I have never identified with the label “mentally ill.”  I had never even considered that it would apply to me.  I still don’t think it does.  I’m not really “crazy”, either—at least not in the real sense of the word—the sense that means mad.  At the same time, I’m not exactly normal.  Normal people don’t try to kill themselves—normal people don’t have to argue their way out of being sent to psych wards.  It’s easy to joke about madness and insanity in everyday life.  Anybody who’s a little bit different—especially in high school—is automatically referred to as “crazy.”  I always felt that maybe, they were right.
    I don’t like saying that I have “mental health issues”, even though it’s most likely true.  That, to me, is almost like creating and labeling a problem that doesn’t exist.  Yes, I have my issues—so does everyone else.  At the same time, I’ve spent many years hiding those issues from everybody.  I knew, instinctually, that they were something of which I should be ashamed.  
    The first time I tried to kill myself I was in the third grade.  I don’t really remember that much about it—just that I had tried to hang myself with my mother’s bathrobe sash.  For years, I didn’t remember that it had happened at all.  I did know that I was weirdly hypersensitive with my neck, though that realization didn’t come until fairly recently (maybe 3 years ago)—I often choke on nothing, and I can’t stand to have anything (or anyone) touch my throat.  The memory of that night remained completely repressed for about 10 years.  However, growing up I always felt like I had a secret—some reason why I wasn’t like the other kids.  I also didn’t really care.
    In high school, I began to self-mutilate.  It started with scratching pictures onto my arms and banging my head on the wall.  However, at heart I am a cutter.  It is my preferred method.  There is something so calming about bleeding.  It brings me peace.  I had two suicide attempts within a couple of months—the first by pills, the second by slashing.  My parents didn’t find out.  However, one night they caught me banging my head against the wall—I have no idea how long I’d been doing it.  They dragged me into the backyard, and, through much crying and yelling, it came down to a choice—I could agree to go see a therapist in the morning or be checked into a psych hospital.  I chose the therapy.  
    My therapist was not great.  I didn’t trust him.  I often lied to him or withheld information.  He told me I was dysthemic with episodes of severe depression characterized by suicidal ideation.  That meant absolutely nothing to me, and I think I resented him for that label.  I didn’t fully know what it meant (and didn’t until I became a psych major in college), but I knew it wasn’t me.  However, he must’ve done something right.  I didn’t feel the need to bleed for almost 4 years.  I’d still get mildly suicidal—however, there’s a difference between a feeling and an urge.  A feeling will go away if you wait it out.  An urge is a NEED to do something.  I’m used to fairly depressed and mildly suicidal every few months—it will usually go away after about a week if I just ignore it.  I listen to angsty music and keep the lights down (I tend to get sensitivity to light during this phase).  I also never tell anyone.
    Last summer was different.  It had been a long time, and I was feeling relatively safe. I was working with an athletic coach who I trusted completely.  He kept telling me I had to open up completely if I wanted to succeed.  Little by little, I let him in.  I told him all my secrets.  He learned my triggers—probably knew them better than I know them.  I chose to be honest and open.  He promised to help me.
    I had a fourth narrowly-avoided suicide attempt last July.  I stopped eating for 2.5 months after he put me on a restricted-calorie diet.  I can’t say the suicide was completely his fault.  I know—and have always known—that I would attempt suicide again.  I’ve come to accept that as my reality.  I do know that it wouldn’t have happened when it did, or the way it did without his influence.  He told my parents that he’d like to think he deserved at least half the credit for my attempt—they said he sounded pleased with himself.  I was told to cut off contact.  I was almost pulled out of school—got put back into therapy.  The one good thing he did do for me was allow me to choose between going to a relative’s and going to Bellevue.
    The following semester (Fall 2005), I took a Gallatin class called Mad Science/Mad Pride, taught by Brad Lewis.  The class focused on the evolution of psychiatry as a practice, with emphasis on post-psychiatry, or Mad Pride.  Despite being a psychology major, I have a huge mistrust of the psychiatric industry.  They terrify me, though I haven’t really had to deal with them.  It turns out I’m not the only one who felt that psychiatry needed to change.  I had never even considered the possibility that it was an entire movement, because I had never considered the possibility that I was “one of them”.   Although I still don’t trust—or particularly like—psychiatrists, one book in particular helped me understand them—T.M. Luhrmann’s Of Two Minds.  Luhrmann, a medical anthropologist, deconstructs the residency training that psychiatrists undergo.  It helped me to understand the entire culture that produces psychiatrists, putting them within a context and making their actions and attitudes more accessible.  However, it did nothing to change my feelings towards psychiatry—instead, it only heightened my conviction that something was wrong with the system.
