Mental health and zines

Speaker 1 00:00

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Speaker 2 00:21

Just a warning, in today's show, we'll be discussing suicide and other subjects that might be distressing to some listeners. So if this is confronting for you or distresses you, then please tune out. Hello and welcome to Brainwaves on 3CR 855am, 3CR Digital Radio and 3cr.org.au. My name's Mark, and joining me today we have writer, artist and publisher Annie from Take On Publishing. Today we're going to be talking about zines and the role zines have played in Annie's mental health journey.

Before we get started, I'd like to acknowledge and pay my respects to the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, the traditional custodians of the land on which I'm coming to you from today. Land where we tell our stories and land where stories have been told by the traditional owners for many years before us. I would like to pay my respects to the elders past, present and acknowledge all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners today. 

So hi Annie, how are you doing today? Thank you for coming into the studio to catch up and talk about some of your experience with zines and particularly one that I'm familiar with so yeah let's get to it. So I guess first of all, for any listeners out there today who don't know what a zine is, how would you describe what a zine is?

Speaker 3 02:01

I... hello, by the way.

Speaker 2 02:05

Were you happy with my introduction? 

Speaker 3 02:10

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. A zine is, by my understanding, a zine is a self-published piece of work and it can be either art, illustration, writing, poetry, prose, pretty much anything that you can put on paper and fold into a little booklet is a zine.

Speaker 2 02:34

Yeah, and how did you, yourself, how did you discover the world of zine?

Speaker 3 02:40

I was invited to table at a zine fair in 2016, I believe, at a zine fair that was created in a protest to MCAs zine fair in Sydney. 

Speaker 2 03:00

Oh, okay. Yeah. What is the story there? What's the MCA?

Speaker 3 03:03

Yeah, so the MCA is the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Sydney. They used to run a huge zine fair kind of in the museum space and there were a couple of I think things that were happening there that I'm not 100% sure what was going on. But Otherworld's zine fair was kind of created in protest to, I think, MCA's relationship with there was like a company that was funding like refugee camps. I see. I see. All right. So it was a political movement that this event was kind of created in and I was invited as part of like a little crew of university friends to table at the first one.

Speaker 2 03:58

Yeah. Oh, excellent. Yeah. Is that zine fest still running today? 

Speaker 3 04:00

Yes. So, Otherworlds Scenefare is still running today. MCA Scenefare is now defunct, but Otherworlds is bigger and better than ever before. I think they've just hit their 10-year mark. 

Speaker 2 04:15

Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. So you've been... Well then it must have been 2014. Yeah, so it sounds like you've been enmeshed in zine culture for quite some time now. What do you personally appreciate about zines? What do you like about the medium?

Speaker 3 04:32

I like that zines are such an immediate form of idea sharing. That's one of my favourite things about it, is that from conceptualising something, you can get it onto paper and reproduce a limited amount of copies and start distributing the idea that you've just had. And I really love that. And it kind of makes me feel like I'm part of this print movement, which is quite special these days since so many things are digital. It's such a tangible way to share new ideas.

Speaker 2 05:18

Yeah, and I suppose there's one particular zine that you're responsible for, called articulation. Yes. Can we talk about that today? 

Speaker 3

Absolutely, yeah.

Speaker 2

Could you please tell us a bit about your zine Articulation, what was going on for you at the time that you wrote it and how it sort of came about.

Speaker 3 05:45

Yeah, so Articulation is a zine about suicide ideation. It's about mental health and mental illness, I suppose, and kind of the issues that I was facing and being honest to myself for the first time. So at the time that I made articulation, I think I'd been in therapy for about a year or two and I was realising, I was coming to the realisation that I was only journaling when I felt bad. So the entire written historical record that I was making for myself was just these feelings of loneliness and anxiety and depression. And at that point I, once I had that realisation, I decided to change things and started writing when I was having these moments of realisation instead. So Articulation, the name Articulation, kind of refers to the fact that at that point in time, I started changing my life on purpose.

Speaker 2 07:08

Right. Yeah. 

Speaker 3

And in kind of putting the zine out there, it was like a confession to everyone that I knew and everyone that I encountered that here's what was going on in my life. I now realise I haven't actually described the zine yet. The zine is 32 pages of excerpts from my real life diary. So these, it's a non-fiction piece, it's autobiographical and it's just selected parts of my journal over I think a four year period. Yeah. So I was, I've been journaling since I was very young and writing for me is a way to take thoughts out of my brain and put them away, which makes sense because I think it's there's something in the act of writing.

