Mental Health Meets Imagination: Review of Sadie McCarney’s Your Therapist Says It’s Magical Thinking
Sadie McCarney, Your Therapist Says It’s Magical Thinking
ECW Press, 2023. $21.95 CAD
Order a copy from ECW Press.
With its Lisa-Frank-esque, unicorn-bedecked cover, Sadie McCarney’s second poetry collection promises fun, irreverence, and whimsy. In that aspect, it certainly delivers, but behind the cotton-candy design also lies a deep dive into mental health, personal experience, and history that you might not expect.
The first section of the collection, titled “Coping Strategies” contains seventeen poems that play with didacticism. Each takes its name from self-care, mental health, or wellness advice—“Let It Out,” “Be The Change,” “Take Your Meds”—often subverting expectations by depicting what actually taking that advice might look like or through interesting comparisons.
“Choose to Be Different than You Are” (a literal summation of so much mental health feedback) is hilarious in the speaker’s insistence that “I am a doctor.” And “Revisit Your Childhood Trauma” blasts the capitalist approach to therapy by comparing examining one’s past trauma to a trip through a “chintzy, tourist-trap town” and a pointed em dash: “See, that bit is crucial to your understanding of— // that’s all the time we have for this week. See my receptionist on your way out.” (No doubt there’s a parallel between the receptionist and a gift shop; McCarney does not even need to note that instead of a toy or tchotchke, you leave with a bill).
The message here is clear: such advice—some well-meaning, some decidedly less so—often falls short or means something different to the person on the receiving end. A different book would lament such scenarios, but McCarney excels at inviting us to laugh instead.
The second section, “Surrey Girls,” veers into historical fiction and contains prose poems “based on the photographs of Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond, a psychiatrist and pioneering photographer at England’s Surrey County Asylum in the mid-1800s, who believed photography had a role to play in mentally ill patients’ treatment.”
The four women speakers of this section each have a distinct voice—compare Lucinda’s “I’d like very much to leave these benches” (24) with Mary Ann’s “Each day I wait patient on the rough-on-rumps benches” (28)—and though their awareness of how they came to be in this asylum and opinions about what’s being done to them vary, common details unify them: hard benches, cold baths, the feeling that something is being taken from them, and a doctor coming not to provide relief but to take photos. Packaged between the more contemporary poems, this section draws parallels between the treatment of mental illness in the past and present, and raises questions about consent and autonomy.
The third and final section, “Alternative Timelines” continues exploration of mental illness and neurodivergence, but is perhaps the hardest to nail down. Some of these echo the advice-riddled first section, for example “Negatives” uses the imperative: “Have no fear. Really. / Please have no fear” (51) But the pleading repetition of “please” paired with emphatic redundancy evokes the self talk of someone desperately trying to not feel anxiety: “Please, just stay still/ and don’t try to think of anything at all” (52).
Others play with history, like “A Labourer at Stonehenge.” Here the speaker is a labourer working on Stonehenge, but past and present collide as the speaker, who happens to be cursed with foresight, describes the future of “the druids’ / municipal make-/work project.” I can’t quite lay my finger on why there’s humour in this—maybe it’s the contrast, or maybe it’s that if we didn’t laugh, we might be overcome by the bleakness of the speaker knowing “some of that bone will be mine” (56-57).
Speculative elements are most prominent in this section: you’ll find mentions of unicorns, phoenixes, robots, and anti-matter, as well as post-apocalyptic scenarios, a universe in which cats are the dominant species, and a child experiencing a reversing timeline. Fun and thoughtfulness run hand in hand here, and perhaps this serves as a reminder, after the sometimes bleak absurdity and critique of the earlier poems, that even though our minds can be fragile and challenging, they also have an infinite capacity for imagination. McCarney’s imagination is certainly on full display throughout this collection.
Emily Stewart is a multi-passionate writer/editor based in Ottawa, where she runs Shelf Potential, which offers editing and creative services to indie authors and publishers. She is reviews editor for Arc Poetry, programming chair for Editors Ottawa-Gatineau, and dabbles in illustration and other arts and crafts. Find her on Twitter as @emstewart041.