Author: Violet Fox

LIS Mental Health Week first took place in January 2016, spurred by Cecily Walker’s blog post suggesting there was a need to acknowledge that library and archives workers experience mental illness. Since 2016 the LIS Mental Health project has included multiple avenues for people to share their experiences and thoughts. We’ve nurtured community and provided an open and welcoming space to talk and share experiences with mental illness through blog posts, Twitter chats, and six issues of the Reserve and Renew zine, raising almost $6,000 in donations for mental health charities.  We’re announcing a hiatus of the LIS Mental Health project beginning in May 2023. The slow decay of Twitter has made it difficult to bring our professional and personal selves to conversations with a wide reach; it's also been…

We're gearing up for issue 6 of the zine and thinking about how we want to move forward. We're going to be choosing a different charity to raise funds for in the future. From 2018 to 2022, all of our donations to Mental Health First Aid, a skills-based training course that teaches participants about mental health and substance-use issues, have totaled $5,861. A huge accomplishment!! All the while we've worked to keep costs low for readers, at just $5 per issue. We've sent out over 650 orders of the zine, and most of the printing/mailing costs have been contributed by the administration team. Thank you to all the contributors to the zine, and to everyone who donated funds to buy a copy of our zine, Reserve and Renew. We look…

guest post by John Connolly of BeyondBookshelves.com Comparatively, there's very little in the library literature about support for library workers with disabilities, and there's even less about those of us who have mental health challenges specifically. Our field isn’t exactly welcoming to library workers with disabilities, and the proof is in the pudding: only about 3 percent of library workers surveyed identified themselves as having a disability, and several surveys of disabled library workers in the past few years have shown that the landscape of our workplaces has much to do to be inclusive of those with physical and mental challenges.  Many disabled library workers report that they engage in "passing," or hiding their condition to avoid being treated differently, or to avoid potential negative consequences for their careers. It…

Our first LIS Mental Health blog post is an anonymous submission. “Be willing to relocate, and you’ll probably have to take a term-limited job at first.” It’s practical advice for new LIS grads; that’s the state of the field at the moment. As someone in her 20s from a privileged socioeconomic background without dependents or caring responsibilities, I thought these were conditions I could easily handle. I had a partner who was halfway through a degree program, so I knew a long-distance relationship was probably going to be in the cards for me at first, but I was ready to do what I needed to do for a stable career. My struggle to find a first LIS job ended up not being a struggle at all, which is a privileged…