https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/thieves-in-the-night/
will show you the life of the mind (on prescription drugs)
To some extent, SJ Fowler’s latest book is precisely what its title would have us expect: on the one hand, a catalogue of the medications typically prescribed to treat mental illness, and the side effects of taking them (or not taking them, as the case may be); on the other, an illustration of the subjective states which those medications variously or collectively induce. And what is particularly brilliant, in this latter respect, is that the book parodies the structure of a choose-your-own-adventure story, with passages offering mock-choices such as:
do you
A) Leave the doctor’s office, and never pick up the prescription
Shut the book, throw it awayor
B) Shamble to the pharmacy. Turn the page.
It’s a darkly comic nod to the fact that, for many users of prescription drugs, the first thing to go is our ability to make choices — or, more accurately, the feeling that our choices are worth making….
Among its other uses, I will show you is an effort to do exactly that: a record of one mind’s attempt to imagine its own materiality, and to discover, thereby, something of the world which exists beyond itself. And while this attempt ought to be doomed from the outset, I will show you, like Vantablack, achieves the impossible. By documenting the illnesses of the mind, the errors in cognition, Fowler’s book succeeds in tracing a world which exists beyond consciousness and subjectivity, a world which makes itself known by means of the traumatic ruptures in their fabric. It too is an encounter with total otherness, and it too succeeds in being properly weird — far more so than another alien arrival.