Mental health

Asylum's poetry editor Janine Booth introduces three of the poetic contributors to the new issue of the radical mental health magazine: Gail Something Else, Fred the Ninja, and Holly Bars.

Rebecca is a school refuser

The lessons confuse her

Miss knows her sister

is a substance misuser

It doesn't excuse her

She's labelled a shirker,

assigned to an overworked social work

a conflict defuser

But Becky's still a school refuser

Mason is a lesson bailer,

afraid of failure

He's looking paler, feeling frailer

Janine has recently taken over as Poetry Editor of Asylum magazine.

Asylum wants your poetry for our radical mental health magazine.

Janine's contribution to A Disorder for Everyone's online poetry gig challenging the mainstream narrative on mental health, held on 16 April 2021, featuring the poems Locked Up and Down and Not OK.

• a guest post by Ian Hutchinson, autistic clinician – NHS children’s services, Cornwall 

Thinking about practical humanistic models for supporting autistic people in distress, time for a paradigm shift? 

What if I can't stand the train
without the carriage to myself?
What if I can't stretch and strain
to reach up to the luggage shelf?

What if all the outside seats
are taken and the queue's too long?
And I don't recognise the streets
and can't see left or right or wrong?

Published in Solidarity 562:

Last year, I wrote a poem (a pantoum) called 'This Place' about visiting my son in the adolescent psychiatric unit where he spent four months (read it here).

He now has his own flat, living independently with support. So I decided to write a follow-up poem of the same length in the same style, hoping that this will illustrate the wonderful progression.