Jyvur Entropy's Blog, page 15

Therapy is a Business

My first longform video essay. I hope to teach at least a few more people about the harm caused by the mental health field.

You may not know this, but you are participating in harm when you spout platitudes like “everyone should go to therapy.”

Stop telling people to go to therapy. It is a business. People are literally drugged to death.

I explain more in this video.

BIPOC Mental Health Month

July is BIPOC Mental Health Month.

Here are just a few things you can do in July, that aren’t the basic bitch ‘destigmatizing’ and ‘self care’ lazy posts that nobody needs more of.

1) Raise awareness about the harm caused by therapy and the mental health industry. Even if you believe therapy is genuinely helpful to many people, you should be concerned about the fact that a not insignificant number of people are harmed. Mainly due to the pharmaceutical industry’s influence. Look into the conflicts of interest in the creation of the DSM

2) Talk about the overlap between the mental health feild and the criminal justice system. Police should not be involved in crisis intervention

3) Get away from the basic bitch mental illnesses. We all talked about anxiety and depression. We’re all ALWAYS talking about anxiety and depression. Talk about the more severe mental illnesses like psychotic illnesses such as the schizo cluster

4) Talk about the homeless. The homeless are disproportionately affected by mental illness. Talk about resources they need. Donate to a facility that serves them

5) Lastly, when talking about the mentally ill, remember that not all mentally ill look like you. Not all mentally ill can “take a mental health day”-they can’t take a break when their every waking hour is focused on survival. Doing nothing for mental health month aside form posting about self-care, telling people to light a candle or take a bubble bath, it comes across as very glib and privileged. The most vulnerable mentally ill-none of that applies to them. They should not be ignored. Yet they were for all of mental health month.

The way that Mental Health was handled by the bookish community made me absolutely disgusted.

Let’s do a little better for BIPOC Mental Health Month

I know, I know. Researching how the DSM is created and learning about the lack of regulation in the APA is work. Learning about the plight of the homeless is work.

Waa waa research is work.

And posting a shitty little nothing “take time for self care” or “destigmatize” post is easy as hell.

I actually think all the slacktivists should just do nothing.

When you talk about mental health and you don’t address the human rights violations committed in the name of psychiatry, you are complicit in evil.

I’m not mad at the people who just don’t say anything about mental health.

But I’m mad as hell at the people who do this shitty “normalize therapy” fuckery without even knowing what the hell the DSM is or how it is created with money from the pharmaceutical industry.

If you do this, do not pat yourself on the back or think you are a good person. You are not. You are complicit in a system that hurts people.

If you want to start researching these issues and educating yourself, I highly recommending looking into the lectures and projects of Paula Caplan or Jim Gottstein to start.

Book Community: DO BETTER with Mental Health Advocacy

All of Mental Health Month came and went.

I saw nobody talk about the rampant conflicts of interest in the mental health field or how the pharma companies influence everything from the creation of the DSM to the marketing of symptom pools and diagnoses directly to doctors.

I saw nobody talk about the homeless, who are disproportionately affected by mental health. I saw nobody talk about police involvement in crisis intervention. I saw not one mention of any psychotic illnesses like anything in the schizo cluster.

The best y’all could do was some bougie, privileged mental health awareness: mental health for middle class white ladies with manageable mental illnesses like anxiety. Where is anybody talking about the most vulnerable psych patients? The patients who are in-patient on a revolving door? The homeless people who don’t have their basic needs met who spend just as much time in the criminal justice system as they do in mental hospitals.

You all only like mental health awareness 1) when it’s cute and manageable and about people who look like YOU and 2) when it worships at the altar of therapy (aka you’ve been brainwashed by the insidious influence of big pharma)

If you are not advocating for reform in the mental health field to end conflicts of interest from pharmaceutical companies, then you are not an ally. I’d rather you say absolutely nothing than use the mentally ill to virtue signal when you actually don’t care. And stop telling people to go to therapy! Y’all are pushing people into a system that is likely to harm and otherize them.

Full rant here:

Weekly Weds Catchup: STOP telling people to go to Therapy

My own twist on the classic WWW meme hosted by Sam at Taking on a World of Words.

What I’m Working On

*Prepping my Kindle Vella serial Feels Bad, Man

This will go live sometime next month. It is my rewrite of the book that got me way too much attention (let’s be real I went looking for attention-I’m an actual maniac sometimes). I got sort of wacky with that whole thing for most of 2019 and 2020.

I’m very grateful to all the writers who tried to kindly point out to me that I was being weird and should probably knock it off. I bit a few heads off and that wasn’t cool, and now I’m just out here trying to be semi-regular again.

The book is no longer about dudes who can’t get laid, because my views have changed quite a bit on that front.

