Clubhouse was and is a revolutionary model of recovery that started in 1948 on the steps of the New York Public Library. It is a world-wide human rights movement (recognized by the UN) with its origins in a group of ex-patients from Rockland County looking for cheap coffee, pie and respect; all things that were in short supply in the state institutions of the time.

I began working at a residential treatment facility in 2000. Immediately I started developing a form of group therapy for our unit with several of my co-workers based on the principles of Positive Peer Culture (P.P.C.)....I believe that the concept of participatory democracy can be applied to psychological treatment and mental health in order to introduce a more humanistic model than the present one.

"At some point I started to think the radio was talking to me, and I started reading all these  really deep meanings in the billboards downtown and on the highways that no one elsewas seeing. I was convinced there were subliminal messages everywhere"¦People would talk to me and I was obsessed with theidea that there was this whole other language underneath what we thought we were saying that everyone was using without even realizing it."

The Bipolar World - SF Bay Guardian September 2002

You can see it all from the highway: enormous monocrops of identical corn plants that reach for miles bordered by an endless sea of strip malls, parking lots, and tract housing. You can see it on our kitchen counters and in our classrooms: the same can of soda on the table in Cairo and Kentucky, the same definitions of "˜progress' and "˜freedom' in textbooks around the world. Monoculture "” the practice of replicating a single plant, product or idea over a huge area "” is about the most unstable, unsustainable, unimaginative form of organization that exists...

a man named todd in the desert growing celery on a day with electric light

and I am a passer-through seeking some kind of truth behind the strip-mall facade of america and he is channeling it through the minerals in his plants and we are talking under a disproportionate amount of sunlight for november and he has known me for about 10 minutes and I can feel myself radiating some kind of energy out through my skin...

Dealing With Shrinks/Dealing With Hospitals

So we're about to give you a whole bunch of suggestions that will help you get better informed about the places you might need to turn for help if things get really out of hand.

In the these pages we've tried to put together some of the complex and jagged pieces of our experiences to give you a sense from the inside of what it's like to live with this thing they call bipolar disorder.