Former Nexus managing editor Jason Schreurs’ first book, Scream Therapy: A Punk Journey Through Mental Health, is a non-fiction memoir that offers a glimpse into the punk ethos and the act of processing trauma while screaming at the top of your lungs. His book is an amalgamation of his journey and the journeys of others, with one overlapping similarity: punk rock saving people at their lowest point through a culture of acceptance and catharsis.
Schreurs will be taking Scream Therapy on the road for a book tour and will be stopping in Victoria at Camas Books & Infoshop at 7 pm on Tuesday, May 16. He believes audiences will be entertained and informed by the content.
“It’ll be a smattering of different pieces from the book,” says Schreurs. “The book has three different sections in it. So, at these readings, I’ll try to kind of tackle each section with some different passages of each. And I’ll have a few music clips that go with; essentially a book reading is just some person reading, it’s not exciting like a concert will be. But the book itself has a lot of exciting stuff in it. So, I think it will be educational as well. I think it’ll be informative and, hopefully, entertaining.”
When Schreurs first stumbled upon the punk scene, he felt like he had found his crowd. More than just having a similar style, the punk rock culture created a safe outlet for him and made him feel accepted for who he was.
“Walking into a punk show is like opening up a whole new world for someone like me, who grew up in a very small town, listening to these bands and learning about what they meant and their lyrics, in a place that was very isolating,” he says. “To be able to walk through the door of a punk show and find other people who are like me who were wearing the same kind of shirts that I was and who were talking about the same kind of bands and the same kind of issues was hugely eye-opening. And it made me feel like I had found my place, finally. After all these years of feeling like a total weirdo and freak, I was able to feel like I belonged.”
Scream Therapy covers a lot of ground, including trauma, physical and sexual abuse, and mental-health struggles (see screamtherapyhq.com/book for more info on the book). For Schreurs, it wasn’t retraumatizing to write about his experiences. He felt like he had a story to tell, and he was able to sit down, leave it on the page, and carry on with life.
“I felt like I just needed to get it out,” says Schreurs. “And, in fact, I’m one of those kinds of writers that can just turn on the faucet and then write, and then I turn the faucet off, and I don’t write. I’m not a practice writer who sits down every day and writes for an hour and tries to like, you know, really bring up these difficult things. I just had a story to tell, and it was there, and it was fairly easy to write. There wasn’t a lot of, like, ‘Oh my god, I just wrote about sexual abuse when I was a kid and now I have to go and hide under the covers for two days’; that’s just not my experience. I’m lucky, I guess, in that regard—I was able to write it and get it out and not feel like it was a huge retraumatizing process.”
Schreurs believes that attending a punk show can be a healthy way to process mental-health struggles, whether by taking part in a mosh pit or screaming along with the band; a punk show can act as a release for people addressing their trauma.
“I’ve got a line in the book where I talk about, you know if you’re at a punk show and you throw a guitar pick in the audience, yeah, you’re going to hit people with trauma. But that’s everywhere. I wouldn’t say that trauma, ratio-wise, is more within the punk scene,” he says. “I think that trauma is dealt with in a more open and productive way in the punk scene than it would be in mainstream society. I think we’re told to bury our trauma and I think by being at a punk show, or being around punks in the punk scene, we’re letting it out, we’re using productive means to get this trauma out and to process it, and to deal with it.”
While punk rock can be misconstrued as being violent or aggressive, Schreurs says that in his experience the community is quite the opposite. In his opinion, the true culture behind being punk is to take care of one another and to stretch that care onto oneself.
“Punk rock is how you live your life, and it’s using what I would call the punk rock ethos or being punk informed, in doing the kinds of things that maybe other people wouldn’t do,” he says. “You know, so maybe you’re going to take someone aside and really try to help them or at least point them in the right direction. And to me, that’s being punk, that’s what punk rock is. To me, it’s living life in a way that supports people living life, in a way that supports yourself going against the grain and trying to be your best person.”