The Icarus Project

Forum member fluidity published this article in The Dominion: News from the Grassroots. Please go there are grab the PDFs if you want print-ready vewing.

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People are Mad. And they’re doing something about it.

Mental health awareness is gradually gaining ground, and so are radical alternatives to mainstream approaches. Community-based initiatives by and for the so-called crazies amongst us tend to be kept under the radar in Canada, challenging discrimination, providing peer support and advocating for a diversity of perspectives on mental health, its treatment and justice.

Grassroots movements around mental health have a rich and often unacknowledged history, with many activities falling under the relatively recent name of Mad Pride. The movement is also sometimes called the C/S/X movement, which stands for Consumers (of mental health services), Survivors (of the psychiatric system), and eX-patients (who have moved on to live outside the mental health services systems).

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(Illustration by Emily Davidson)

Thanks so much to German comrades for translating maamyyrä's "Hurting Yourself" workbook to German.

Original zine here:

http://theicarusproject.net/downloads/hurting-yourself

German version:

http://theicarusproject.net/downloads/sichselbstverletzen

In 1973 the academic journal Science published an article called On Being Sane in Insane Places. It documented the findings of an experiment by psychologist David Rosenhan designed to test the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. The first part of Rosenhan’s study involved eight ‘sane’ people feigning auditory hallucinations to see if they could get committed into psychiatric institutions. What is interesting about the experiment is not the ease with which the participants successfully feigned mental illness, but the difficulty they had, once inside the system, of proving themselves sane. Although none of the participants showed any further symptoms it took up to 52 days for them to be released, and even then only then when they accepted diagnosis of irreversible lifelong conditions such as schizophrenia. So what? That’s pretty much what I thought until I got diagnosed with bipolar.

I woke up this morning and there it was again, I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother. This essay is all over the internet, written by a woman who is using her personal story about experiences with her “mentally ill” son, whom she is “terrified of,” to appeal for more dialogue on the issue of mental health. As I write this, her son’s picture has been viewed by over a million people. They have read her accounts of what may be some of these young man’s most painful childhood memories.

This is a call for submissions to a zine I am compiling, which will include self-portraits and descriptions of one’s own madness/mental health issues as a DSM alternative. The idea for my zine is that labels like Bipolar I, Schizophrenia, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder are dehumanizing and cannot capture how beautiful and diverse and complex madness is. I want to create a translator from DSM to mad pride- sort of like an alternative guidebook for understanding madness rather than the DSM.