We launched a zine!
MENTAL is an interactive zine illuminating the healing power of art and creativity, powered by culture therapy.
MENTAL is now available on Metalabel here
The goal of culture therapy is to shine a light on more human, less clinical forms of care — what we like to call therapy with a lowercase ‘t’. We believe that small moments of self-expression and creativity, like making music with friends, doodling in a sketchbook, or dancing to a beat, can all be paths to mental wellness.
Instead of relying on adult-made infographics and lengthy reports to tell people about culture therapy, we’ve decided to focus on showing people through tangible stories and creative artifacts, created in direct collaboration with young artists.
That’s why we teamed up with Any Collective — an artist group made up of Jon Chen, Soo Park, Eric Beard, Arthur Derkson, and Billy Theodosatos — to create a zine called MENTAL. This first issue highlights the stories of 12 young creatives and the 1M+ people they’ve impacted through their practices.
A little preview of what’s inside MENTAL Issue 01:
Emwell takes us behind the scenes of Well Well Well, his creative interview show where he plays the role of pseudo-therapist and host to emerging underground artists.
Rehma and Adam Saleh have a heart-to-heart about pursuing creative dreams together while navigating their relationship.
David Eardley from Pink Essay reflects on the grounding nature of chairs.
Benito Quas Longoria shares a poignant poem alongside raw outtakes from his sketchbook.
Alvilda Faber Striim invites us to see surreal moments as opportunities for perspective and empathy.
Alex Sovoda from Enzo the Magazine talks about their mission of “restoring hope in the community.”
You can grab a copy of MENTAL at our LA launch party on October 3rd at Presq. If you know 16-24 y/o creatives in the area, feel free to right-click the invite below and share it around!
Speaking of previews, one more big update: Sahir Ahmed has joined ctx as our new social media lead! (And we’re hyped about it.) Sahir comes from office magazine, where they led Editorial, and they’ve already begun rolling out snippets of MENTAL on our social channels ahead of the launch.
If you’re not following us yet… why not? We’re @culturetherapy.plus on Instagram.