Icarus Resurrection 2023

Learning from the past to build a better future in the transformative mental health realm.

In this message:

• Resurrecting an old community forum

• T-MAPs April Workshop Sunday April 16

• IDHA’s Decarcerating Care Event Monday April 17

• Doing my best impression of a father at 2am.

I’m leading with a couple questions…

I get asked, sometimes multiple times a week, if there’s a place online where people can find like minded people who are looking for support with their diagnosis of bipolar disorder or psychosis, or their distrust of the medical model but use of psychiatric drugs, or if there are just some creative people with trauma histories who support each other in creative ways.

I never know what to say. For many years I would send people to the Icarus Project forums and I felt confident about the way we held space for nuance and complexity in these realms. I love that IDHA has continued in the critical tradition of Icarus but it doesn’t have a peer support component. T-MAPs also grew out of the Icarus Project but we’ve never had an active functioning space online for people to share resources and support. I know dozens of people and organizations doing amazing work in the transformative mental health realm and I would love to be more actively connecting those people to each other, and providing a gathering space for a new generation of mad folks.

If you are reading this and there are forums and websites you frequent and recommend I would love to know what they are. Please comment on this post below.

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Meanwhile I’m on a Signal thread with a small group of awesome tech minded old and new friends who are working on resurrecting the old Icarus Project website and forums as an archive to inspire a new generation of people, and hopefully attract a bunch of the old ones to reconnect with one another. Most of the Icarus site content disappeared somewhere between 2015 and 2020 when the organization was in a big transition and trying to figure out how to pivot its social justice mission to center people of color. The Fireweed Collective does great and inspiring work, but along the way a bunch of voices got lost.

The idea for the archive is to take an earlier version of theicarusproject.net and turn it into static HTML pages and do the same thing with the old phpbb forums that thousands of us posted on. The archive site will also have a set of links to all the academic articles and papers that were written about The Icarus Project, and probably some other links to like-minded projects and organizations.

But I’ve been having this fantasy lately of creating some kind of humble T-MAPs discussion forum that is easy for people to sign up for and use and that is password protected and that, hopefully, can be a place where people share stories and ideas and support one another. I want it to be a place where we can discuss strategies for taking care of ourselves and each other, talk about struggles in and out of the mental health system, and practice mutual aid support. I want to connect it to the spirit of the old Icarus Project community forums, and populate it with content and questions and ideas from a bunch of different places. I want to have it as a place to post T-MAPs content and have people practice it together.

It’s a nascent vision. It would look really different as a Slack group or a Discord group or some other kind of community minded software. I’d LOVE to hear your thoughts about it. How would you set up an Icarus Project inspired forum in 2023?

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Transformative Mutual Aid Practices (T-MAPs) are a set of tools that provide space for building a personal “map” of wellness strategies, resilience practices, unique stories, and community resources. Creating a T-MAP will inspire you to connect your struggle to collective struggles. When we make and share our T-MAPs with others they become potent tools for healing and liberation.

On Sunday April 16th please join me for a 2-hour virtual workshop consisting of awareness exercises, journaling, sharing in pairs, and group discussion. We will practice how to communicate your mental health needs using practical tools from Internal Family Systems and other transformative therapy models, and create safety. Expect to come away inspired, with a creative framework for managing your mental health. I hope you will also make some connections and friends!

Two hours is a very short time to introduce these ideas and I’m actively developing a longer framework for a multi-week workshop. At the moment these T-MAPs groups are a really good way to connect with me in real time and get a sense of my facilitation style and share some creative and liberatory ideas with like-minded strangers. Come check it out!

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Psychiatry and psychology have been used to justify mistreatment and segregation since at least the early 1800s in the United States and remained largely unchallenged in mainstream culture until the 1960s civil rights era. For example, psychiatry has been used to bolster the institutions of slavery through psychiatric disorders (“drapetomania”) and scientific reports (e.g. by Dr. Samuel Cartwright) that deemed African Americans “biologically inferior” and pathologized those who tried to escape its reins (“protest psychosis”). The ideas underpinning these ideologies persist today, evident in the disparities in diagnostic rates, as well as the disproportionate criminalization and institutionalization of marginalized communities labeled as having a mental illness. There is a direct correlation between this insidious history and present-day efforts by the state to expand involuntary commitment.

On Monday, April 17, IDHA will continue the conversation with Decarcerating Care: Histories of Coercion and Dreams for Liberated Futures. This sixth installment will explore how institutionalization has long operated as a tool of social control, disproportionately impacting Black and Brown communities, manifesting today in the expansion of involuntary commitment directives nationally. A panel of activists, survivors, researchers, providers, and other advocates will explore the history and current status of involuntary commitment in the United States, centered on the factors that have shaped how people approach mental health and the impact of this history on diagnosis and the mental health continuum. We will discuss key examples in New York City and California, demonstrating what these initiatives have in common and how they are indicative of a larger pattern. We will also share key resistance strategies grounded in lived experience wisdom.

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Doing my best impression of a father at 2am.

thinking about Internal Family Systems theory at 130am when my kid is sick, he keeps waking himself up coughing so i’m in the baby room holding him in my arms and his sister is asleep in the crib next to us. i’m typing between coughing fits.