Cassandra was admired by the god Apollo. In efforts to seduce her, he offered her the gift of prophecy. After receiving the gift, she changed her mind and rejected him. Angered, he spat into her mouth and cursed her so that none of her prophecies would be believed. She was seen as a liar and a madwoman, oftentimes locked up.

I seek to tell the stories of people who have not always been believed or heard. I have been collecting interviews with people with mental illness who at one point in their lives identified or were perceived as femme*. I wish to document their stories and bring them to light, and to explore the intersection between gender and mental illness, examining the way that those identities interact with each other.

I interviewed forty people and counting with the questions below and made a portrait of each one of them based on our conversation. After the conversation, I extended the offer to them to ask me any questions, and asked them how they wanted to be represented in their portrait. The following stories are the transcripts that I collected during this process, each one reviewed by the person in question.

I aim to avoid editorializing these transcripts. The purpose of this project is not to repeat my own opinions in a multitude of different voices, but to present a wide variety of opinions, some of which will be contradictory. What follows is a record of conversations where I sought to ask questions that would provide a skeleton for the subjects to fill with their thoughts and opinions. Nothing more, nothing less.

The counterpart to this series: The Hercules Transcripts, about masc-ness and mental illness, can be found here: https://theherculestranscripts.wordpress.com

To contact the artist or read more about her work, go to her website at https://www.sarahsamsaltiel.com

The Questions

Please state your name, your age, and your gender identity and presentation.

Have you been officially diagnosed with a mental illness?

A. If so, with what? How was the diagnosis process for you?

B. If not, is there a reason that you have stayed away from diagnosis? What symptoms have manifested for you?

What has been your personal history with mental illness?

What are you proudest of in that history? What is the thing that you are most struggling with right now?

How do you conceive of your mental illness(es)? How do you view it in relation to yourself?

What things on the day to day trigger the worsening of your mental illness? What actionable things do you do to feel better?

How much do those around you know about your mental illness? If you talk to them about it, what do those conversations look like?

How much does your mental illness color your interactions with other people (meaning, how are you treated because of it, but also how does it internally affect the way you approach social interaction?)

How do you interact with other people with mental illness?

(Note: the wording of next questions shifts depending on whether the person identifies as femme — if they don’t then the wording is changed to address their personal relationship is to femmeness)

What has been your personal history with gender?

What does femmeness mean to you personally?

How has identifying or being perceived as femme affected intimacy (platonic, romantic, physical, emotional, sexual, whatever they feel comfortable answering)? How has being mentally ill affected it?

Do you feel like gender and mental illness have interacted in your life?

Are there any other identities that you want to talk about that have affected these two?

Anything that you would like to say that hasn’t been brought up in the questions?

*– It should be noted that the word “femme” is being used as an imperfect umbrella term, one that includes anyone with a present or past connection to femininity and does not depend on their having a singular position on the gender spectrum.