CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
tentative title
Prozac Generation: Institutionalized Youth Speak Out Against the Psychiatric
Establishment
Deadline: December 31, 2004
Please email submissions to:
youthinterrupted@yahoo.com or mail to
Youth, Interrupted, P.O. Box 6281, Washington, DC 20015
Pseudonyms are OK.
The Youth, Interrupted collective seeks submissions for an upcoming anthology on the psychiatric oppression of young people. We are especially interested in receiving submissions from people whose stories include the experience of being institutionalized during the period of the 1990s -present, but we welcome submissions from people of any age who experienced any form of psychiatric oppression as youth.
We seek to focus on publishing the stories of people who were institutionalized during the 90s-present because these voices have not been
heard. Books such as Girl, Interrupted and Life, Inside are stories of psychiatric oppression from the perspective of baby boomers who were
hospitalized during the 1960s. There are certainly cross-generational similarities among the experience of being diagnosed as "mentally ill" and locked up as a kid. But with the notable exceptions of Becoming Anna: The
Autobiography of a Sixteen Year Old, and The Last Time I Wore a Dress, there are virtually no published accounts from the perspective of young people who were institutionalized and psychiatrically oppressed in recent decades.
While kids may not always be locked up for as long as they were in the 1960s, greater numbers of youth are being forced into "mental health
treatment," in the form of esidential "treatment" centers (RTCs), and the for-profit youth incarceration industry, which includes managed care "behavioral health" hospitals and the explosion of for-profit "behavior
modification" boot camps.
Too often we have been the subject of someone else's research. The Youth, Interrupted collective seeks to create the opportunity for us to break the silence and to tell our own stories, in our own words. We hope that this book will not only be a resource for kids, but for parents as well, who may feel pressure to turn to psychiatry to "fix" their kid.
About the collective:
j.rogue is a twenty-three year old white working class genderqueer. ze was hopitalized for a number of mental "disorders" in the years 1994-1995. ze is the author/editor of the radical mental health zine, Rogue Elf, and lives in
Austin, Tx.
Leah Harris is a twenty-eight year old poet of eastern european jewish heritage who experienced incarceration in youth psych wards and forced
medication throughout her childhood and teenage years in the 80s and early 90s. Leah writes a zine called oppositional defiance, is currently working on a memoir called Psychiatrized, and lives in Washington, DC.
We realize that this anthology will not capture the experience of all incarcerated youth across race and class. We are choosing to focus on the
"mental health" system, rather than the "juvenile justice" system, because that is the system we experienced personally. We recognize that it is a more common experience for kids of working class families, and particularly kids of color, to be sent to jail for so-called behavioral problems, while middle and upper class kids with health insurance tend to receive "mental health"
treatment. We view this as a parallel system of youth oppression that shares many overlapping characteristics.
