Editorial

by Jessie Cunningham-Reid
Creator of Special Issue s

Special Issue s Promotional Video made by Liam Power

Borne out of my own “notes” on my phone and having suffered from anxiety and depression, I record intrusive or anxious thoughts on my phone in an attempt to externalise them and take their power away.  I started to notice some common threads in my thoughts and could see some feminist themes and also some internalised misogyny and self-hatred which I think speaks to our society and culture, as to what messages we learn growing up and from the world around us.  This led me to thinking about magazines.  Growing up I used to collect Dolly Magazine, and this monthly publication shaped much of what I thought about my womanhood during my teenage years and is a huge platform that sends messages to generations of women.  Of course, this is not a new idea, that media is bad for self-image, but I suppose I am not necessarily saying that I hate magazines, I think they’re great and also clever.  I guess, I wanted to create a satirical magazine as I have a love for imagery, fashion and text.  By subverting the magazine and injecting some of the themes I have already mentioned, I want to create a voice for parts of ourselves we have shamed or forgotten about.  In my own work I use “selfie” culture to comment on narcissism and the irony of taking what can be seen as a vanity project through a lens of self-criticism. Navel gazing, selfie-taking and self-therapy become blurred in an attempt to understand oneself, change and the world around us.

As a mental health worker, I am familiar with mental ill-health and have been exposed to an array of people’s experiences of the world.  Unfortunately, stigma is still rife in our culture, especially with the less prevalent illnesses such as schizophrenia and Borderline Personality Disorder.  I think we have started to talk more about anxiety and depression in everyday conversation, which is great, but stigma is still around mental ill-health in general.  I suppose the title Special Issue s alludes to the common phrase when people say “They’ve got “issues” or that someone is “special” in a derogatory way.  But in my magazine I am elevating these terms to a new status, where I am genuine about it and in turn am actually mocking society.