The book is now focused on the experience of living in a toxic family while being a psych patient, something I wrote a lot about in my last blog post. The book will about the experience of being a psych patient, and hopefully, will teach more people about the conflicts of interest and rampant corruption in the psych industry.

*Working on a collab peice about problems in the psych industry. A writer that I’m acquaintances with approached me about a collaboration. I won’t say too much about it, because it’s not only my work, and she wants to pitch to actual publications once it’s done. (the neat opportunities that are offered when you pop the hell off in a random discord server XD)

*Planning a digital book convention in my discord server. This was a project suggested by a writer friend of mine and now we have a great little team together, brainstorming different events and trying to decide on a keynote speaker to invite.

*Writing my post-colonial piece about Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. I’m specifically focused on the noble savage/white savior dichotomy and how this harmful dichotomy is reinforced through modern “anti-racist” rhetoric. Look, there’s no way to be that focused on intrinsic traits without getting a little racist. A lot racist actually. Being an ally is really just using people of color as props to prove what a good white person you are, and that’s really messed up. All you have to do in this world is be decent. You can’t spend all your mental energy positioning race as the most important defining feature of a person and also behave decently. That’s how you get Rachael Dolezal situations. White women allies are freaking wild.

*Writing a romance short for an anthology I was invited to be a part of with a group of other writers. The deadline is approaching, so I actually really need to get cracking here. I think I’m the only person doing a role reversal thing, but everyone in the collection seems to be bringing their own interesting flavor. Lots of different writers and types of romance.

*Lastly, I wrote a short piece for a mental health series a magazine is running. I emailed the editor and pitched it to them, so we’ll see what happens.

What I’m Watching

*I watched and then rewatched Run Hide Fight. We did a watchalong in my friend’s discord and it was cool to hear everyone else’s take on it. I actually turned out to be the one most critical of the movie. Which is weird, because I’m the biggest Ben Shapiro stan. But I’m just really critical of basically all media I consume.

*My husband and I are rewatching Better Call, Saul for the 4th time. I can just never get sick of that show.

And now on to the classic questions:

What I Recently Finished Reading

This is such a great book. There are so many conflicts of industry in the psych industry and anybody who tells people to go to therapy has an ethical responsibility to educate themselves on these issues and advocate for change. If you don’t have the energy or motivation to do that then you need to stop playing lip service to mental health.

Literally, book community, y’all disappointed the FUCK out of me during mental health month.

Everybody wanna play like they’re so intersectional and woke…

Why did I see NOTHING on my social media about the intersectionality of class, and mental health?

Y’all do mental health awareness SO FUCKING BOUGIE.

I’m so livid at all the mental health “advocates”, honestly. Y’all telling people “take time for yourself. Self-care. Take a bubble bath” but do you think the homeless black woman suffering from psychosis, being arrested and drugged against her will, who isn’t even having her basic needs met CAN TAKE A FUCKING BUBBLE BATH.

And look at this shit?

“Normalize Therapy”?? Fuck YOU.

Therapy is run by the influence of corporations. Y’all so fucking anti-capitalist until I criticize your precious fucking therapy. There is a profit incentive and barely anybody is talking about and it makes me actually angry.

How long ago was it that being trans or gay was a diagnoses in the DSM? How many people were greatly harmed just for being who they are? Oh, but NOW the mental health field is perfect? You all NEED to be more suspicious of therapy.

The psych industry harms people and you are complicit in that harm and you perpetuate that harm every single time you encourage someone to go to therapy.

Everyone encouraging people to go to therapy is working with the basic bitch mental health issues of anxiety and depression. No fucking wonder you love therapy. You get to go and sit in a pretty little office for 45 minutes and talk about yourself. You haven’t been arrested mid-crisis. You haven’t been held down and drugged.

ALL YOU ASSHOLES TALK ABOUT IS BOUGIE PRIVILEGED MENTAL HEALTH SHIT AND IT MAKES ME REALLY FUCKING ANGRY.

First of all, think a little bit about the people with severe mental health issues-the people with psychotic illnesses.

Second, consider the intersection of class and mental health. What is the mental health field like for the homeless or very poor patient?

Third, and this is important: SHUT THE FUCK UP until you have researched the influence of the pharmaceutical industry in the creation of the DSM, in the marketing of diseases themselves and creation of symptom pools, and in the way money is funneled from the pharmaceutical industry directly to doctors.

That is the responsibility you have if you consider yourself a mental health advocate.

You keep doing this basic bitch-don’t actually give any fucks-mental health awareness, and all you’re really doing is virtue-signaling. Except in this case, your virtue-signaling is actively harming people.

What I Am Currently Reading

I’m also beta reading this book for Pixie Stormcrow

This is a very unique twist on the mafia romance genre. It’s going to be released July 15th, according to the goodreads page.

