What do lithium, Dr. Bronner’s soap, and pulling teeth have in common?
There’s ample material about mental health in the world. Healthline can tell you every potential interaction between weed and Ritalin. Your doctor has handed forwarded you enough WedMD links to fill a small library. Half of TikTok seems to be 22-year-old girls with green hair convinced that every quirk about them is a symptom of ADHD — which I get, and I’ve written about that kind of thing a lot.
But when I went looking for stories about mental health and mental illness, I found a few of the old standards (shout out to An Unquiet Mind) and then not much else. What I’ve been looking for is stories about the human experience of mental health and illness, about the ways we’ve understood (or misunderstood) the brain and the way it commands our behavior.
I’m especially interested in the histories of treatment, stigma, and the actions and reactions of people in their own environments. So here we are.
Why subscribe to another goddamn newsletter?
I always joke that I “wrote that one thing that you didn’t really agree with” because I think it’s accurate and I think it’s actually why I’m pretty trustworthy. I’ve been a writer for more than half my life at this point and have had stories published in The Nation, the Atlantic, NPR, the New York Daily News, Bust Magazine, and a bunch of other places.
But writing has changed and it’s harder and harder to be a writer as a capital-J-job anymore. Especially when you want to write about stuff like the history of mental health care, specifically at the intersections of gender, race, culture, and class.
I love history and I love reading and writing about it and if you’re here, I bet you do, too. So that’s what I’m doing. And you can get like, 90% of it for free, but you can also kick me a few dollars each month if you want to support this ongoing work.
Much like a patent medicine, these claims have not been vetted
I’m not a historian. I’m a longtime journalist who likes reading about histories and finding stories. This is not going to be academic, I promise.
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