    The single most important reading from that class was a selection from Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness, a reader on bipolar disorder published by a non-profit group called The Icarus Project.  The reader was so powerful because it resonated with me on a deeply personal level. It was not an analysis or a study—it was a collection of individual experiences of being bipolar.  At the same time that I felt a deep connection to the phantom writers, I was terrified.  Barely a month before, it had been suggested to me that I might be mildly bipolar.  That term meant nothing outside of the psych classroom.  It was a disease, where depression could be downplayed into an emotion.  It wasn’t a label that I identified (or currently identify) with.  However, the experiences and feelings that were written on these pages matched my own.  Their hopes and fears were verbalizations of those that existed in me.  The writing was so powerful, I can’t even remember my reaction to it.  On some level, I think I haven’t fully processed it yet.  I remember feeling numb, stunned—I felt as though my air had been taken away, but that rebirth was possible.  
    When we came to class that week, we discovered that we had a guest speaker—Sascha DuBrul, co-founder of The Icarus Project and author of some of the pieces that had been assigned.  I think I spent most of that class in shock.  Here was someone that I had never met, who had written things that made me cry, and he was an actual person.  Sascha shared his story with our class.  He spoke about medication and hospitalization and stigma and a thousand other topics that had been pushed to the edges of my consciousness.  Though I had said almost nothing the entire rest of the semester, I suddenly found myself telling a class full of strangers that I had been suicidal, that I had been threatened with hospitalization.  It was terrifying, but also a relief.  I would often feel uncomfortable in the class, because we’d be discussing issues that directly affected me in my daily life in a very clinical and detached manner—the only way for me to not go crazy was to detach from my own experiences, and become someone different.  In this class, I could fully release the hidden side of myself, and it was okay.  Though it was completely out of character, I went up to Sascha after class and asked how I could get involved.  In a short span of time, I had been convinced that if I didn’t become involved, I would die.  I still believe this to be true.
    Through a series of emails, we decided to set up a Gallatin internship.  Though I hadn’t known it at first, another girl in the class, Elizabeth Brackbill, had the same desire.  This was a completely new experience for all of us, and we are all making it up as we go along.  Early in the planning process, we laid out some goals for NYU—to start a peer support/peer education group, to open the space to talk about suicide openly, and to de-stigmatize “mental illness”.  At the beginning of the semester, we decided that since I would be graduating in the spring, it made sense to split up the internship—Elizabeth would be more focused on organizing at NYU, and I would work more closely with the national collective.  
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    The Icarus Project is a radical mental health peer support and activist group.  They believe that the key to healthy living is through a strong community—having supports to help monitor and ground you.  It’s model is harm reduction—that individuals have the right to decide what “healthy” means, and live according to those standards, not those prescribed by doctors.  They are neither pro-meds or anti-meds, and welcome people with diagnoses and without.  The Icarus Project is also an activist group—their goal is to change the way society thinks of “mental illness”—to create a language and a culture that speaks to “dangerous gifts” rather than to “disease”.
    In New York, The Icarus Project runs bi-monthly hub meetings.  The meetings run two hours long—the first meeting is focused on inward support (like a traditional support group).  The second hour is focused on outward action—planning and organizing different activist activities that either the entire collective is working on, or that individuals are involved with.  
    As interns, we were strongly encouraged to take part in the meetings.  After all, we were working with a group that focuses on community—it would be nearly impossible to function if we didn’t know actual community that we were supposed to be assisting.  For me, the hub meetings were terrifying.  It took almost a month of talking with my therapist before I could actually get the courage to go to one.  I was petrified of everything—that they wouldn’t like me, that I wouldn’t like them, that I wouldn’t identify, that I would over-identify.  One of the most terrifying prospects was that I was not (and still am not) diagnosed.  Somehow I felt (and to a certain extent, still feel) that this creates a divide between me and them.  However, I refuse diagnosis (I’m not sure if my therapist has one for me or not).  I fear that if I did have a diagnosis, I would conform more and more strongly with the diagnosis, eventually displaying symptoms that I might not have.  At the same time, in this setting, I almost felt that not having a diagnosis was more crippling because I was unsure of how I should act and exist.
