What did he miss? Let us know in the comments. [Please note that Tim’s lungs were crushed under 2.5 atmospheres of anxiety throughout most of the interview].
Saraƒin is a writer, illustrator, cartoonist, and mad identified person. Asylum Squad, the webcomic, was born during a year long stay in a Toronto mental institution as a creative means of passing Saraƒin’s time. She will be selling her work at the Mad Hatter Street Fair and Marketplace.
Asylum Squad – Saraƒin’s long running Mad Comic!
What are you most excited about with your new book, Asylum Squad: The Jung Ones 2?
I am excited, as I always am, at the prospect of making new fans, and advancing the storyline. This book was the most action packed in the series thus far, and was a joy to work on.
What do we need to know from previous issues to understand the new book?
It helps to have at least read The Jung Ones pt 1, even better to have read Monster Hospital 1 & 2. There are recaps in each new volume of events that occurred in previous books. Basically, at this point, Liz Madder and company are well into the Ajna Project: an experimental drug treatment program based on Jungian psychiatry, that they signed up for, and were accepted into, during their stay at St Dymphna’s psychiatric hospital.
How do you describe your experience with madness?
I do not like psychiatric labels, for I have been given many in my life, and none of them seemed to stick or describe me very well. I prefer to use the term Mad, even though I don’t consider myself a “sufferer of mental illness” – rather, I feel that I see the world through an unusual perspective due to a form of spiritual emergency that started in my mid 20s.
Editor: Do you, or people around you, blame yourself, others, diagnosis, society or do you recognize that “Something happened to me”
It took me a long time to acknowledge that I had been through multiple traumatic experiences. The first time I heard a therapist refer to my emotional reactions as the result of trauma I stopped seeing her. I wasn’t ready to acknowledge that people had done things to me that have left a lasting mark. I wasn’t taught that people could or had hurt me. I was taught that I was hurting myself. The message that I received, loud and clear, as a teen was that everything was the fault of my mental illness and that I was solely responsible for everything that had happened to me. I was on a constant quest to fix myself so people would like me. I believed that people treated me poorly because I was difficult, sad, annoying, and impulsive. It never occurred to me that the poor treatment I received meant there was something wrong with them and how they saw me as a person. (more…)
Mad Pride 2014
