Going Mental

Issue One

So, I did a sort of test run back in October and was pleased with both the interest in a mental health newsletter (by me, of course) and the Substack template (yay Substack). The plan is to finally get going on this thing and publish twice weekly—either Mondays and Thursdays or Tuesdays and Fridays. Suggestions?

Full disclosure: I am doing this leading up to and in tandem with the release of my book, So Old a Pain: Depression in Fragments, which is due out in June.

What I want to do here, in Issue One (get it? I have “Issues!”), is to basically provide a preview of what to expect each time this thing appears in your inbox. What not to expect is a “sob blog,” or to-the-minute consistency, for that matter. It’s a mental health newsletter, after all. And who’s to say I won’t be going mental when I’m supposed to be working on it?

---

In the news

In this section I’ll provide a link to a depression or anxiety or (insert your diagnosis here)—themed article I’ve come across in the news. I’m already excited to share the one I have queued up for Issue Two (lol “issues,” I just love that!), which deals with depression and memory loss. So stay tuned for that early next week.

---

Excerpt

I’ll always include a short excerpt from my book. It won’t always make sense in isolation, but too bad! Mental illness doesn’t always make sense, either. Issue Two (rotfl!) will have some or all of the introduction. I haven’t decided yet.

---

Video

I want to insert a video, simply because I can and it’s my newsletter. It’ll often be me, wearing a writerly black turtleneck and sitting in front of a lot of impressive books. But it’ll sometimes be a video I took outdoors or even a music video of a song I like. This will be a super cool section.

---

Mindful

The concluding section will be a few sentences or a short paragraph about how I’m doing. I’m not going to use this space to unload or anything like that (that’s what Twitter is for), but more to simply share what’s on my mind—like how therapy went or a project I’m working on. Hopefully, over time, you’ll become familiar with my patterns of thought and perhaps figure out or clarify your own patterns. Or maybe not! You might end up hating this newsletter, and me! And that’s fine. There’s always the “Unsubscribe” button.