    The first meeting I went to was small—I think there were all of 5 people there.  I said my name, and nothing else.  It was a bit traumatizing.  I had panic attacks on my way to the community center where they are held.  I had to make on of my friends walk me over—she came and sat with me until the meeting started.  I spent the entire time being incredibly uncomfortable, and like a complete outsider.  The only thing positive about that initial meeting was that I met Madigan.  Though I didn’t know it at the time, Madigan was my co-supervisor.  She immediately made me feel welcome and, if not exactly okay, less panicked.  My first meeting was in December, which worked out because I immediately went home for Christmas break, which we had planned on purpose.  It gave me a chance to become acquainted with Icarus, and then immediately step away and process.  
    It took almost two months before I could walk to the meetings without getting mild panic attacks.  Going to the meetings was an incredibly uncomfortable experience.  On the one hand, I wanted to be accepted by these people, and on the other I wanted to disassociate myself with being crazy.  I didn’t trust the people, and I didn’t trust the format (peer support)—it was unlike anything I’d ever been exposed to. However, I felt it was almost my job to continue to go to the meetings.  Of course, as I continued going and started to recognize and become familiar with the people, I became more comfortable at the meetings.  I stopped having panic attacks.  I speak at the meetings—not as much as some, but I tend to be a quiet person in general.  I am able to feel a real connection with them.  I have come to be comfortable in my non-diagnosed, non-medicated identity.  
    Icarus is a space for people to come together to talk about experiences.  No judgements are made based on diagnosis or medication.  It doesn’t matter that I don’t have an actual disorder—it also doesn’t matter that I don’t necessarily see myself as having “dangerous gifts”.  I’ve learned that I don’t have to identify with all of the elements in order to fit into the community.  Looking back, it almost seems like my fears were completely irrational.  
~    *    ~
    The meetings were only a small part of internship.  While Liz focused her work around organizing on campus, I focused the majority of my energy in assisting to organize the collective.  Icarus has a partnership with Fountain House, a clubhouse for people with severe psychiatric disorders that’s located in Hells Kitchen.  Fountain House is an amazing space where people are able to come together and create a community—much like the Icarus ideal.  Fountain House assists in providing housing, securing jobs, and even runs a satellite college out of their facility.  In an effort to do outreach with younger individuals, Fountain House created a partnership with Icarus, giving them office space and materials.
    The first time I went up to Fountain House, I had no idea what to expect.  I had been warned that it was like “going down the rabbit hole”.  It was everything and nothing that I expected.  It was not nearly so intimidating as I thought it might be.  The people are very open and friendly—sometimes a bit too friendly, and work is easily derailed by conversation.  It was an important lesson for me in establishing boundaries.  Although I had been going to hub meetings for a while by this time, I still didn’t have experience being around “truly” crazy people—schizophrenics, and other individuals who were not able to hold up a façade as efficiently as the majority of Icarus folks.  I only knew what textbooks had told me—lists of symptoms and behaviours that tend to dehumanize “the patient” and enforce a very clear divide.  However, they’re only people.  So what if their thought processes are different than what is considered “normal”.  Fountain House is filled with interesting, intelligent individuals who deserve to be seen as so much more than “schizophrenics”.
    The actual work I did at Fountain House is not so extraordinary—basic administrative tasks.  My main task was to create a distribution system with the collective member in San Francisco.  While the work is important, and it makes it much easier for everyone involved with distribution to have one systemized way of keeping track of payments and sales, it is not the focus of the experience.  From my perspective, my main goal was to learn how to work within a collective environment.  Like the majority of people, I’m used to a hierarchical job structure.  Although I definitely had guidance, there was no one telling me exactly what to do and how to do it—I had to take responsibility for my own time and projects and figure out how to work with people on a more equal footing than is the norm in job settings.  The most rewarding aspects of my time at Fountain House were the time I spent interacting with the community.
~    *    ~
    Although the majority of my time was spent at Fountain House, I was involved on the NYU campus, though it was more of a supporting role.  As an NYU student who has attempted suicide while at school, I know how important effective outreach is.  And I know what isn’t working with the outreach that NYU has in place now.  Not that it is ineffective—that is, of course, untrue.  I’m sure there have been many, many students who have been reached through UCS and the Wellness Center.  However, I also know that there is another large population that is completely turned off by the tactics used by the administration.  If I exist, there have to be others like me.  Those are the kids that Icarus at NYU aims to reach.   There are two factors in creating a visible presence on campus: the support of the students and the support of the administration.
