What if people actually knew what to say and do to help you through your depression spiral, panic attack, or other mental health crisis? Do you have mind obstacles and yet feel conflicted as to what to do for someone else struggling?
How to Make Your Own Mental Health Zine
Zines (pronounced “zeens”) are self-published booklets that anyone can make. You can make them different sizes, and put anything you’d like inside them. Below is a prompt to make your own mental health zine, instructions on how to create it, and four examples of mental health zines created by The Strange is Beautiful’s staff.
Zine Review: “Processes: A Meditation” by Terra Olvr
There are many different ways to meditate that have been proven to calm your anxiety, depression or other mind obstacles, and to ground you. Some people like guided ones, where a person is speaking for the entire time and tells them what to do or visualize. Others enjoy practicing in silence, and simply letting the mind journey and wander to wherever it needs to explore. “Processes: A Meditation,” a zine by Terra Olvr (she/they) that I bought at their San Francisco Zine Fest table in 2018, is an inbetween option.
For each set of pages, there’s one philosophical sentence on the right-hand page that seems to both acknowledge daily mistakes and struggles, and to encourage taking healthier choices of self-love. And on the left-hand page, there’s a drawing representing what it would look like in a meditative physical form or “how the verses live in the body,” said Olvr.