And I’m reading this Amish romance that I found at my city library. I was really enjoying the book, but then damn, does EVEY romance need a bitchy blonde character to compete with the female lead for the affection of the male lead? There is even a scene of the two main characters laughing at the blonde behind her back and calling her “uppity.” I don’t why women have to be so catty and hate each other in romance novels, but it’s misogynistic and toxic as hell and I hate it.

What I Will Read Next

I have a whole bunch of erotic furry stories cued up to read. I had a bunch recommended to me on Sofurry (I’ve never heard of Sofurry, I’m only on furaffinity-and…shameless plug for my collab furry erotic short that I wrote with Nikita Nian of Nikitty Studios!-Check out Nik’s patreon if you’re interested in furry VNs and think you might want to play the pre-alpha version of his game ‘Down Dockside.’

That’s it! And yes, I know it’s Thursday.

When You’re Stuck in the Mental Health System and an Abusive Family

One way in which the biomedical model of mental health failed me was the way doctors never seemed to care that I was under incredible stress at home. I grew up never knowing when screaming would break out, when I’d be punched, kicked, or hit, or even once, have to see my two-year-old sister injured so severely by my mom that an ambulance had to be called. Years of seeing doctors and therapists, starting at age 14 when I had, what I believe to be, a very understandable reaction to the constant violence and chaos, and none of the doctors wanted to talk to me about what was going on at home. And why should they? The biomedical model says that a person displaying the group of symptoms that I displayed is bipolar. Bipolar is something internal, faulty wiring in the brain. Why should they have cared about what was happening in my family? With the biomedical model there is no reason to look at a patient’s living situation or social/familial environment. It’s a chemical imbalance. Take a pill and go be quiet.

I saw many doctors over a period of years, across two states (because we moved when I was in high school). There were no doctors who took what I said seriously. Their only concern was prescribing me drugs. Because that is what they’d been taught, in medical school, by their fellow doctors, in all of the research and studies: ALL sources corrupted by funding from the pharmaceutical industry. For all I know, some of the doctors I saw could have been actively receiving funding from one or more pharmaceutical companies. But even if the influence was not that direct, the influence is pervasive, insidious. The doctors who were on the board for the DSM 5 received funding directly from pharma for their research. The DSM is the most important tool for diagnosing and treating patients. There is no reason the pharmaceutical industry should have monetary influence in that process. But they do and they also influence the education of doctors, research, and academic papers. Patient treatment from diagnosis to treatment plan is determined by the pharmaceutical industry. So we don’t need to surprise Pikachu that drugs are over-prescribed to the point that patients are drugged into symptoms they do not have, to the point that the patient’s actual problems are ignored, even if those problems are toxic family and abuse.

This is an advice post for past me, and everyone who is currently living in the situation that I was in as a teenager and young adult.

If you have been labeled mentally ill for responding in an understandable (albeit socially unacceptable way) to years of physical or emotional abuse, and now your abusive family wields your diagnoses against you, this post is for you. If everyone else in your family screams and is hysterical and violent, yet the second you do it, everyone calms down and stares at you like you’re a lunatic, this post is for you.

First thing, you HAVE to get out

You can love your family and also recognize that they are keeping you sick.

For me, when I started getting my life together, there was a noticeable increase in conflict in my house. Lots of screaming in my face, shoving and hitting me. I would be the only person who was calm and still my family would be screaming at me that I was having a bipolar meltdown. I stood there shaking while my grandfather turned beet red and screamed in my face, when I tried to walk away and disengage, he tried to hit me, my grandmother got involved. He shoved her. She hit the floor. He dragged her out of the room. Both of them blamed this on me. All I did was stand there and then try to walk away.

A psych diagnoses is a weapon to be used against you.

This is why in the process of getting out, you have to be very careful about how you react.

Don’t engage, but be careful about how you do this

If you’ve spent years taking the bait and shouting back at them out of fear or righteous anger, then suddenly coming to your senses is going to upset them. By going so crazy, you became the scapegoat for the toxicity in the family. Now professionals are involved. Maybe police have been involved over the years. That was okay, because the focus was on you and what a problem you are. You can’t just calm the hell down now. They need you to be crazy. If you aren’t, they might have to take a look at themselves and they can’t stand the idea of doing that.

When they see you getting better and making plans to move out, they’ll try to goad you into exploding like you always have. You can’t explode, but you also can’t exactly take the high road. At least, you can’t do it in a way that makes it clear you’re taking the high road.

I’ll give you an example. After I’d made a lot of progress, hadn’t been hospitalized in over a year, had a full-time job where I was making decent money, and had recently been accepted as a transfer student to a good university in the next state over (I went to community college ages 18-22). My younger sister had come for a visit and we were taking the bus to a nearby city to spend the day. My grandmother offered to drive us. My grandparents were in the front seat; my sister and I were in the back.

When we were maybe half a mile from the house, my grandmother turned to me and said, “You don’t have your purse, Jen?”

