Here's a story of impossible questions and tentative answers from Gumby, an Icarus Project member and mother trying to help her son ward off the crash and start putting the pieces back together afterwards.

Too often, we don't get help or identify our problems until we've reached a total breaking point...

Part of taking care of yourself is learning to recognize the signs that indicate youʼre heading into dangerous territory. When Sascha got let out of the last halfway house, he was sent into the world with a list of warning symptoms to watch out for and a list of "coping skills" to help deal with them. While we think this is a good idea, we donʼt think they did the best job identifying symptoms or suggesting creative ways to handle them. So weʼre going to share their list first, and then give you a list we brainstormed based on our observations of ourselves over the years. We encourage you to make your own and share it with the people in your life.

What do you do with your life now?

Part of being diagnosed bipolar is realizing you have to make serious changes to keep from ending up in the same holes over and over again. You have to start taking care of yourself and making your health a priority, even if the people around you have less fragile systems and can sustain a more punishing lifestyle.

Here are some ideas and guidelines for putting on community events from Icarus superhero Ashley McNamara with help from long time community organizer Alli Starr, compiled by Sascha Scatter and edited by Alex Samets.

Outside this corporate medical culture, there is another way, an ancient way found in all societies across history. Tribal societies put the authority to heal in the hands of people who've struggled through illness and survived it. You become qualified to help others because you've been mad or sick yourself. Illness is a painful initiation into your calling as a wounded healer.

Fountain House was probably one the first, most important, and positive things that happened to me, even though it didn't quite seem that way at the time. But it was hard to be objective about anything then"”I was working on an almost entirely intellectual hope"”the most important function of which seems to have been reserving judgment, being receptive, and then trying things on blind faith.