So all my journals are pen and paper and articulation, the zine, all of the images are all done pen and paper manually. But yeah, like the zine itself, when I put it out there, the way I described it was just that this is like my first long form autobiographical zine. And it's highly personal. I don't really recommend that people read it unless they're in the right headspace because it takes you through a lot of very hard moments of my life. Yeah.

Speaker 2 08:45

Yeah, that's something that definitely jumped out at me, just the how intimate some of what you were describing in the the zine. And when I was reading it, I was thinking, I wonder how Annie feels when you're tabling at a zine fair. How do you feel when you've sold the zine to someone and they're walking away and you see it in their hand, knowing that they're going to be very familiar with some pretty, you know, difficult, you know, what it was like for you to go through a very difficult period of your life?

Speaker 3 09:23

Hmm. That's a great question... I have been extremely online for a very long time, and in kind of the previous iteration of the internet, it was highly encouraged for people to be anonymous. So with that kind of veil of anonymity, I started keeping little journals online at like various websites. So I've been sharing very personal parts of myself with strangers for a very long time. And the difference with articulation was that I could now see these strangers faces. And that was, that was different. And to be honest with you, when someone decides to buy it and they walk away with it, I feel great. 

I feel great because immediately they are going to have an understanding that someone that they don't know is going through some shit. I don't know if I can swear on the show, but yeah. Like someone that they don't know is going through some shit. So maybe that will help them be more kind to other people. That's my general hope with Articulation. The more nerve-wracking part is when they're standing at my table and they're reading it in front of me. That part, that part kind of sucks. Cause they're reading my journal in front of me.

Speaker 2 10:50

Yeah, and also from what I understand, due to the content of the zine, particularly discussions around suicide and struggling with other mental health struggles, I understand there was a bit of apprehension at first for you, due to the type of work that you were doing. With some of that apprehension, did that have anything to do with some of the stigma around mental illness at all? 

Speaker 3 11:23

Yeah, absolutely. So I put an articulation in 2018 and then, I mean at that point, this was pre -pandemic so there was little to no discussion about mental health in any kind of workplace. Even socially, it wasn't something that you would just bring up with your friends, that you were depressed, you would just disappear for three weeks and then reappear again and pretend like nothing happened. But I had been posting online about my kind of mental health journey, about going to therapy, about all of these different things. And it was in that period of like between 2012 and 2015, it was such a short period of time but that's when real life kind of entered my online world, if that makes sense.

Speaker 2 12:23

Could you elaborate a bit on what you mean by that?

Speaker 3 12:26

So in 2012, I would describe kind of the online community as everyone was just starting to make Facebook accounts at that point. And most of the online communities that I was in, I was still an anonymous person. No-one knew where I lived, no-one knew what I looked like, I was just posting about my life experience on the internet.

Speaker 2 12:50

right so with other types of social media sort of companies that were popping up around that time you were putting your actual name, you're putting your your real name to the, what you were putting out there is that what... 

Speaker 3 13:02

No so i would... because I was just using a username at that point. And it was over that little 3-year period between 2012 and 2015 when Facebook became really popular that you started attaching your real name to things. It was a cultural shift online to people suddenly attaching their online personas to their real name. In 2018, that was kind of when I was in between jobs, but I was working in kind of like corporate land, corporate land, social media world, and I was still keeping all of that work very separate from my artist life, so to speak.

And Articulation was kind of the first piece of work that I put out that was very serious and very reflective of who I am as an artist, but attached to my real name. That was the first piece of work. And as we've been describing it, it's very intense as a piece of work. It's priced rather high and I explained my decision to do that by saying that if someone's not willing to pay that much money for my piece of me, then I don't want them reading it anyway.

Speaker 2 14:30

Yeah, because it's a very, yeah, it is a piece of you, isn't it?

Speaker 3 14:34

So, to kind of round back to what you originally asked, I had apprehensions about putting this out into the world because it was the first collision of my two lives, of my professional life and my artist's life, if that makes sense. So the apprehension there was that one would affect the other negatively, and because no one else was really talking about mental health, there was a real chance that maybe opportunities wouldn't come my way anymore, professionally, or maybe, I don't know, just like, anxiety will put impossible thoughts into your head, right? So I was really worried mainly about not being able to get a job.