And I said, “No, I don’t need it. I have cash in my pocket.”

My grandmother said, “Don’t you need your ID to get the bus?”

And I exclaimed, “Oh crud, you’re right! I’m an idiot.”

And my grandfather hit the dashboard and yelled at the top of his lungs, “YES. YOU ARE!”

As my grandmother turned the car around, I was very quiet for long moment, and then I said, “Why would you say that? Why are you being so nasty when I already admitted I made a mistake.”

I kept my voice level and calm.

My grandfather lost it, screaming stuff at me like “You stop it! you never know when to stop. Look at what you do to this family!”

I kept going. I said, “Why are you hysterically screaming? This is not a proportional reaction.” Again, I kept my voice low and calm. I had been reading a lot of self-help and books about healthy communication. I had started to really understand that I wasn’t the problem.

My grandmother joined in the screaming. They both shouted at me that I never knew when to quit. That I was too emotional. That nobody could have any peace with me around. They both hit the dashboard and shouted for the next ten minutes. I didn’t say anything. Neither did my sister. My youngest sister is the most timid of the three of us. I wonder if it’s because she received the worst of the violence. My mom burned her arm so badly on the kiln when she was two. My mom threw a set of keys at her face and cut her eye open. She needed stitches. When she was only a toddler, my mom picked her up and threw her as hard as she could into a wall. The wall broke. The drywall crumbled just as her toddler body crumbled into a limp little shaking ball on the floor. Years later, sitting in the backseat of the car with me, she was sixteen and she was still the mousiest most timid thing. She held her hands in tight fists in her lap and looked at the floor until my grandparents stopped screaming.

Calling them out directly didn’t work.

The next thing I tried was not engaging at all. Trying to walk away from conflicts would also cause escalation.

You have to gauge your family yourself and figure out how not to engage as you plan your escape. But what I figured out is this: if they can tell you are taking the high road, if they can tell you have figured them out, they will feel threatened and they will escalate.

What usually worked in my case was to nod and say okay very meekly and look afraid, even though it was humiliating. I mean, look, I always was afraid. I always flinched and shook when my grandfather got in my space, towering over me, and acting like he was gonna hit me. But since the age of 14, since the day I snapped and attacked him, I’d always looked him angrily in the eye and screamed back at him. I shook and flinched and my heart raced, but I looked him in the eye and screamed back at him all the same. I think I did this because for all of my life keeping my head and trying to “be good” didn’t work. Matching anger with anger and violence with violence was a new strategy. Not that it worked out very well for me. It ended with a slew of psych diagnoses and a revolving door pattern of in-patient hospitalizations. I guess…like I know how martyr-y this is gonna sound and I already hate myself for it, but fuck it, let me find a brightside here: At least with all the adults focused on me and my outbursts, my sisters weren’t hurt as much as they might have been. When I was fifteen, I started getting into fist fights with my mom when she tried to hurt my youngest sister. We were pretty evenly matched. After a couple of these, she stopped losing her shit on my sister. So, hopefully I did something. Both my sisters hate me now, but they both have their own side of this whole thing.

In short, if you have to nod and swallow your pride, do it: It’s worth it. Getting away from them is worth it.

Tell Them As Little As Possible

I told my grandparents everything about my plans to get an apartment at first. Every time I made progress on my plan to achieve independence, they found something to criticize or get upset about. It went like this, my grandfather would fly off the handle and once he got upset, she’d get upset too.

They’d spent years sporadically threatening to throw me out of the house. Now I had a good paying job and I had money saved up, and they would find any reason to scream at me that I couldn’t live on my own. Working almost forty hours a week and taking three courses at community college, while volunteering for hospice, and my grandparents would see me awake at midnight and scream at me that any 22-year-old who didn’t go to bed at a decent hour couldn’t live on their own. Everything was my illness, my sickness, I was too too sick to be on my own.

I stopped talking to them about my plans.

An uncle of mine had died in an unfortunate accident several years prior to this and my aunt had been engaged in a lengthy lawsuit ever since. The lawsuit was unexpectedly settled and my aunt decided to split everything up between the family, instead of keeping it all. She would have been completely entitled to keep it all had she chosen to do that. She lost her husband. But that’s not what she did. I received a lump payout of $10,000 with another $5,000 to be paid to me ten months later. My sisters received the same.

I put that money in a savings account and amped up my apartment search. I realize that I was very lucky and a lot of people in an abusive living situation will not have such a large amount of money given to them out of nowhere. Work as hard as you can and save as much money as you can. Do not let your family know how much you have saved.

From the moment that money was wired to me, my grandfather was on me to sign the money over to him. He tried to get me to give him power of attorney too. He would yell at me, shove me, back me up against the counter and jab his finger in my face, and the whole time berate me to sign those papers.

I knew that I couldn’t. But I also couldn’t fight him.

