

‘[I]n evaluating any given person,’ Allen Frances writes in his book Saving Normal, ‘we lack a general definition of mental disorder to help us decide whether he is normal or a patient, mad or bad.’ The admittedly porous, but nonetheless vitally important line between mental illness and mental health has been one of the threads in my academic work for the last couple of years, so it is with growing wariness and frustration that I have been watching the debate on Donald Trump’s mental health play out.

Brain
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Type
Reflection
Category
Writing

A novel ending

I have finally finished shredding my novel.

It had been the work of many days, feeding it into the machine sheet by sheet and watching the pages re-emerge as linguine. It’s not surprising the story was bad. I wrote it soon after my husband died, leaving me with three young children, so the raw ingredients by weight were exhaustion, desperation, false hope and uncertain talent. It was a testament to one thing only: the discipline of writing every day.

cowimages
Type
Article
Category
Unions
Work

Rage, rage against the factory closure

On 1 May 2017, May Day – International Workers’ Day – Australian dairy giant Murray Goulburn announced that they were shutting factories across Victoria and Tasmania, slashing jobs and devastating communities. Faye and Julie, two National Union of Workers delegates working at the Edith Creek site in North-West Tasmania, shared their responses to the closure.

Tiso column
Type
Column
Category
astronomy
Technology

On living under a hyperreal sky

On the morning of 11 August 1993, my partner and I took a train and then a bus from Milan, where we lived, to Courmayeur, an alpine town near the French border. We didn’t book any accommodation, but headed with our blankets a little way up Mont Blanc, in search of an open space protected from the lights of the city.

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Type
Polemic
Category
Politics

How Labor can win back Victoria’s love (part three)

Rezoning decisions are easy money if you have the right connections.

A rezoning windfall profits tax, a form of betterment tax, would ensure the uplift in property values from government zoning decisions be diverted towards services and infrastructure, which would in turn benefit every Victorian.

aboriginal-australia-map
Type
Article
Category
Indigenous Australia
Language

Whodunnit to whom? A case for language preservation

Dyirbal is now spoken by just twenty-nine speakers. Languages in decline have their own complexities. In their book Vanishing Voices: The extinction of the world’s languages, Daniel Nettle and Susan Domain explain how Dyirbal previously contained very specific terms which are now lost. Many terms for ‘big’ existed, depending on what was being described. A big eel required a different term to a big turkey, different again was a big tree.

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Type
Announcement
Category
callout

Writers, we want your ‘false documents’!

Overland is seeking fiction submissions for a special online fiction edition themed around ‘False documents’ – that is, fiction disguised as or in the guise of ‘real’ textual artefacts – to be guest edited by Dave Drayton.

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Type
Review
Category
Fiction

Raised by wolves: new survivalist heroines in fiction

In recent years there has been an increasingly apocalyptic flavour to literary fiction, an upsurge in narratives of radical self-reliance in the face of economic, environmental or civil collapse. Given the end-times polarisation of the political climate, the trend is perhaps unsurprising, but in 2017 three debut novels specifically featured teenage heroines schooled in survivalist practices by their fathers.

piccie
Type
Article
Category
Activism
Class

‘We had Marx, they had Pauline’: left organising in poor communities

Those of us involved with political organising often harbour the belief that we are more politically aware than others; that the ‘ordinary people’ who exist outside our theoretical and organisational worlds are apathetic, or apolitical, or unenlightened. I have never found this to be particularly true. Like many people, those I met in Logan had lost faith in politics, but they were highly politicised.

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Type
Article
Category
Illness
The Body

On sickness as present tense

The problem with illness is that it robs you of pleasure. Young people are supposed to live in the moment, take risks, be spontaneous. But life in a hospital is a boring and cruel simulacra of life, with the minutiae of your body ticking like a machine being the best and only thing to focus on. In other words, you become self-obsessed, but not with gaining pleasure, more in avoiding pain.

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Type
Article
Category
Environment
The future

Ode to the bin chicken

The ancient Egyptians venerated the ibis. Followers of ibis cults would visit temples and purchase mummified ibises for use in votive offerings. The ibis was a sacred bird associated with creation and fertility and knowledge and learning. The ibis cults became so wildly popular that priests began breeding and rearing the birds onsite, specially for mummification.

State_Library_of_Victoria_La_Trobe_Reading_room_5th_floor_view
Type
Polemic
Category
Education

Beyond fees: a case for a waged education

In Australia, working- and middle-class students who cannot obtain financial familial support must both study and work a shitty part- or full-time job. Government youth allowance payments are deliberately difficult to obtain and excessively bureaucratic. Certainly, they are not provided on the presumption that to study is to perform valuable labour.