My buddy Eric recorded me talking on KPFA last year and I just rediscovered it. If you have a few minutes to listen to me talk about the stuff in my head, check it out:

So last month I traveled to Israel and the West Bank for the first time in my life and met so many inspiring people and got my mind blown and heart broken open. Right before I got on the plane to fly home I facilitated an Icarus Project style radical mental health discussion at the anarchist community center Rogatka in Tel Aviv. There were about 20 people there, with a number of folks from Anarchists Against the Wall, some of whom I'd met at a protest in Nabi Saleh a few days before amidst the tear gas and skunk water canons.(!?!) We talked about madness and language and collective trauma and watched Crooked Beauty and it felt like it could be the beginning of some important new discussions about mental health in the radical activist community in Israel.

I co-founded the Icarus Project with my best friend Jacks McNamara in 2002 and it initially began as a website for people to be able to find one another and raise the level of dialog around experiences in the mental health system. As it grew it became a magnet for the brilliant and mad.

Reseeding the Icarus Bunchgrass 
The same way bunchgrass sometimes dies out in the middle and continues growing healthily while gaining new ground, in the last couple years the Icarus Project has lost its central organizing body while continuing to live and grow in many directions.
In this coming year what we aim to do is reseed the Icarus bunchgrass -- redevelop enough of a core organizing body that we can make decisions and continue to grow and develop and be a force for change in the world.  We want to attract a wide and diverse variety of Icarus allies and former members, provide a new platform for community conversations with our upgraded website,  create material that can be discussed in our local groups, sort through and highlight some of the amazing discussions that have happened in our forums over the past 10 years, raise some more money, and--very importantly--begin to develop a base of people from which to develop a new decision-making body for the organization.

(This is a paper I wrote for Prescott College with Dr. Brad Lewis as my mentor. It's still rough in a couple place but at some point soon we're going to clean it up and submit it to a journal.)

Abstract: Over the past nine years, I've had the good fortune of collaborating with others to create a project which challenges and complicates the dominant biopsychiatric model of mental illness. The Icarus Project, founded in 2002, not only critiqued the terms and practices central to the biopsychiatric model, it also inspired a new language and a new community for people struggling with mental health issues in the 21st century. The Icarus Project believes that humans are meaning makers, that meaning is created through developing intrapersonal and interpersonal narratives, and that these narratives are important sites of creativity, struggle, and growth. The Icarus counter narrative and the community it fostered has been invaluable for people around the world dealing with psychic diversity—particularly for people alienated by mainstream approaches. But, despite the numbers of people who have been inspired by this approach, the historical background of the Icarus Project is hard to find. It exists primarily in oral history, newspaper articles, unpublished or self-published Icarus documents, and in internet discussion forums. As the cofounder of the Icarus Project, I use this article to make that history, or at least my understanding of it, more widely available.

At this point I’ve read my history. I learned about the European Enlightenment, made sense of where the philosophies of the sub-culture I came from drew their historical understanding. Marxism is in some ways very Biblical. There are a lot of things about Buddhist philosophy that are pretty punk. All of these things eventually overlap. I don’t think there’s any future in de-spiritualized communities, or cultures. You can look at the Left in the United States, and how much better the religious right is at organizing, because they have God on their side. Compare that to my mom in her apartment in Manhattan, reading the Nation magazine. For myself, it came from having what I didn’t realize at the time were spiritual experiences– in the punk scene, with the anarchists...