The Icarus Project

One of my friends said, what should we do? Should we have regular red flag check ins with each other, the way we do about relationships? Should I go up to you and ask, Have you been thinking about killing yourself lately? And I thought, if anyone came at me saying, HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT KILLING YOURSELF LATELY?, I'd automatically lie and say hell no. The way I have to every single doctor, social worker and most therapists in my life.  I don't want anything I can prevent on my permanent record, and I definitely don't want Danger to Self or Others. I've been fighting this my whole life, and I've seen the oppression and hardness that that label can mean to folks in my life who've had it.

But if you normalized it. Because it is normal. This secret. That so many of us wrestle with suicidality. Then maybe, maybe just maybe I'd tell you where it was at. 

And maybe we could map the terrain of those ideation places better.

In November of 2012 the AKPsychiatriekritik [freakoutcrazy.com] will publish a German version of the Hurting Yourself Zine and an Zine with mixed writings from different Icarus Project publications combined with autobiographical texts of members and friends of the AKPsychiatriekritik about experiences with crisis and psychiatry. 

On a hot September day Sascha and I traveled back to something both mythical and real. I took him to visit a giant old oak tree with articulate arms, poised in mid-dance under an even more giant sky. I had painted this tree years ago for an Icarus publication; it's the final image in a graphic sequence where a flock of birds lifts off the telephone wires, disappear as stars, and land back in the branches of this particular oak tree. The upper right panel of the graphic states in big capital letters “You Are Not Alone.” As we sat on the bench underneath the tree plotting out potential goals for the next 10 years of Icarus, a flock of doves alighted on the exact same branch as in the painting...

The Icarus Project is celebrating their 10 year anniversary. With this milestone comes the great realization that we, the groups that have come since, are the second generation of Icaristas. We have taken the foundation that Sascha and Jacks have laid and we have run with it. And run with it far we have!

Maryse writes about radical mental health, healing justice, Icarus history, OWS organizing, peer support, and holding each other and our movements accountable with love.

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There is a reckoning period, I think, early on in the political life of most organizers. It's a moment when we realize the enormity of the harm done, the systems that work to continue this harm, and the endless struggle required to uproot this cycle of oppression and violence. That realization hits us hard and heavy. For me, for years, I walked around with a weight, a hopelessness where my only defense was to keep fighting back. Where the way me and my friends dealt with George W. Bush, Abu Ghraib, the police state surrounding us during the 2004 Republican National Convention was to just keep moving, to bottle up all the pain and anger and let that drive us into more organizing, more meetings, more workshops. We worked from a place of deep suspicion of any system or institution, seeking to create our own alternatives rather than work within them.