Past Issues

GAMHAA Ray Spring 2020: Health and Healing

Issue description: This issue began as one focused on medication, but as we received submissions, we realized the connective tissue between the work from our contributors was this: health and healing. Health and healing are contested topics. We are constantly reframing what it means to be healthy and how it is that we are supposed to heal (if we can heal). The works in this issue ask what it means to take your own health between your fingertips. They zoom in on unhealthy relationships and spaces. They ask what it means to be medicated while navigating our entangled lives. And they encourage you to embrace help. Health and healing are contested topics, but ones that we’re ready to grapple with.

In this issue, we are proud to present featured artwork by Miranda Koffey, which depicts the emotional experience of beginning medication for bipolar disorder and anxiety. In our first piece, “Untitled,” an anonymous author shares the struggles they faced in their first year of graduate school navigating different spaces and relationships with professors, ultimately finding their own value. In “Smoking,” an anonymous contributor
writes about their experience with trying to quit smoking while in graduate school. They give candid advice for smokers who want to quit and for people who want to support their loved ones who smoke. In “Things I Learned in Therapy Or: Why You Should Consider It, Too!” Addison Koneval provides images that correspond with the themes language, self-understanding, and validation. In “Some Musings on Medication,” Liz Miller offers an open and honest piece about depression, anxiety, and medication. Miller also encourages graduate students to start their own dialogues about mental health.

The GAMHAA Ray Winter 2018: Life After Trauma

Issue description: In response to the recent tragedies on our campus, we’ve dedicated this issue to talking about trauma care and suicide prevention. Our goal is two-fold: first, to make an incisive yet hopeful contribution to the growing conversation concerning our campus’s lack of effective mental health and suicide prevention services; second, to stand witness to the individual and collective trauma we have experienced as a result of losing students, friends, colleagues, and family members. Though we commend those who have made sincere efforts to address this crisis on our campus, we have been disappointed by our administration’s inattention to the cultural and structural issues that contribute to suicide. Suicide is caused not just by individual factors such as genetic/chemical predispositions, but by institutional and structural neglect. We must therefore do more than reach out to those who are in distress—we must commit ourselves to social and economic justice. As our campus community deliberates ideas like these in the pursuit of a larger “culture of care,” we hope to shine some light on the efforts of faculty, students, staff, and members of the larger Columbus community to respond to suicide and trauma in humane ways. Included in this issue are an open letter to President Drake and the Mental Health Task Force, proceedings from Columbus Area Integrated Health Services’ 10th Annual Clinical Conference, and an anonymous reflection on the difficulties of caring for ourselves while caring for others.

The GAMHAA Ray Spring 2018: Self-Care

Issue description: “Self-care” has entered the public lexicon. No longer merely therapy language, self-care is touted on Pinterest, in TEDTalks, even in Forbes. There’s a certain delight in witnessing the public embrace of things you’ve been hearing for years from your therapist—it’s like watching people getting unplugged from the matrix, seeing reality for the first time. It can be so validating to watch people realize that they don’t need to work themselves to death, that it’s okay to take some time off, to prioritize their own wellbeing. But there’s a certain air of commodification around self-care these days. When “self-care” becomes synonymous with “buy something,” a healthy and necessary practice can be buried in commercial opportunism. Even more pertinent to our concerns at GAMHAA, when “self-care” means that institutions divest themselves of the responsibility to create healthy and egalitarian work and learning environments, the term can be a screen for malfeasance. In this second issue of the GAMHAA Ray, whose release coincides with our “CareCon” event, grad students share their experiences and their thoughts on self-care.

The GAMHAA Ray Winter 2017

Issue description: The first issue of The GAMHAA Ray is the product of graduate students’ collective effort to shed light on and advocate for our mental health and wellness here at OSU. The Graduate Association of Mental Health Action and Advocacy (GAMHAA) is a brand new organization, formed this year amid the plethora of research testifying that graduate students are much more likely to experience mental health challenges than undergraduates and general members of the population. GAMHAA was founded to spread awareness and enact change in the knowledge of grad students’ unique position, and our first goal was to build a platform to voice our experiences, to advocate for our wellness, and to inform our fellow students of mental health resources on and off campus. This publication, The GAMHAA Ray, is that venue, and we hope you will find it both a source of information and a way of making your own stories heard. With the awareness of the many ways that mental health intersects with race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and so forth, GAMHAA seeks to represent the spectrum of graduate student experience.