This coming September will be the 10th anniversary of our Icarus Project journey. With your participation, we will be celebrating this milestone anniversary. We are asking each of you to reflect back on your own personal journey with The Icarus Project.  We want to celebrate our victories and learn from our mistakes, as well as look forward to what we envision The Icarus Project to be over the next 10 years. Currently on the agenda: re-designing the website; revising and updating all of our publications; creating a 10th Anniversary story sharing archive; as well as some organizational restructuring, including getting an advisory board into place.

Alix LeClair wrote this beautiful paper for Brad Lewis' Mad Science/Mad Pride class at Gallatin last semester. She's interested in starting up a Campus Icarus group, in her words:

"I really want to take the icarus project into reality in new york. I've been asking around at Gallatin and talking to people in my Mad Pride class about it, but you can write something on the website about how myself and some others are trying to get the
campus icarus at NYU started again.They can email me AFL255@nyu.edu I
have a lot of ideas but I can't put it into practice on my own and I'm scared about being a "leader" of anything, and I'm sure others will be interested if they only knew the group was there."

I’ve been involved with Bay Area Icarus for over a year now.  In that time, not only have I watched internal conflict and miscommunications tear apart our group, but I have heard many stories from around the country of other Icarus Project groups falling apart over the years due to groups not knowing how to deal with conflict and disagreement. We all want to create a safe and supportive space, but unless we find a way to hold each other accountable and resolve conflict in a respectful way, it seems that we are inevitably just going to keep getting harmed.  If we want to develop long term, sustainable support networks we need to find ways to heal harm done within our communities so that everyone involved can feel respected and heard. 

The Mind(ful) Liberation Project in Richmond, VA - an Icarus-inspired local group - is selling some great "Peer Support Now" t-shirts to fund their distro work. Check em out and buy 1 or 2.

$7 each, get them while you can

"If madness isn’t what biopsychiatry says it is, what is it? If we don’t agree with what biopsychiatry says, then we probably don’t agree with the treatment practices. For us to have some kind of intelligible answer to a first-year psychiatry intern who can tell you: it’s a brain disorder and every minute that it’s not being medicated, there’s irreparable damage being done.  The people who fund the research are the big phama companies that psychiatry represents.  A psychiatrist now can see 30-40 clients a day. Psychiatry says: this group of Icarus folks can sing Kumbaya all you want, but we own it.  I don’t believe that."

Crooked Beauty is a poetic documentary that chronicles The Icarus Project's co-founder Jacks McNamara’s transformative journey from psych ward inpatient to pioneering mental health advocacy. It will be screening at 3 festivals in the UK this fall. Come out if you are in England or Scotland!