Big name designers are coming out with more and more collections targeting kids -- complete with big-ticket prices. Though the designer clothes for kids are undoubtedly adorable, is paying hundreds for a sweater your daughter will soon outgrow -- or splatter with mud! -- really a good idea?

So, Basic Training was interesting to say the least. I learned a lot from a really amazing Sniper.

a new video

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.

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. 

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.