This was tricky.

Sometimes I said no. Sometimes I hemmed and hawed. Other times I pretended I was late for work.

He forged my signature once. The papers were sitting right out on his desk. He’d signed it for me. I ripped them up and barricaded myself in my room, waiting for the fall out.

If you are in. situation similar to mine, be prepared for this sort of escalation. Legal escalation.

It did not even end there. But I don’t have the energy to get into all of it.

I got out and I’m okay.

Save your money, make your plans, but be incredibly secretive about it.

Nobody Will Believe You and That Has To Be Okay

It’s been ten years since I escaped my family. I’ve been a known quantity in the indie writing world since 2016. I am so used to not being believed that only this year I started talking about this stuff. I have friends in the writing world that have known me since 2016/2017 and they are just now learning that I have all these emotional issues and I come from such a dysfunctional family.

My extended family, aunts and uncles and cousins who don’t know what my grandparents and mom are like when they aren’t around, they believe I am crazy.

They believe I am an over-dramatic emotional bomb, causing so much trouble for my poor mom and grandparents. My cousins that I grew up spending summers with will not talk to me. Ignored my facebook friend requests. Awkwardly avoid me at family gatherings.

The few times that I snapped and said things like “Anybody would be as crazy as me if they lived the way I do. Papa hits her you know. Papa hits her and screams and throws things and threatens everybody.” Nobody believed me. I’m the crazy one. I make shit up. That’s what they believe. And I’ve always been the type to say when I was pissed off or sad. I’m the type to yell and cry. Around other people, my grandfather is calm and kind. And I was an angry emotional teenager. I didn’t have this facade of an exterior. I wasn’t the perfect well-behaved victim who knew exactly how to act to receive sympathy and help. So I didn’t get any.

If you are in the mental health system, my guess is that you didn’t know how to be the perfect well-behaved victim either.

It’s too late now. You are crazy and nobody will believe you.

So don’t try to make them believe you. Do not defend yourself. Do not bring receipts. Your family will likely escalate talking about how crazy you are to extended family or family friends as you get better and become more independent. The sooner you accept that you will never not be crazy to them, the sooner that you accept that crazy to them means ‘person who can not be believed or sympathized with’ the better you will feel.

Nobody will help you, so YOU have to help you.

Stop Waiting for Love and Acceptance. Your Family Will Not Give it to You

If you’re like me, the more independent you become, the more you start to achieve success as a functioning human being, the more you’ll hope for your family to recognize how far you’ve come.

But this goes back to your success being a threat to them: They will not be proud or give you an atta boy or say “wow, we were really wrong about you.”

It will never happen and the more that you hope for it, the more you open yourself up to further abuse from them.

Here is how I interact with my mom, now that I’ve transitioned from no contact to minimal contact. The second I start to feel anything, I end the conversation.

I feel happy because she’s proud of something I did? End the conversaton.

I feel annoyed because she is picking at me? end the conversation.

I feel longing for some real connection to her? end the conversation.

If I feel anything at all, the conversation is over. this is why I only talk to her every few years and even then, never for more than four or five text messages.

Happy Birthday, Jen!

Thanks, Mom

What are you doing to celebrate?

Going out to dinner with Ernie. How is your bird?

He’s good! I’ll send a picture. Hey! i live in your state now. Dunno if Nan told you. Want to get together soon? I miss my Jen!

I never responded to that last text and didn’t speak for her for another two and half years she sent that.

Do not let yourself hope for that love you never got. They didn’t give it to for 18 years. Why would they give it to you now? Why?

the answer is that they wouldn’t. They won’t. Never.

And that sucks. But you’ll be so much sicker and so much worse if you keep letting that hope make you pathetic around them. You don’t have to keep letting them hurt you forever. You don’t!

Cut them out. Never look back.

Take care of you.

Trust Yourself and Don’t Be Afraid to Make Choices about Your Treatment

Your family isn’t the only group that wants to keep you dependent. The mental health industry does too.

Unfortunately, there is no good alternative to mental health treatment as it currently exists.

I am able to manage without professional help. This may not be the case for everyone. If you think you can manage on your own, try it. Trust yourself. The mental health field is not there for you; it is there for drug company profits.

That being said, medication does work for some patients. If it works for you, I’m so glad. If it doesn’t, you do not have to keep taking it. Come off it safely and with a doctor’s help (if you can find one who will guide you through the process without victimizing you further). But you do NOT have to treat mental illness with drugs. There is a plethora of evidence that psych drugs harm patients and exacerbate symptoms.

If therapy is helpful to you, great.

If it isn’t, stop going.

You can do this. You can become independent. You can be your own person under nobody’s control.

You have a right to true freedom. You should be free from violence, screaming, and chaos. You should be free from the pressure to take drugs that make you worse.