Speaker 2 15:29

And with that being said, you mentioned that, you know, there was a lot of possibly anxiety influenced thoughts about some of the negative consequences of being open about your mental health struggles. Did any of those come to light? Did any of the things that you feared?

Speaker 3 15:49

I don't think so, but I'm also not sure. Because I think, especially in corporate life, people will say one thing and mean another. So there are times when I've wondered if the kind of art that I put out has affected something in my professional life, but there's no real avenue to verify that. If that makes sense, yeah.

Speaker 2 16:15

Because some people would just prefer to be polite and not talk about things.

Speaker 3 16:20

And also, I'm not really in the business of outing any companies for being horrible, you know what I mean? So it was just kind of like, Ooh, I wonder if this happened because I did this, but also, I'm not confrontational about it. But on the other hand, a lot of very positive things have also happened because of Articulation.

Speaker 2 16:47

Yeah, that's something that I'm very curious about. So the fears that you had, put those aside, what were some of the the positive effects of exploring your mental health in this medium in a very public way?

Speaker 3 17:07

It, I like to describe it as this, it gave people a shortcut to be able to be vulnerable with me. Even though I'm a stranger to the majority of my audience, I've had a lot of people approach me when, for instance, someone in their family suicides. And I've never had that experience, but I have been suicidal. So I think there is comfort in talking to someone who understands even a little bit about what that experience is like. And I've had people approach me when someone close to them is having a mental breakdown, so I will give them suggestions about what to do.

Mainly because I think over the years, talking about mental health has been destigmatised in the process of COVID. We kind of had a period of a lot of corporate companies telling us to try yoga, but then after that, I think people are more open to discussing even the possibility of mental health.

Speaker 2 18:26

Right. So do you mean within their own mental health or that perhaps someone might be suddenly identifying a feeling and associating it with, Oh, this might be a mental health struggle that I'm having? Whereas before I just thought it was just, you know, maybe my own defects. 

Speaker 3 18:46

Yeah, definitely. I rag on Are You Okay Day quite a bit. I think it opens the conversation but it doesn't give anyone any tools to continue the conversation. So I personally take on that responsibility with people in my life where if they approach me with, for example, in the scenario that they have a friend or a relative going through a mental breakdown, I will say things like, okay, what do they need? How are you going to find out what they need? Here are some questions that you can ask in order to find out what they need help with. And here's some functional things that you can do for them. They're not going to be able to cook or clean, you can go to their house and help them do that.

So I will go out of my way to tell people what to pretty much. And I think without articulation, I wouldn't have that avenue of conversation so quickly. There would be a lot of other things in the way, I think. Yeah. So being vulnerable first has made it easier for people to be vulnerable back. Yeah.

Speaker 2 20:07

Yeah. Just to shift track a bit, I want to ask you some questions about the artwork in particular. Have you always been interested in illustration? Is that something you've already always enjoyed doing as a young person or is it something that you picked up at another point in your life? When did you start drawing?

Speaker 3 20:32

Yeah, I've been drawing for a really long time. I think I was a writer first. When I was younger, I wanted to be a lot of different creative things, from writer to artist to all kinds of things. I went into university studying animation, which is kind of a combination of everything I've ever wanted to be, but I studied that for five years to realize that I didn't want to be an animator. So then I kind of came out of it with all of these very specific, almost like craft skills, and thought, what do I do with this? And then, yeah, went into social media content, that kind of thing, and then eventually kind of rounded back to illustration and writing, because those are the things that make the most sense to me.

I think, because I've been doing them for so long, I can take a thought and translate it into a drawing and a bunch of writing a lot easier than I can in any other medium. Yeah.

Speaker 2 21:49

There was a there's a couple of reoccurring motifs throughout the pages of articulation. One that I picked up on was hands and another one that I'm quite curious. I'd love to hear your response to on the cover of articulation. It's kind of divided into two halves and on one half you have a pair of what appear to be an illustration of a clear pair of glasses and below you have a sort of a black pair of glasses. It's kind of a I see some sort of duality sort of thing going on there and I was wondering what your what your intentions were for that cover.

Speaker 3 22:36

I was looking forward to talking about this because I think it's the case of the English teacher over-complicating things. For me, those two pairs of glasses were the pair of glasses that I wore when I started those journal entries, and the pair of glasses that I wore when I finished that journal.

Speaker 2 22:56

Oh, right. Yeah. Okay, that's really interesting. 

