Open Minds Quarterly – Winter 2007

It is a tremendous effort to develop quality work like Open Minds Quarterly does, while focusing on the consumers and survivors of mental health services.

It is a tremendous effort to develop quality work like Open Minds Quarterly does, while focusing on the consumers and survivors of mental health services. First, to believe in the creativity of those who see and seek alternative versions of reality is a commendable venture. Then to embrace it in a cohesive journal  (fonts, pictures, etc. all contributing to the aesthetic), is a step in the direction of brilliance. This issue, a total of 26 pages, contains survivor narratives such as Susan Nickerson’s “Fly Away, Messiah” and Mark Ellerby’s “Towards Recovery,” the title of which says it all: recovery doesn’t mean complete salvation. “I am not sure what the future holds,” says Ellerby, “but it has to be better than schizophrenia.” Kurt Sass takes it a step further in his poem “Sometimes It’s Worse When You’re Better.” Besides the narratives and poems that directly relate the experience and consequences of mental illness, there are creative leaps of imagination, like Kim Nanuan’s “The Real and the Imaginary and—,” in which the writer and the journal exhibit what they can do with font arrangements and dimension leaps. Headings include “An (Overwrought) Homage to (Romanticized) Warriors from Ancient Japan” and “On the Precariousness of Life: Thoughts from a Depressed, Anxiety- and Thought-Disordered Perfectionist in the 21st Century.” It makes me think: Is that me?
[www.nisa.on.ca]