If your family is not allowing you those basic freedoms, then you have to get away from them. Do what you need to. Fight for your life. You ARE fighting for your life.

Good luck. You can do it

Polyamorous Queer Gothic Vampire Romance (in a Castle, so you know I love it)

(Make sure you read to the end to see some questions answered by the author!)

A few years ago, I stumbled across a book with a blood red cover and an LGBT+ sticker on it. Back then the book was only on wattpad, one of my favorite serial sites to read on. It kept popping up in my newsfeed (back when wattpad still had a newsfeed). People I followed kept voting and commenting and adding it to reading lists. The cover was pretty and I love a short, cryptic title. 

I gave the book a click. The description pulled me in right away. I love medieval books. Anything set in a castle is a total win. 

The main character Meya drew me in right away. Due to tragic events, she is taken from the only life she has ever known and finds herself serving a mysterious lord in a creepy, gothic castle. There are all kinds of murmurs and rumors about Lord Deminas. 

I binged this book so quickly and even went back to reread it. Now that the book has been published by Gurt Dog Press, I have a beautiful red paperback on my romance bookshelf. It is so soo good. I know I’m a little late with my Pride Month recommendation, but it is this book. Especially if you love gothic romance. 

This book was confusing in the best way. Almost the entire time I was reading it, I was like “Is this a horror or a romance?” Shimaira blends the two genres so seamlessly. Despite the dark themes in the book (cannibalism, murder, and vampires, just to name a few), the romance is quite touching. There’s no non-con. You know I wouldn’t be praising a book with non-con. There is, however, a lot of consensual smut. There are some steamy bath scenes that come to mind. 

I loved reading about Meya’s relationships with Lord Deminas and Nina. This was the first polyamorous romance I’ve ever read, and as someone who is monogamous, I was a little confused at first by the love triangle that suddenly…wasn’t a love triangle. It was interesting to read about a relationship dynamic that I haven’t experienced myself. Plus the two different love interests each had their own energy and vibe with Meya. Nina was this sweet confidante while Lord Deminas was stoic, imposing, and masculine. Nina and Meya had more of a friendship that blossomed into romance, while with Lord Deminas, it’s clear the fear is part of the titillation for Meya. She’s intimidated by him and this adds to the sexual tension. 

I don’t want to give too many spoilers, because this is such an awesome read and I want people to experience it for themselves. I’ll just briefly mention some of my favorite parts of the book:

-Meya cooking and tasting human flesh

-The dead girl on the rocks below Lord Deminas’ window that Meya dumbs dirty water on when she’s done cleaning

-The sexy bath scenes with Lord Deminas

-Meya cleaning Lord Deminas’ room naked while he watches

-That first kiss scene with Nina

There’s so much more I could get into. I’ll just leave it off with this, if you like polyamorous romance, gothic romance, vampires, and smut, you’ll love this book. 

This remains one of my most-loved 5 star reads, even years after reading it. 

You can check out ‘My Lord’ here!

Amazon | Goodreads | Gurt Dog Press | Barnes and Noble | Wattpad Choose Your Own Adventure | Target | Shimaira’s Linktree | 

Emily Hurricane and I teamed up to write our reviews concurrently and we asked Shimaira a couple of questions.

Your publisher specializes in LGBT+ authors. Since it’s Pride Month, can you shout out some other Gurt Dog Press LGBTQ+ authors and tell us a little about their stories?

Shimaira says:

Anna Kirchner’s LITTLE BLACK BIRD is YA urban fantasy set in Poland featuring Polish folklore, amazing friendships, and has ace/questioning rep. I’m seeing it making quite the rounds on bookstagram

Review Here

Review Here

April-Jane Rowan’s BENEATH A BETHEL is a queer horror fantasy novella, set in a frigid fantasy land with non-humans (they got fur & tails). Upon coming of age, their teeth are pulled & they get magical dentures instead. The story is very graphic & has amazing worldbuilding (like tea that makes you feel emotions). Also, April’s writing style is just beautiful ♡♡

Review Here

Claire Olivia Golden’s UNRAVELED is a sapphic urban fantasy with fae and a cursed crochet shawl. It has OCD and mental illness rep — own voices — and it’s just so good ♡ as a bonus, it also features the crochet pattern at the back so you can make your own (not) cursed shawl

Review Here

A.L. Haringrey’s A CURE FOR HUMANITY is another queer urban fantasy, where some humans have evolved into vampires and werewolves, but the humans are suppressing them with (gruesome) tech. It’s a very inventive take and features some really nice worldbuilding (like candied bloodclots for the vamps). Also fun fact: this story used to be on wattpad too

Review Here

D.B McKenzie’s BLOOD WORTH is… a queer mystery urban fantasy… horror? It’s hard to put this one in a genre box. I had expected there to be vampires but NOPE, this book is a lot more unique and just so good. Another great mental illness rep and what I also loved: no romance! Just an awesome friendship

Review Here

Alexandra Beaumont’s TESTAMENT OF THE STARS is a sapphic dark fantasy featuring celestial “magic” (they (ab)use fallen stars) and delicious worldbuilding. It deals with political/civil war and it’s a real rollercoaster ♡ I still want to live in one of the cities of that book

Review Here

Nem Rowan’s THE RUINER is Gurt Dog’s latest release. It’s a queer thriller romance about a trans MC who gets stalked… and it’s so well done ♡ the setting is kinky with a BDSM club, it’s own voices, I shipped the achillean romance so hard it hurt, and the stalker was truly horrific & terrifying.