Speaker 3

Yeah, so the dark pair of glasses I wore for six years. That's like the longest time that I've ever worn one pair of glasses. They were my favorite glasses. I went through a lot of life wearing those glasses. I still have them. They're getting dusty on a shelf somewhere. And at the end of that kind of series of journal entries, I had a new pair of glasses that were very special. They were Van Gogh glasses. They were Van Gogh branded glasses, and the frames are made of bone, and the sides are made of, god! Carrot. So they're my special occasions glasses now. I got married in them. Yeah. So it's, I mean, you could definitely read that as a metaphor, but for me, it's a very literal, literal imagery. Yeah.

Speaker 2 24:01

So I guess that's a bit of an example of what happens when somebody walks away with your zine and has their own little story to tell from what they're seeing. A few years have passed now. How has your relationship to your mental illness changed since publishing articulation?

Speaker 3 24:21

Yeah, I mean, I've been to more years of therapy now. I released a part two, actually, of an articulation called Amelioration.

Speaker 2 24:36

Yes, handed that to me this morning and I appreciated it very much and I'd love to hear about what I have to look forward to by reading Amelioration.

Speaker 3 24:43

Yeah, so Amelioration, I think when I looked up the word amelioration, I can't exactly remember what it means anymore. Oh, that's right, it's iterating at something to improve on that same thing. And the contents of that, so it's done in the same style as Articulation, it's a series of excerpts from my journals, from the same period of time with an additional year added in at the end. And Amelioration is less about the discovery of self and more about trying to crawl, if that makes sense.

Speaker 2 25:28

What do you mean by trying to crawl? I'd like to hear what you mean by that.

Speaker 3 25:34

So I think therapy, if done effectively, gives you the opportunity to face yourself truthfully. And that was what articulation was about. It was about the idea of finally realising and being able to explain, for the lack of any better words, what was wrong with me, whereas amelioration was about attempting to heal for the first time. And that's what I mean by learning how to crawl. You get stuck with mental illness. You get stuck in time. And in order to move forward, you have to learn different coping mechanisms to the ones that you've been applying in your own life because they've kept you stuck.

Speaker 2 26:27

Yeah, you mentioned earlier, actually, in our conversation where friends have felt comfortable letting you know that someone in their life is struggling and you point it out to them, yeah, they're not going to be able to clean, they're not going to want to eat, or perhaps they might want to eat but eat in a very sort of haphazard way. You mentioned that sometimes, you know, we learn, oh, it's okay to ask people how they're doing, but there's no prompts or are you... There's no guideline. Yeah, so would you say that learning to crawl has been you learning some of those guidelines that can help you get out of that stuckness that we often find ourselves in during a period of mental health struggle?

Speaker 3 27:17

Yes, but from the perspective of the person who is drowning. So I put together a little guideline on my own social media for everyone who follows me there of those particular questions of what is useful to someone who is drowning. So how to ask someone who is going through it how you can help and not in an invasive way and not in a way that makes them feel bad about themselves because that's also not what you need. And those questions were born out of for about a decade I was mostly living on my own and that really affected how I could ask for help from friends or family or anyone.

So I was spending a lot of time on my own and every time I would go through depressive periods I would kind of I didn't want to obligate any single person for anything because I'm bad at asking for help like we all are. It's quite a common conundrum that people find themselves in. So I would basically put on, for example, my Instagram story, hey, I'm going through this, can someone send me memes today? Something simple like that. Or something that I really had trouble with for a little while was buying groceries. So I started putting together lists of items that were non-perishable and I would tell everyone about these things that I could do for myself. And then basically be like, if you know someone going through it, here are all the things that you can buy for them, deliver to their house, knock and run if they don't want to see you, and that will help.

Speaker 2 29:08

I love that. Non-perishable items. Yeah, sort of pasta. Absolutely.

Speaker 3 29:12

Like dry rice noodle was my favorite, soy sauce lasts a long time, that kind of thing. So I would put together these little kits almost for people when that was just what I needed.

Speaker 2 29:29

That's fantastic. Also, I've understand that you have a relationship with certain, I guess what you might call just, we've got like the practical side of things...

Speaker 3 29:44

Can't go, can't cook clean.

Speaker 2 29:46

It's very helpful to help in, you know, these, these sorts of the realm of practical sort of needs. But I understand that you've also you're also familiar with some therapies, particular schema therapy. I understand you're currently working on a new mental health related zine focusing on schema therapy. 

