As one of the creators and directors of The Icarus Project I want to express our heartfelt gratitude to the members of Fountain House for being generous enough to share space with us in your building and offer us the opportunity to participate in this amazing community you've created in the middle of Manhattan Island. As a budding organization in the early stages of growth, we here at The Icarus Project are excited about the prospect of grafting some of our dreams to the mature roots of the Clubhouse Movement and making some of our visions come to fruition. In turn, we hope we can attract lots of light and bring some new energy into Fountain House. For those of you who are just learning about us, I'd like to tell you a bit about our history and plans for the near future.

The History

The Icarus Project was created two and a half years ago by my friend Ashley McNamara and I. What we both had in common was that we were diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had done time in psych hospitals, but rather than seeing our condition only as a "serious mental illness" we also understood that the part of us that gets called a "disease" or "disorder," was also very much a dangerous gift. We were inspired by the ancient Greek myth of Icarus about a boy who has wings but doesn't respect their power and dies after flying too close to the sun. We felt like we were part of a group of people who had special powers "” like wings "” but felt very alone and didn't know how to use them without crashing over and over. One day we sat in a tree and wrote up a mission statement to inspire people like us to come together and learn how to take care of ourselves. Here's a little excerpt:

At our heights we may find ourselves capable of creating music, art, words, and inventions which touch people's souls and shape the course of history. At our depths we may find ourselves alienated and alone, incarcerated in psychiatric institutions, or dead by our own hands. Despite these risks, we understand that we are members of a group that has been misunderstood and persecuted throughout history, but has also been responsible for some of its most brilliant creations. And we are proud.

We used our mission statement, and the stories of people all over the world, to create a website with open forums where folks who struggle like us can write to each other and share stories and ideas in ways that make sense to them. So much of our struggle comes down to a lack of good language to communicate with, so we wanted to open up space where people could find new ways of talking about what we go through.

Slowly people started discovering us and the message boards began to fill up with posts that were so amazing we decided to try to edit them together and create the book we always wished had existed for us. So we spent the winter of 2004 in a little house in the woods writing and self-publishing a book entitled Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness - A Reader and Roadmap of Bipolar Worlds. Once the book came out, Spring broke and we left New York to do a full speaking tour across the country, selling our books, sleeping in the back of our pick-up truck, and facilitating workshops and discussions about mental health at community centers, bookstores, universities, and clubhouses. While our book was mainly directed at other bipolar folks like ourselves, it quickly became clear that our message "” that sometimes what are considered "diseases" are actually dangerous gifts, and that we need to learn to take care of ourselves "” appealed to all kinds of people struggling to find ways to understand their mental health. Even though we both are pretty skeptical of the corporations and policies behind the pharmaceutical industry, both Ashley and I take psychiatric medications and believe that they should be treated as one potential tool among many others "” like nutrition, therapy, acupuncture, meditation, whatever helps. Everywhere we went we encouraged people to respect the choices folks make in reference to their mental health, and to understand that we all have to figure out what works for us; there is no formula for everyone.

By October we had sold out of 2000 books, started another workshop tour, and started meeting with Fountain House to explore the idea or working together on reaching out to people who often have a hard time getting services or finding community around their mental health issues, particularly youth and students. This winter we pulled off a truly inspiring artshow on the Lower East Side featuring 40 Icarus Project members and then found out we'd been awarded a large grant to help us start alternative support groups all over the country. We're hoping that our partnership with Fountain House will help us to get those efforts off the ground"¦

Mind/Body/Community

Fundamentally, one of the main messages of the Icarus Project is that you can have all the psych drugs and psychotherapy and public services that are out there, but without a supportive community, life is going to be really hard. One of the foundational ideas behind the Icarus Project is the concept of Mutual Aid: people helping each other, instead of only getting help from authorities. One of the most amazing things about Fountain House is that it was started by people diagnosed with mental illnesses who were trying to create community support for themselves, and we at The Icarus Project really identify with that goal. We're trying to expand on the efforts of groups like Fountain House, however, by reaching out to people who don't necessarily identify with models of lifelong "mental illness" as the only way of understanding what they go through.

A lot of our members feel really alienated by mainstream culture and don't want to fit into the kind of lives they see on TV or hear about in school. They really want to be healthy in ways that feel healthy to them, but they don't see being different as a problem "” in a world that's pretty sick, sometimes not being able to fit into the mold makes sense. While all of our members want to work for change in some way and help make the world a better place, for many of them doing the kind of regular steady work we're expected to do in our culture feels like it is part of what makes them mentally and emotionally sick. Instead of fitting into something that already exists but doesn't work for us, we're trying to create something new. Part of what we're trying to do with The Icarus Project is carve out more meaningful models of work and health that fit our understandings and capabilities.

The Icarus Project is part of an international community of artists and activists and dreamers of all kinds who are trying to make the world they want to see. We're currently doing our part in this movement by putting together our second book entitled: "Underground Roots and Magic Spells: a Guide to Building Mental Health Support Networks in Our Communities." The whole theme of the book is about how we live in a world that wants to make everything the same - identical crops of corn, identical cans of soda, identical people and identical minds - but that really systems need a whole diversity of plants, people, and ways of thinking about the world. We're hoping this book will help people get together and start learning about ways they can support each other, get healthy, and create a place in our world for all kinds of bizarre and beautiful ways of thinking.

Big Exciting Plans For the Springtime and Beyond

Beginning in April, The Icarus Project is going to be organizing a national network of mental help support groups out of our headquarters at Fountain House. We're going to start by organizing groups on college campuses in New York City, and by distributing our new book and support materials to people all over the country. A group of students at NYU are already in the process of forming an Icarus Project support group, and we hope they'll network with the NYC Icarus group that's been meeting since September and is currently re-locating to Fountain House. We're hoping to see all kinds of cross-pollination of ideas and experience between current Icarus Project members, folks at Fountain House, and students, activists, artists, and people of all kinds.

We're also planning to work with the Fountain House young adults program to get some help distributing Icarus Project literature to all the people who want it across the country and the world. The number of requests we get is starting to be more than we can handle without help, and it's only going to get more exciting as we're getting more publicity and releasing another book. With the help of folks at Fountain House, and the work our awesome new NYC support network coordinator Madigan Shive, we will hopefully make this a reality.

I would be really happy to hear from any Fountain House members who have questions or ideas about how we might work together. I can always be reached at: scatter@theicarusproject.net and you should expect to start seeing me around Fountain House beginning in early April