Review Here

Emily and I also asked Shimaira, “Can you tell us a little about the LGBTQ+ representation in My Lord?”

But to read that answer, you’ll have to check out the companion post on Emily’s blog! Link here

The UN’s Position on Human Rights and Mental Illness — Mental Health @ Home

In 1991, the United Nations General Assembly passed a set of principles for the protection of persons with mental illness and the improvement of mental health care. A PDF version is embedded below. The international community will talk the talk when it comes to human rights and mental illness, but they’re still a long way……

The UN’s Position on Human Rights and Mental Illness — Mental Health @ Home

Psychiatry is the Only Big Business People Implicitly Trust (and they shouldn’t)

This is a 5 Star rave review of Crazy Like Us by Ethan Watters

This is such an important book. The focus is on the Westernization of mental health practices around the world, but it also touches on some of the biggest issues and conflicts of interest in the psych industry as a whole. This book gets to the heart of the issue: Psychiatry is a business and diseases themselves are marketed.

We create symptom pools and the unconscious mind latches onto these as a way to perform emotional distress. And who has the biggest hand in creating symptom pools? the pharmaceutical companies. Pharmaceutical companies fund research which is then misrepresented and cherry-picked, so the efficacy of psych drugs can not be proven. Psych drugs may help some patients but they greatly harm others: which is itself a reason not to treat them as a blanket solution for all psych patients.

Many of the doctors involved in the creation of the DSM-the single most important tool in psychiatry for diagnosing and treating patients-have received incredible amounts of money from pharmaceutical companies. These conflicts of interest need to end, because they greatly compromise patient care.

There is also a stark condemnation of the biomedical model in this book. This book talks about how otherizing the biomedical model truly is. From my own experience, as a kid living in a very violent home, I was diagnosed with bipolar at age 14, two days after having the absolute fuck beat out of me by my grandfather and I landed in the ER in a hysterical state. Even if I AM mentally ill, there is no way my home environment didn’t exacerbate my symptoms. Yet, all doctors ever talked to me about was my chemical imbalance. When I talked about my abuse I was ignored. I was drugged. The drugs made me much more emotional. With these new symptoms caused by the drugs, the doctors gave me more labels, more diagnoses. I was drugged into symptoms that I did not have and then otherized further.

Psychiatry in its current state, is harmful. Stop telling people to go to therapy or get “professional help.” Like any big business, psychiatry is rife with oppression. The most vulnerable groups are further victimized.

I Subscribed to Ben Shapiro’s Streaming Service and Watched His School Shooter Movie

Four Stars

Action-packed and doesn’t glorify school shooters, instead glorifies the heroes who stop them. We hear the stupid nihilistic message that drive school shooters and the main character Zoe talks straight back to that narrative, laughing at the guy who wants a “reckoning” for being bullied in 6th grade.

Strong badass female main character.

Shows that people are the problem not guns (because duh). I kind of figured going into it that good guys with guns would be the heroes, because it is distributed by Ben Shapiro’s media company and I was not disappointed. I know hoes mad because it didn’t do a whole ‘lock up the guns’ thing, but it was really tastefully done. Also really not sure why the people all concerned about fascism and authoritarianism want the government to have weapons and individual citizens to have very limited access to them.

I thought the execution of the good guys with guns message was great. Done very well. Zoe made the school shooters look like lame idiots. We really needed a school shooter movie to (finally) do that.

The only reason I’m giving it four stars is because (as someone who used to work in a middle/high school and has done the run/hide/fight school shooter drills with kids) I can tell you that no freaking school still does lockdowns. Even back when they still DID lockdowns, they didn’t keep kids from running out the exits. Tons of kids evacuated themselves during the Columbine massacre. So it was kind of dumb that there was a lockdown in a movie set in the present day. Also like nobody in the building knew a shooting was happening in the cafeteria….you know fast all the kids in the caf would have texted all their friends irl? Also gunshots. They loud. And why were there literally NO teachers in the cafeteria when the shooting started? Lunch duty is a thing. And how in the fuck did nobody else in the school hear or notice a van being driven INTO the building? It was wild. Literally the entire rest of the school kept trucking, going blissfully about their business.

