All in Your Head 4: Cure
Collaborative
36 pages
https://www.etsy.com/au/shop/GlitterWurst
All in Your Head 4: Cure is a full-colour, US-sized half-fold zine of (primarily) words and images around the theme of cure within the scope of sexuality, neurodiversity, and disability.
Sometimes I feel a little unsure when I come into a zine series after the start of it, but there’s absolutely no problems with jumping in with the fourth issue.
All In Your Head 4 opens with ‘My Mantra,’ a piece by V about being bisexual and the treatment he has received being such. As someone who is also bisexual, this one struck me – especially as V wrote that it’s not an illness that needs to be cured.
This zine is packed – there’s a lot to read. Writing pieces are nicely broken up by more ‘collage-esque’ pieces so it doesn’t feel densely chock full of text only. Ideas of what cure really means, the pressures to be cured, and what actual cures would really mean for certain individuals are explored.
Reading about the different perspectives on the concept of ‘cure’ and how detrimental that can be was quite eye-opening. Things I’d never really thought about or questioned despite having things in common with the authors. In the piece ‘Borderline Survival: Beyond Recovery and Cure Narratives’, Rosen writes:
“Invoking ‘personality’ along with ‘disorder’ [in Borderline Personality Disorder] is park of what makes the diagnostic label so dangerous, but there’s truth to the ‘personality part. ‘Curing’ my BPD would be tantamount to erasing my personality.”
This concept is also touched on later in the transcript of the virtual round table included in this zine.
All in Your Head 4 is a great collaborative zine that got me questioning everything from societal pressures to my own self-imposed pressures. This is definitely a zine to check out.