    Student support is a given.  Since the group would be for them, it only makes sense to create it if there’s student interest.  And of course there is—how can there not be?  On a campus where suicide is such a giant issue that is never talked about, students need somewhere to find release.  More importantly, students need a place where they can go talk about whatever issues they’re having—whether it’s major depression or just mid-semester stress—where they’ll be comfortable and not feel like they’re going to be diagnosed and judged, which is one of the main reasons I wouldn’t have used UCS if I wasn’t forced to.  I’ve come to appreciate that talking to people who have had the same experiences is an incredibly powerful tool.  It creates community by reducing stigma.  It may seem ridiculous, but it sounds so different to have a professional and a peer suggest the same idea—like healthy eating habits.  From a professional, it can almost be patronizing or infantilizing, but from a peer, it becomes someone who knows and understands the mental state sharing something that helped them.  
    One of the problems with NYU is that the student body is so spread out.  It’s difficult to mobilize them around any one issue, especially one that is unfamiliar and a little scary, and in the spring semester.  Initially, students tend to be wary when they hear the phrase “mental health”, or anything relating to it.  Being associated with it in any way for some reason reflects upon their own emotional or mental status—which I completely understand.  I’m still trying to get over that myself.  Also, the outreach materials that we have available right now are not best suited to NYU—they use language that almost makes it sound as if one has to have a diagnosed mental illness in order to be a part of the conversation, which is absolutely not true.  However, by going through Gallatin, we were able to very quickly get an extremely dedicated group of students together.  There is huge potential for Icarus at NYU, and there are a number of students who recognize it and are excited about it.
    Unfortunately, the support of the students is not enough—we need the support of the administration since we’re talking about issues surrounding mental health, and especially since we want to address suicide.  The administration is extremely sensitive to these topics—as they should be.  Because NYU is not a closed campus, it is much harder to keep stories such as these under wraps the way it’s possible to do on closed campuses.  Meeting with the administration was incredibly intimidating.  I’ve always disliked Bobst—it makes me very uncomfortable. I hadn’t been in since the Plexiglas went up.  To sit at a table in the President’s Conference Room with various heads of departments was unreal.  Especially since my place, as I saw it, was to critique their systems.  I was an individual example of who they can’t reach, and I could explain why Icarus was able to help me more than their outreach could.  It’s a strange kind of power to be able to say that to these big important people.  If I hadn’t been involved with Icarus for as long as I had been at that point, I never would have said anything.  Not only would I have lacked the confidence, I would not have been comfortable with my identity as a suicide-attempt survivor.  The more I interacted with these people, the more comfortable I got with my own identity and with telling my story.  More importantly, I was able to become comfortable enough with both the institutions and the individuals to form a working relationship, and to truly understand how our partnership could form.
    The work at NYU is incredibly important to me.  It is the main reason I decided to put together an internship with Icarus.  I almost feel as if it’s my legacy.  I hit a very low point, and I definitely didn’t feel that the school had any answers.  It’s incredibly alienating to not only feel that there’s nobody else who feels the same way, but to not trust the answers offered by the school.  With an Icarus group on campus, hopefully less people will reach the point that I did.  Seeing Icarus take root in Gallatin, and knowing that there are definite plans to expand to the entire university, makes the pain and trauma of the summer worth it.
~    *    ~
    The most important lesson I take from the internship isn’t about organizing or interacting with administration—it is how to deal with my own mental health.  Each of the three supervisors (Sascha, Madigan, and Brad) have given me different perspectives and tools that help me to cope.  And of course, interacting with the community (both in NYC and at NYU) have begun to teach me how to trust and depend on peer supports.  This is particularly true at NYU, where my own experiences are directly relevant to the work we are accomplishing.
