Craft Chat Call for Short Stories- This Way Lies Madness

[Pamela Jo]

Imagine my surprise to see Lee Murrays name appear on writers.ie.

https://blog.flametreepublishing.co...0p_1wbFulBbRhHD8ZE_aem_w2z1kc1u_LLLIlsNGTGSYQ

 

[Lee Murray]

Imagine my surprise to see Lee Murrays name appear on writers.ie.

https://blog.flametreepublishing.co...0p_1wbFulBbRhHD8ZE_aem_w2z1kc1u_LLLIlsNGTGSYQ

Thank you for sharing, @Pamela Jo! So excited for this one. I'm really hoping we can push back on the stigma and demonisation of mental illness in horror.

 

[Pamela Jo]

Thank you for sharing, @Pamela Jo! So excited for this one. I'm really hoping we can push back on the stigma and demonisation of mental illness in horror.

Is it ethical for you to expand a bit on what hits the target? Are there any examples out there that do bullseye? The call was written beautifully but I was left a bit puzzled as what sort of creature was expected at the end of the day.

 

[Lee Murray]

Is it ethical for you to expand a bit on what hits the target? Are there any examples out there that do bullseye? The call was written beautifully but I was left a bit puzzled as what sort of creature was expected at the end of the day.

While not short stories, consider Daniel Kraus's Whalefall with being swallowed by a whale as a metaphor for suicide ideation or Lauren Elise Daniel's Serpent's Wake: Tale for the Bitten in which the serpent represents grief, trauma, and abuse. Both favourites of the editors. I hope that helps.

 

[Pamela Jo]

While not short stories, consider Daniel Kraus's Whalefall with being swallowed by a whale as a metaphor for suicide ideation or Lauren Elise Daniel's Serpent's Wake: Tale for the Bitten in which the serpent represents grief, trauma, and abuse. Both favourites of the editors. I hope that helps.

HMMM. I have to put that in my writer brain and let it percolate. I can definitely get the film Babadook being about grief but the characters are not mentally ill.
For example when my father mentioned he wasn't himself because his dog died the day before his checkup his GP gave him prozac as if a pill could and should make the "bad" feeling go away. Isn't that stating some happy, clappy state of being with no strong feelings is "normal" and everything outside of it is "unbalanced." Is grieving now "mentally ill?"

For me all horror is about dealing with whatever is overwhelming and too much to handle, but I'm not sure my ideas explore mental illness. Are the protagonists diagnosable? Is this about other interpretations of madness other than the Freudian?

My Uncle and Aunt were administrators at an asylum for the criminally insane. He left the job when a patient he thought was progressing attacked and tried to kill him with a garden rake. He also could no longer afford liability insurance because the courts released a patient he had advised was dangerous and the young man went home and killed his sister and grandmother with an axe The surviving family sued him. Though the insurance paid off - they raised the premium to half a million dollars (this was the early 80's) and my uncle couldn't afford to practice anymore.

Though the stigmatisation of madness is unfair, paranoid schizophrenics can be dangerous. Their delusions have killed innocent people. Finding truth/reality has always been a daily task for humans. With the flood of information coming at us from the internet that is getting harder not easier.

I remember my Uncle saying that the most difficult thing in "returning" a patient to sanity is that the cultural definition of sanity changes. In the 50's and 60's a woman who didn't want to marry and have children was "maladjusted", possibly "insane." You were supposed to find treatment that made her accept her destiny as wife and mother. You see this in Shirley Jackson's work.
The women's movement shifted that, but now there is almost a male definition of sanity that still ignores any innate women's intuition or value in being female that you see in indigenous cultures.
Recently the Irish government intervened to get an Irish woman home from UAE. She'd attempted suicide after repeated abuse from her Saudi husband. Illegal there. She'd been imprisoned and it took major diplomacy to get her out.