Wild Flesh: Explorations in Critical Drug Studies

  The Cynical Cycle of Mindless Inaction Recognition, Critical Consciousness, Disruption, and the Praxis of Doing the Next Right Thing Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. A Prayer Before Beginning Spirit of Life, Mystery in which we live and move, Sacred depths of this astonishing world: Wake us. Interrupt the sleepwalking routines by which we move through our days seeing without seeing, hearing without listening, knowing without understanding. Startle us with a black beetle on a red rose bush. Stop us before the dead horseshoe crab washed upon the shore. Let the ordinary trip the switch. Turn our attention toward what we have learned not to notice: the neighbor sleeping beneath a freeway, the joke that diminishes another human being, the worker whose labor disappears behind what we consume, the species vanishing without ceremony, the child frightened by authorities, the lonely, the despised, the discarded, the person standing directly before us whom our categories have prevented us from...

Drugs, Stories, and Social Worlds:  Remembering Terry MacDonald, 1950-2021    by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. I recently learned that Patrick Terry Macdonald died on July 1, 2021, at the age of seventy-one. I simply hadn't known. Graduate school creates intense friendships and intellectual companionships, and then scatters people in different directions. Someone who was once a vivid presence in your everyday world gradually recedes from view. Decades pass. Then one day you type a familiar name into a search box and discover that the person whose voice and laughter you can still summon so easily has been gone for five years. I met Terry in Santa Barbara in 1983. I had moved into 625 Bradbury Avenue, next door to Maureen Harrington de Vivas, another graduate student in Sociology at UC Santa Barbara. Maureen was about five-foot-five, Canadian, with bright red hair, an enthusiasm for cannabis, and by then something approaching legendary status as a graduate student: she had ...

  Whose Category? Self-Naming, Dual Diagnosis, and the Career of “Triple-Challenged” A Research Note Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. September 3, 2026 The Third System That Never Answered to a Chart I did not experience my own crisis as three things happening to me. I experienced it as one thing: a mind coming apart in public, with nowhere private to let that happen. The people trying to help sorted what was happening to me into two familiar tracks almost immediately — psychiatric crisis, substance problem — because those were the two doors available to walk me through. What neither track could hold was the third fact that was, in practical terms, doing more to determine what happened to me than either diagnosis: whether I had a door of my own to close that night. Psychiatry could write orders. Addiction medicine could write orders. Neither could write me an apartment. That is the gap I want to start from, because it is not abstract to me. Dual diagnosis, whatever its limits, was bui...