I asked an AI to write a guest article on my blog about Mental Health Stigma. Here’s what ChatGPT had to say. Please note that they got stuck at the word “from…” I’ll complete the thought for them. Mental health stigma refers to negative attitudes, beliefs, and stereotypes that exist towards people with mental health […]
Here’s me, raw, a little off-key, but wailing along to former Spice Girl Melanie C’s “Never Be the Same Again” I heard this song in the park outside the Parliament Building in Tbilisi, Georgia. There was no electricity in most of the city, so the kids came down to 9 April Park and plugged in […]
Watch my recent interview with Doc April from Own Your ‘Ish I got deep with the Doc, talking about the many facets of mental health stigma, starting with the way doctors are forced to treat their patients, and then the worst of all, the kind we perpetuate on ourselves by echoing the dark voices of […]
Another nice article came out about me on Authority Magazine. Read it here: Medium One of the tenets at the heart of my philosophy is a quote attributed to Mahatma Ghandi: The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members. As someone who was once very vulnerable, […]
I was asked to talk about my 5150 book series as a ‘Champion of Mental Health.’ Link to the article is just below: Click Here
Stigma begins during mental crisis and hospitalization, but its effects are far reaching. Stigma continues years afterwards. It affects the sufferers in nearly every aspect of their lives. Until it had a name, I didn’t know what was the horrible feeling that plagued me throughout my twenties. It’s called “Stigma”. Stigma is shame imposed from […]
A series of articles about stuff you might already know. I won’t apologize for assuming you don’t know something I write about. When humanity was at its peak, people yearned for knowledge. Now that we are on the decline, people with knowledge are ostracized or labeled “elitists”. Today, the hoi polloi asserts its right to […]
Today I read that Trump told his supporters to pipe down when they booed him on national television. He advocated that everyone should get the booster shot. Huh. No one is all bad. As much as I couldn’t bear to listen to Trump, he did a few things during his presidency that were positive from […]
What I Did For My Summer Vacation Most young adults in my circle spent the summer after freshman year doing interesting things. Some went to live on a winery in Italy; some worked on a kibbutz. I had a full-blown psychotic break and spent the whole summer in the mental hospital. It was only slightly […]
Readership vs. Mission I wrote 5150 and the other books in the Psychotic Break Series to make known what was unknowable. I wanted to take the reader through the mind of a new adult whose fragile mind shattered and rebuilt itself several times. My mission was a success. What I hadn’t considered was the readership […]
If you’re a fan of my novels and novellas, you may get a kick out of the short stories I published on Instagram as @5150DuncanMac. In addition to “What Lurks in the Library”, I also published “The Baptism” and “The Phone Calls”. They are a blend of humor and horror lite. The trick to reading […]
A short horror story about bullying and its underlying causes Julius Highbaugh loved books more than anything. He read a book every couple of days and listened to audiobooks when he walked to and from Midvale Junior High. School was a mixed bag. He liked math, science, English – all the classes except Gym. He […]
What was your favorite part of 5150? Your least favorite? The author intended to reduce stigma around mental illness by putting a reader inside the mind of a psychotic. Do you think they reduced stigma? Why or why not? Although 5150 is set in the past, in a pre-internet world, do you still feel it […]
Looking for a quick trick for clearing the mind? In olden times, when we had to navigate our computer using text commands, there was one DOS command that always scared me: ‘del *.*’, a command that wipes out all the files in a given directory and all its subdirectories. If you did it at the […]
When I’m not writing and editing my bestselling novels and short stories, I actually work a day job with numbers and spreadsheets and databases. I found my niche in that market. Think of someone who has to write, edit copy and make improvements to a manuscript. What skills do they possess that could possibly be […]
I met Bill Rasmussen in Fourth Grade at Mills Elementary School in Benicia, California. Bill came from a large, poor family who lived in a big house on East J street. His mother, June, was very good at stretching dollars. She baked her own bread, served Carnation powdered milk, and forced the family to go […]
A Revelation I recently stumbled across the term “transgressive fiction” while researching my genre. I was baffled because my books were too far out to get into a mainstream genre like “Young Adult” or “Gay Coming of Age”. Coming of age locked up in jail and the mental hospital is too far out for that […]
Sometimes I get so excited to finish a cycle of edits on a novel, I decide it’s ready to go without giving a holistic read. The solution for this is to order review copies and pass over with a red pen. In the process of fleshing out 7th Avenue South (prequel to 5150) I inadvertently […]
It sounds much harsher than it is. Pathetic fallacy is a story-telling technique in which the environment surrounding a character is an extension of what is happening inside their head. My first introduction to pathetic fallacy was in Wuthering Heights when Heathcliff is raging somewhere on the moors while thunder and lightning crash and flash. […]
Readers ask me how I manage to construct complex sentences without grammatical errors. My answer is always the same: ‘Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition’. In Junior High, I had two great English teachers. They were night and day when it came to their teaching style and curriculum. The only constant was the cursed Warriner’s grammar […]