Infrarrealista Review — I Got Issues: The Heavy-Handed Mental Health Issue

Overview
Infrarrealista Review, a magazine with a penchant for the raw and unvarnished, invites submissions for its themed issue 'I Got Issues: The Heavy-Handed Mental Health Issue.' The call is explicitly framed around lived experience of mental health struggles, institutionalization, and psychological chaos, referencing DSM-5 diagnoses and cinematic touchstones like Isabelle Adjani's performance in *Possession*. This is not a venue for sanitized or clinical depictions; it seeks work that embodies the disquiet, the mess, and the unruliness of mental distress. The magazine's curatorial stance is unapologetically regional: a connection to Texas is mandatory. This is not a gesture toward provincialism but a deliberate circumscription of community. Those without ties to the state will be rejected outright, a policy that underscores the publication's investment in a specific locale and its voices. The editors also commit to paying all contributors, a rarity in small-press publishing and a signal of respect for creative labor. While the call invites 'pure chaos,' it also directs submitters to the website for word counts and other specifics, suggesting that even within apparent formlessness there are formal expectations. The issue promises to be a gathering of work that refuses to tidy up mental illness into neat narratives, favoring instead the heavy-handed, the excessive, and the genuinely unsettling.