Edition 72
States of Mind
- Published 4th May, 2021
- ISBN: 978-1-922212-59-7
- Extent: 264pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
How do we conceptualise our psychological, existential and political condition?
Anxiety and depression are on the rise in Australia and across the globe; digital media has created a pandemic of loneliness and disconnection; ideological extremism is widening our divisions and threatening our democracies – and all the while, the wellness industry is spinning everything from mindfulness to minimalism into big business.
Where does this leave us?
Griffith Review 72: States of Mind explores the parameters of our cognitive landscapes and how far they might take us.
AUDIO
Listen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘New vibrations’.
Listen to Loki Liddle reading ‘Snake of light’.
Listen to Joshua Lobb reading ‘Preparing for the inevitable’.
Listen to Editor Ashley Hay on Nicole Abadee’s Books Books Books podcast.
In this Edition
An inclusive blueprint for mental health
In the shape of things to come Too much poison come undone ’Cause there’s nothing else to do Every me and every you Placebo, ‘Every You and Every Me’ AS A MEDICAL student and young doctor in the 1970s, I was on the one hand fascinated by the mystery and...
Surviving Covid
MASHED_BEAUTATO HERE with another strategic guide on how to most efficiently ace the hottest new game on the market. Surviving Covid is the latest release from Apocalypse Studios – it’s a simulated survival game where you’re tasked with surviving a pandemic plaguing the planet. The...
Psychiatry and the socio-political order
AT A COMMUNITY consultation forum on mental health in regional Queensland in 2013, the discussion turned to the human rights of people with mental disabilities. The facilitator, medical journalist Dr Norman Swan, looked at me and said: ‘Doctor! You are a psychiatrist, and some...
Unease and disease
OVER THE COURSE of eight years I researched and wrote a book, Bedlam at Botany Bay, about colonial madness in Australia. I read the records generated by the projects undertaken here – endeavours at every scale, from simple survival through to the efforts of empires to...
Decolonising psychology
IN NOVEMBER 2020, the long-awaited Productivity Commission Inquiry Report into Mental Health in Australia was released publicly. Among its many recommendations, it highlighted the concept that health is more than the absence of illness and that a holistic understanding of the social, political and...
The sad stats
IN 2018 I was hired to work as Victoria’s first dedicated LGBTIQ outreach lawyer, to be based at a queer health service. I had just started transitioning, and the opportunity to leave the large city law firm where I worked at the time was appealing....
Our once and future home
IT’S A HOT Australian twilight, some years ago now, and I’m among a couple of hundred people who have gathered in the forgettable, sanitised space of a function centre conference room to talk about the future of life on Earth. The formalities have concluded...
Delusions of sanity
ACCORDING TO THE Parable of the Poisoned Well, there once lived a king who ruled over a great city. He was loved for his wisdom and feared for his power. At the heart of the city was a well, the waters of which were...
Going sane
ON THE DAY of The Correspondent’s launch in September 2019, a reader who identified as manic-psychotic sent me an angry note. ‘I’m insulted by your use of the word sanity without even a mention of psychosis,’ he wrote. ‘Is this a joke? Is this...
The privatisation of anxiety
AT THE LAST moment, I had stuffed K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher into my carry-on case. At 817 pages and weighing in at over a kilo, Fisher almost cost me an excess luggage charge. Better to have packed my local bookshop’s...
On surviving survivor’s guilt
MY MOTHER’S ASHES got scattered at the end of Australia’s Black Summer. She’d been dead for eighteen months. But her family – my five foster siblings and their twelve children – hadn’t been together since the funeral. Now we belatedly congregated under storm clouds south of...
Embracing ugly feelings
THE FIRST TIME I was hospitalised, my mother visited me in the dank psychiatric ward bearing a three-tiered lacquer bento box packed with handmade delicacies. I told her I couldn’t eat. She began to sob, and in between wet gulps, confessed that my severe depression...
This Her Thing
I DRIVE PAST where Mum died and I feel the tractor beam of that place, the urge to pull in and stop. But I don’t. It’s off the highway, down a small gravel road with a dead end, and I know how country eyes...