Also, there was way too much Columbine fangirl fap material. Did we need that chick to jut out her chest and breathily go “Please don’t hurt me”? I feel like it should have ended with an UwU. And the scene where he makes the teacher take her shirt off at gunpoint. Just saying columbine fangirls be masturbating tonight….or not, because the overlap of humans who are subscribed to Ben Shapiro and humans who masturbate to school shooters is probably incredibly small.

Anyway, I’ll be making a full movie review for my youtube channel. It will probably go up tomorrow.

Fair warning, I probably will delete my channel again if I ever get too many followers. I’ve done it multiple times now, so safe to say I’ll probably keep doing it. Because I think I want attention. Then I get it and I’m like “No!” and then everybody leaves me alone and I want it again. So….don’t subscribe to me if you want me to keep making content. I have a panic attack whenever anything I do starts to take off.

I’m Starting a Kindle Vella Serial!

Hey! Does that book look familiar? Dear god, I hope note. I revamped the FUCK out of that thing.

The original book had a way more of a focus on romantic relationships and a certain i-word that has been scrapped entirely because wowza…what a mess that whole project was.

Okay, this book is more about the general directionlessness of one’s early-mid twenties and (the part I’m most excited about!) the problems with the psych industry.

Like I talked about in my livestream a couple months ago, I have some experience with the psych industry. I have all the diagnoses.

Okay, I’ll do a meme watch:

Me: doctors which psychiatric illness do I have?

Doctors: YES

I told y’all to stop teaching me memes. I can’t be trusted to use them responsibly.

Well, anyhow, I don’t actually think I have all of the disorders the doctors threw at me. Let’s see Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Major Depression, Catatonic Depression (that one was temporary-I think it usually is-I started moving and talking again eventually-I don’t think most people could remain in a state like that more than a few weeks), boderline, bipolar, and schizoaffective.

Whew! Was I playing bingo or what?

Really though, once you know all about pharma’s influence in the creation of the DSM and the diagnoses of patients, it kind of makes you suspect that half those disorders are even real. And the bipolar diagnoses they gave me when I was 14, 2 days after my grandfather beat the fuck out of me and I was in the ER in this highly-charged emotional state, and they diagnosed me right then and there. So….yep, I’m not too sure I trust that.

I definitely have some emotional issues. I definitely have strange perceptions and ideas at times, and I do weird shit as a result. (Although don’t mistake me: I’m not blaming my general assholery on my mental health issues. Like yeah, I have mental health issues, but I also have impulse control issues and I tend to be a tad self-involved. When push comes to shove, I can always keep the crazy in check when I really need to. I never had a meltdown while working with kids. I never had a meltdown working with alzheimers patients. I know how to sit quietly and wait for the emotional storm to pass when the stakes are high enough. So I’m not saying my mental health problems are the reason I act like such a shit sometimes. My reasons for wanting to act like a shit might stem from mental health problems-then there’s still me making the active choice to act like a shit). Anyway, emotional issues and problems with weird ideas don’t automatically correlate to all of those labels. I take the psycho-social perspective: I think I’m a little screwy because my childhood was sort of fucked. It wasn’t the worst, I guess. It’s not like I was locked in a basement and beat/starved/raped constantly. It also wasn’t the best. It used to make me sick to my stomach when my mom would be affectionate: when she would hug me or say anything nice to me. I felt like I was walking cautiously around a wild animal and one wrong move would send her feral. But to be objective for a second, as far as people-fucked-up-by-childhood go, I think I probably score just a little higher than average. I think the violence and screaming in my house was just a little more than average. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t upsetting or that it hasn’t made it difficult for me to manage my emotions and form relationships with people over the years.

Anyhow…the psych industry…all of that was a horrible experience. So absolutely horrible. I feel so deeply hurt when I think about my time in-patient, the drugs, the doctors, the way they didn’t listen to me and sided with the adults abusing me, the way they GAVE my mom tools and language to tear me down further. God, I wish there was a way to show people what that was like for me. How isolating and horrible it was. How the drugs made my weird thoughts worse and instead of taking me off them, the doctors gave me new diagnoses based on the symptoms that the drugs gave me.

The psych field made me feel so small and alone. It was so dehumanizing.

Anyway, that’s my new goal for the rewritten version of this book. I want to highlight those problems. I want people to fully understand the systemic issues with the psych industry and I want people to treat mentally ill individuals with respect and dignity.

So yeah, ‘Incel’ is now ‘Feels Bad, Man.’

I like this new direction a lot better and I hope that it actually does some good in the world. The book is going to be far more autobiographical and the focus is no longer the male experience, but the psych patient’s experience.

Or idk, maybe it won’t do anything and I’ll go stick to monster girl porn.

Okay! Well, Vella is supposed to open up to readers mid-July. I’ll update once the rewritten book is live.