A Volunteer Editing & Publishing Service With Severe Thoiught Disorders

People experiencing formal thought disorder (loosening of associations, clang associations, word salad, pressure of speech, tangentiality, etc.) often produce huge amounts of writing: journals, manifestos, poetry, memoir fragments, forum posts. This writing is frequently brilliant, heartbreaking, and completely inaccessible to anyone else because of the disorganization. Most existing writing-support programs require a baseline of linear coherence that these writers literally cannot produce without help.Result: decades of profound creative and testimonial material stays locked in bedrooms, psych-ward lockers, or gets deleted by embarrassed family members after suicide or hospitalization.Solution
A free, low-barrier service that pairs experienced editors (retired journalists, creative-writing MFAs, peer-support workers, ex-patients themselves) with writers who have severe thought disorders. The goal is not to “fix” the writer or make the work “normal,” but to collaborate on turning the raw material into something structured enough to be read and preserved—whether that ends up as a chapbook, a blog series, a printed zine, or just a clean PDF the author can hand to a friend or therapist.Core principles 

• Zero pressure to medication compliance or insight-oriented language 
• Editors work at the writer’s pace and in their preferred format (hand-written scans, voice memos, live chat, whatever) 
• All published work can remain anonymous or pseudonymous 
• The writer retains full control and copyright

Deliverables in year one 

• 50–75 completed projects (5–50 formatted pages each) 
• Quarterly zine anthology printed and mailed to psych wards, clubhouses, and peer respites 
• Simple website/archive so nothing disappears again

Budget sketch (for grant applications)
$62,000 

• $35k part-time coordinator (lived experience preferred) 
• $15k editor stipends ($200–400 per finished project, many volunteers but we pay disabled editors) 
• $8k printing & web hosting 
• $4k outreach (flyers in clubhouses, ads in Schizophrenia Bulletin, etc.)

Where this can actually be submitted right now 

• Scattergood Behavioral Health Foundation 
• SAMHSA’s “Alternatives” or “Consumer/Survivor” grant lines (if still open) 
• Open Society Foundations Mental Health Initiative 
• Local community mental-health block grants (many states have “innovation” pots) 
• Clubhouse International innovation fund 
• Even Kickstarter if we want to go grassroots