Surviving Academia

The process of healing from first episode psychosis as a queer person of color is not represented in the medical model, academia, or media. As a pansexual, non-binary, Latinx femme with a psychological disability, walking out of the hospital doors for the final time incited immense amounts of isolation that overcame my spirit because of the lack of dialogue around such healing. I assembled this zine with the intention of my intuition that somehow, somewhere, someone with my identities and positionality exists with similar trauma to mine from having experienced a mental health crisis. Zines are an accessible multimedia approach to sharing collective wisdom. The very definition of a zine varies as each publication can differ in size, art and writing media, price, and shape. Through this multimedia personal narrative of the different stages of healing, I continue to endure as a graduate student still affected by my trauma, I hope to center the power of personal narrative and lived experience as valid scholarship.