The Icarus Project

  Wednesday, July 23, 2010 at 1PM

AFSCME Building (basement of the Walker-Roehrig Building) 600 West Lafayette at Third Detroit, Michigan 

Event Info: http://organize.ussf2010.org/film-festival (scroll down to Crooked Beauty) Google Map:

http://maps.google.com/?q=42.329055+-83.054629+%28600+West+Lafayette%2C+Detroit%2C+MI%2C+%2C+us%29

With the numbers of “diagnosable” mental illnesses being so high, it isn’t any wonder activists are questioning just how much sense these diagnoses make.  Where is the line drawn between illnesses and gifts, between insanity and individuality? 

 I'm spending the month of June co-teaching a seminar at Esalen on the history of the Human Potential Movement and what lessons and tools might be useful for a modern day radical mental health movement. That's not actually the full description of what the course is about, but that's the focus I'm bringing to the table from my years working with the Icarus Project and being involved in radical anti-capitalist organizing...

Icarus was mentioned in a small article in the New York Times, 04-12-2010...  

RUNNING THE ASYLUM
Don’t really want to get “better”? Rather be yourself? With nerve and seriousness, the Icarus Project investigates the turbulent “space between brilliance and madness.”theicarusproject.net

Hey check out this article I just wrote and please tell me what you think!

Mad Love, Sascha

More and more, the acceptance of the idea that our dissatisfaction and disease is a result of “brain chemistry” is desensitizing us to the notion that our feelings and experiences might have their roots in social and political problems. 0 0 0 Fundamentally, if we are going to shift the current mental health paradigm we are going to need a movement that both has the political savvy to understand how to fight the system, and the tools to be able to take care of each other as the world gets even crazier.

In recent months some of the old time Icarus Project organizers became aware of this book called Firewalkers: Radically Rethinking Mental Illness put out by a group in Virginia called VOCAL. Firewalkers tells the story of a bunch of people who’ve all struggled with serious mental health issues and, in different ways, learned to see their struggles as sacred quests of transformation. - from sascha

Longtime Icarus member and organizer Leah Harris, who is also the co-coordinator of the US Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry, writes

Please find below a link to the report put together by several psychiatric survivor, human rights, and disability rights organizations. It includes what we feel are the human rights issues most central to mad folks and people of "diverse-abilities" - including the right to make our own decisions, not to be institutionalized or medicated against our will, and to have access to the freedom and dignity that are the inherent rights of all people.

download draft UPR report