    Sascha introduced me to the Icarus Project.  When he came to speak to our class, I felt that maybe Icarus could fill a gap that I felt in my own life—to bridge the disjoint between my everyday life and my “crazy” life.  He was the first person I met who openly spoke about his experiences with mental illness, and inspired me to begin speaking about mine—at first only with a few people, but little by little I’m opening up more and more.  Because I really feel like he understands, and listens without judging, Sascha was the first person I was able to call of my own volition when I was in crisis.  It really helps to have mentors and role models who are real people—someone you can actually talk to and look and say, okay—I can do that.  Sascha is inspiring because he was able to take something that could’ve destroyed his life completely and turn it into an amazing project that reaches thousands of people.  And he’s real—he’s not some figure sitting at a desk or anonymously contributing money, or something superficial—he’s out there in the world working to make these very human connections.  In doing so, he’s making himself vulnerable to other people, which is incredibly difficult.  A year ago, I couldn’t have imagined talking to people about what I thought and felt—now I tell complete strangers that I want to kill myself.  I think what makes Sascha’s lessons so powerful is that he’s there in the real world with me—I can see his struggles and triumphs and translate them into my own.
    Madigan Shive was my co-supervisor.  I initially met her at the very first Icarus hub meeting I went to—later I learned that she is the main liaison between Icarus and Fountain House, and so would be supervising the majority of my work.  Madigan has an incredible calming aura about her.  She is able to instantly make people feel welcome and at ease—this was especially important to me during the first few meetings.  She’s someone that you instinctively feel like you can trust.  Madigan taught me a lot about interacting in a collectivist model.  I learned a lot about self-determination and self-direction—her method of supervising is to give a few assignments, but she really left it up to me to decide what needed to be done, and how, and when.  In the beginning it was difficult, since I’m so used to people telling me exactly what to do and when to do it.  Madigan taught me how to be a more autonomous individual, especially within an office setting.  More importantly, she taught me a lot about myself.  She helped me discover strengths that I didn’t think I had, and helped me see that maybe my weaknesses weren’t quite as crippling as I assumed they would be.  Madigan really taught me the value in reaching out to a community for help, and how to give help to others in return.  
    While Sascha and Madigan represented the more radical activist side of mental health, Brad Lewis brought in a sense of historicity.  As a psychiatrist, Brad brings another perspective into the dialogue.  It’s very easy to completely dismiss all of psychiatry as worthless, and psychiatrists as evil (as I had previously done).  Brad allowed us to see past our preconceptions of the evils of psychiatry, and into the good that it does.  More importantly, he showed us the ways in which psychiatry was questioning itself, and the changes that are slowly being made from the inside.  Through the readings done in his class, we were able to see the movement that Icarus grew out of, and align it with other movements that are happening. As a doctor and an NYU professor, Brad is an important ally.  He has connections to the administration that students and outside organizations don’t—he is able to more easily communicate with and get information from the university.  I think most importantly, for me, Brad taught  me to be critical of psychiatry without completely rejecting everything about it.
~    *    ~
    The internship with the Icarus Project is the most rewarding experience I’ve had here at NYU.  Though it did give me valuable work experience, more importantly, it taught me important skills in coping with my own madness.  I learned alternatives to traditional psychiatry, that, at least for me, work better because I’m not afraid of them.  Though I continue in traditional talk therapy, Icarus provides an invaluable supplement to it in the form of peer support.  Being able to go and talk with a group of people who share similar experiences is incredibly important, especially in a world where such experiences are often marginalized and stripped of personal meaning.  I have learned to talk about my thoughts and feelings, not deny and hide them.
    Ultimately, this is why I feel that Icarus is such an important organization.  Because it works to open up space to talk about mental health in a non-judgemental, non-pathologizing way—in a humanitarian way—it is a valuable tool, especially for university students who don’t want (or need) to be diagnosed and pathologized.  Icarus is about a group of people coming together to build community and learn to talk about themselves—it just happens that the conversation centers around mental health.  It allows people to make their own choices and lead their own lives, instead of reconfiguring them around a prescribed lifestyle set by anonymous doctors in hospitals.  
    Icarus allows people to find their own brilliance, and meaning in their own experiences.  I still don’t think that I have a “mental illness” or that I’m “crazy”—I also don’t think that I have “dangerous gifts” or that my experience is particularly extraordinary.  I live my life the way I always have—sometimes that involves dealing with suicide attempts.  It doesn’t mean that I’ve gained some sort of insight into a crazy world.  I have learned that my experience—no matter how I chose to define it—is worth sharing.  There are others who may be helped by lessons that I had to teach myself.  There is incredible value and meaning in sharing experiences with others, not only just because it might help them, but in sharing it helps me.  Most importantly, I learned that I’m not alone in my struggle.