Speaker 3

Yes. 

Speaker 2

Would you be able to talk about that a bit and also for anyone that's listening and doesn't know what schema therapy is, would you be able to describe somewhat what that entails?

Speaker 3 30:23

Absolutely. So I am working on a new zine series about schema therapy with Dr. Z Liu, who is a clinical psychologist based in the inner west in Sydney. And they are probably one of the more prominent schema therapists in Australia by my understanding. Schema therapy by my very layman's understanding is it refers to kind of a lens that we look at life through. And this is kind of, it includes everything from like memories to emotions to physical like body sensations, anything where like your mental health is manifesting as something else, if that makes sense. And schema therapy refers specifically to something called early maladaptive schemas, which is kind of the results of things that have happened to you in early childhood to teenage years and how that has affected your mental health later on in life.

So the way that I usually explain it to people is that schemas are more about how your mental health issues manifest. They're more about symptoms. That's it. So schema therapy is more about symptoms and looking at how things are manifesting in your life rather than like slapping you with a diagnosis and treating the diagnosis. Yeah.

Speaker 2 32:21

And how did you become acquainted with the psychologist that you're working on the zine with?

Speaker 3 32:28

Yeah, I met C at a writers festival. Yeah, originally they pitched a graphic novel to me, so at that point I was already working as Taegon Publishing quite early on. And I was very interested mainly because I had never heard of Schema Therapy before. And kind of through the process of working with Z, we realised that what they wanted to do was to go out into the world and interview other prominent schema therapists who all have their individual specialisations in each schema and then put all of those together into one final book. And I thought, well, what better way to make this information accessible than purchasing them as a series of scenes?

Speaker 2 33:21

Right, so the intention of producing it in the format of a zine is accessibility to other people who might benefit from the therapy.

Speaker 3 33:31

Yeah, that's definitely my intention there. Each scene focuses on one schema. We've got two out at the moment. By my understanding, there are 18 schemas, so we've got a long way to go.

Speaker 2 33:48

How many, where are you up to now? 

Speaker 3

We're up to number two. 

Speaker 2

Okay, and when will you be commence publishing and distributing the zine on schema therapy?

Speaker 3 34:02

So those two zines are out already. The second one will be launched on August 15th, but in Sydney. The schema featured in that one is Emotional Deprivation.

Speaker 2 34:25

Can you describe emotional deprivation?

Speaker 3 34:27

Emotional deprivation is unlike the other schemas where it's something that has happened to you, emotional deprivation is when something that should have happened didn't happen. So for example, it might be that your main parent or caregiver didn't show you the affection that you needed in certain times as a child and it manifests in all kinds of ways. So the case studies in the zine are about sex addiction, yeah. And I've never read two therapists talking about sex addiction before, so that's...

Speaker 2 35:14

So the psychologists that you're working with.

Speaker 3 35:19

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2 35:20

They've noticed that there's a correlation between people struggling with sex addiction and emotional deflection.

Speaker 3 35:29

How the interviews are structured is that Z will go out and interview other schema therapists who specialise in that schema. So the therapist that is featured in this second zine is called the trauma dumpling. Her name is Liz Lacey and she specialises in helping people with the emotional deprivation schema and the case studies that she discusses in the interview are mostly about sex addiction.

Speaker 2 36:04

So, where can people, if people are interested in reading your zines or your zines about the series that you're currently producing on schema therapy, where can people find those?

Speaker 3 36:17

Yeah, they can find them at takeonpublishing .com, T -A -K -E -O -N, publishing .com, and yeah, they can place an order there and I'll send it to you in the mail because it's only available in print at the moment.

Speaker 2 36:32

Awesome. Yeah. Well thank you Annie for coming on the show today and sharing your knowledge with our listeners. You can find more of our shows at the website brainwaves.org.au or on 3cr website 3cr.org.au or on iTunes.

Speaker 2 36:49

Feel free to send us feedback or suggestions for shows via email at brainwaves at wellways.org. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next Wednesday at 5pm for another episode of Brainwaves on 3cr. If any of the things that we have talked about today have distressed you, you can contact Lifeline on 131 114 or Wellways helpline on 1300 111 500.

Speaker 4 37:19

You've been listening to a 3CR podcast produced in the studios of independent community radio station 3CR in Melbourne, Australia. For more information, go to all-the-Ws dot 3CR dot org dot AU.