It is 30 years since the first issue of the magazine. For one reason and another there have been a few stops and starts along the way, which is why we are only now up to Volume 23. All the same, most of those years we provided an outlet for views and ideas which were never going to get much of an airing – if any – in academic and conventional channels. Read more
This final special feature in our series focuses on critical approaches to mental health in comics. We begin with a comic from Liam Geary Baulch about being caught in the system, and then there are some personal reflections from Andrew Voyce about sequential art and mental health. Read more
The special feature in this issue focuses on depictions of body and gender-related mental distress in comics. We kick off with a piece by Caroline reflecting on the recent spate of autobiographical comics, particularly Marbles. After that we have Kate Tibbets’s Lobotomobile and Jason Darrah’s piece about mental health in prisons. Read more
We briefly featured the life and work Leonard Roy Frank on pages 7–10 of the recent Electroshock issue of the magazine – Asylum 21:3 (2014). Now we are sad to report that his long and principled struggle against the routine abuses of medical psychiatry has come to an end. Read more
Welcome to the start of a series of editions of the magazine featuring mental health issues depicted in comic strips. We kick off with a full issue devoted to this topic. This will be followed by special features in the next few issues. They will focus on specific themes: depression, anxiety and psychotic experience; bodies and gender, including eating disorders, femininity and masculinity; and critical approaches to mental health diagnosis and treatment. Read more
The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, and the majority of these prisoners suffer from mental health conditions. A 2014 report estimated that U.S. prisons and jails house 10 times more mentally ill individuals than state psychiatric hospitals (CTA, 2014). Read more