The perennity of love
AS THE PANDEMIC begins to bite in March 2020, many people report exceptionally vivid dreams, recurring nightmares. The phenomenon is widespread enough to feature in news bulletins. Experts are interviewed. I am pleased that dreams have become newsworthy, but I see no cause for surprise....
Faith and trust and pixie dust
SO YOU’VE LEARNT some counselling techniques. Skills, pacing and rhythms to use in any conversation. Let’s recap – I’ll keep being your practice dummy. Do you remember the first technique? It’s called immediacy. Immediacy is where you draw attention to your physical location, to what’s happening here,...
There is a green hill
I’D BEEN IN the house on Abbeyfield Road in Sheffield less than a week when Jack first arrived. It was a tall terrace, and narrow, with nothing but a small entry hall on the ground floor. Jack arrived with a sharp, determined ring of...
Love and fear
MARCH 2020. IN a darkened room in a Melbourne hospital, a slight, dark-haired woman sits at the bedside of a lone patient. Outside, COVID-19 webs its way silently through the city; inside, the patient rests back on the day bed, eyes covered with a...
The chemical question
‘IT’S MY HORMONES, doc. It’s my hormones, and no one’s listened to that.’ It was the late 1980s, in what was once Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital in inner-city Melbourne. A brash young registrar doing her training in psychiatry had arrived at her first hospital placement, full...
The Closure Company
THEIR SIGNS USED a distinctive shade of blue. It was a colour they’d patented, like Tiffany Blue, though the shade was warmer; it almost made her feel happy about being sad. She’d seen the advertisement flash across the screen at the train station in...
A woman alone
Dedicated to Susan-Gaye Anderson THERE’S NO POINT making it up. An eminent Australian historian, a woman, once said of an equally eminent Australian novelist, a man, ‘I admire him for making it up.’ History, that is, as if historians themselves don’t make it up. To...
Snake of Light
Listen to Loki Liddle reading ‘Snake of light’. HE SOUND OF buzzing filled the dodgy motel room, bouncing off the dirty tiles and dancing beneath the flickering florescent light. Large chunks of brown hair fell by his bare feet. Sol paused as a siren passed in the dark...
Preparing for the inevitable: Five states of mind
Griffith Review · Joshua Lobb reading Preparing For The Inevitable from Griffith Review 72: States of Mind You have ten seconds The car rolls over for the last time; the birds have flown away. You only have time to turn to your lover and rasp: I’m...
Intensifier
It’s strange that a dog barking at the beach becomes a cause for concern. Those nearby look around for who owns the baying in the shallows, occasionally swimming a few feet out, then circling back to rescue driftwood from its returning master. It distracts...
The bee box
You made this; working with wood and mortar to build nesting sites for native bees – the leafcutter, the resin, the blue-banded. For some you drilled holes to size to suit their tiny forms, for others experimented with mixtures of sand and water seeking the right consistency to entice them to burrow. And I think...
Le Méridien
8 a.m. poolside, two women rolling cigarettes like a production line. This hotel full of Russians with grapefruit-hard stomachs and bar tabs the length of my tax return. Impossible not to envy them, their skin thieving all light from the Calangute sun, their immoveable solitude. How they command language – menus, signage, entire...
The light we cannot see
I am the way into the city of woe, I am the way into eternal pain, I am the way to go among the lost. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Vol. 1 (Inferno), Canto III: The Gate of Hell (Anthony M Esolen translation) I: Journey through Anaplasia: An itinerary...
Coal and meter
The poet digs down a decade with her plastic pen, rests by the ancient seam, Earth’s little little black dress boudoir-veined. Poet and coal are looking for love, unelectric coup de foudre. But things proceed awkwardly. The poet moves to the unburned bed, can’t resist old conveniences: metaphor, simile, desk of wood – mocking pit...
keyhole
wearing today like it is your last. sip of sunlight. wearing today like an impatient scream. a stent that fails the test. a weather beaten lounge. a carpet that withholds too many secret grazes. cheap sedatives in irradiated capsules. wearing today like a levitational...
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