On Monday, January 15th Sarah and I found each other at the Delta ticket counter at JFK. Our overnight flight to London Gatwick was leaving in a couple hours; we were each a little nervous, excited, and tired from hauling suitcases full of clothes, books, and tons of (heavy!) Icarus Project materials up and down stairs and subway stations to eventually distribute in the UK. We were planning to stay with a mysterious friend of Madigan's in a squat in London, and it seemed that she might or might not meet us at the airport. In the preceding few days we'd received requests from folks in the UK to a) accompany us on the train to Bradford to talk about psychosis and spirituality on the way up to our evening talk there b) film interviews with us for a film about alternatives to psychiatry c) meet over coffee to discuss the representation of bipolar romance in british cinema and d) post Ireland's first radical mental health discussion on the Icarus Project's events calendar. If nothing else was certain, it seemed like we were headed for an adventure full of fascinating characters.

During the flight, Ashley read and slept. Sarah listened to music and jotted down notes for her blog:

"On the plane, flying over the Laborador Sea. It's -67 degrees F outside this pressurized, sterile, and ill-smelling vessel. Ashley and I are heading to England for eight days of learning and sharing and couch/squat surfing. This trip feels surreal--so quickly organized. I have walking pneumonia and I can't believe I'm actually going...It's my 25th birthday today and I'm in an airplane traveling timezones. Trippy shit...I'm slightly nervous about sustaining my energy for the trip and my level of mental functionality, as well. I'm eager to just be there and start talking to people. "

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Max did in fact come get us at the airport. After much confusion about terminals and patchwork conversations on strangers' cellphones, we met up and found ourselves telling stories a million miles a minute while shuttling through a series of trains and lousy weather to finally arrive at the front door of a building in London that seemed far too nice to be a squat. As Sarah remembered:

"Today, an amazing radical feminist medic woman picked us up at the airport and brought us to her squat in Kensington. Astounded by the squatting situation and the laws that allow for it in the UK! Fantastic! The building is in the heart of a wealthy neighborhood, surrounded by a French ambassador's home and wealthy American ex-pats. I was so grateful for a place to sleep in quiet today and for the amazing communal meal and conversation with house mates here. Tonight we made plans for the week, figured out an incredibly complicated train system, and prepared for tomorrow's day in London. I'm so tired and ready to crash from jetlag..."
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The next morning we set off on into London:

"Yesterday was a wild London ride indeed. We began the day at the Tate Modern, our one site-seeing adventure, sliding down Classen Holler slides and checking out their amazing Surrealist gallery.

We then headed off to a cafe in central London to be interviewed by a woman who is writing a film about a love affair between a woman who is "bipolar" and a man who is not. She wanted to know what it's like to be "bipolar" and in a relationship, about our patterns and coping skills, etc. A totally surreal experience to be a token other for 2 hours. Sometimes I feel that the more times I tell my story, the less it feels like "me" and the more it feels like someone else's life. The woman did seem genuinely interested, however, and I hope that speaking to us will allow her create a more respectful and accurate portrayal with fewer harmful cliches. What she does with the information we gave her is up to her. Hopefully, we've done a public service of some sort..."
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The next day we got on an ill-fated train heading North to facilitate a discussion called "Mad in America" with the Bradford chapter of Evolving Minds. (To find out more about Evolving Minds, a " a public forum which meets monthly and is open to anyone and everyone to encourage public debate and dialogue", visit http://www.evolving-minds.co.uk/indexbradford.html.) Rufus May, an ally of Will's, and a brilliant subversive clinical "spy-chologist," had set up the talk for us at the last minute, and we spent the afternoon radioing our location to him via cellphone.

Ashley remembers the day vividly:

"On Thursday morning we ate a funny English breakfast, stocked up on fruit, nuts, and snacks, and then got on the train for what was supposed to be a 2 hour journey to Leeds. Except it ended up being one of the windiest days in recent British history. The roofs took to "flapping" on 3 stations, a tree fell on a train, lorries were blowing over on the motorways, and our simple journey ended up taking 8 hours and involving an epic number of absurd updates from the conductor about the next catastrophe along the way and the latest set of expected delays. Luckily I had marvelous emails to return and books to read, and was somehow in the frame of mind where i could accomdate the insanity of the journey with humor rather than rage.

Later in the afternon a text message appeared on my neighbor's cell phone, which I had been using to walkie-talkie with Rufus, our host up North, who was going to try to intercept us somewhere along the train route and drive us to the workshop we were supposed to be giving in Bradford that night. The text message was from a radical filmmaker named Mel, whose film, Evolving Minds, had inspired groups of the same name to form in England. (To find out more about the film, check out http://www.undercurrents.org/minds/index.htm.)

She suspected we might be on the same train that was stuck in Grantham, and sure enough 5 minutes later I appeared at her seat, where she was knitting a sparkling wild hat across from her friend, Eliza, a shaman in training who was soon to become my close mate (as the British would say). We are shared a picnic of our packed snacks and talked for hours about psychosis, spirituality, nutrition, activism, mental hospitals, and the nature of time. Meanwhile the train moved in bits and spurts, Sarah slept heavily in the other car, and the conductor debated whether or not the train would be diverted to Leeds or end up in York (in which case we would be kicked off, which we were.) Eventually the four of us got expelled onto a cold rainy platform in Doncaster with a lot of outraged passengers, and some hours later Rufus rescued us in Leeds and drove us to Bradford where a crowd of folks had waited patiently for 2 HOURS!!! for us to come give our workshop.

The workshop was splendid. Despite the ridiculous circumstances, people were full of questions and listening ears, and everyone was quite inspired by The Icarus Project. At the end we were mobbed with questions and requests for books, and sold a ton of materials in about 3 minutes. Eventually Sarah, Mel, Eliza, Rufus and I all piled into a tiny steamy car and made our way to the wee town of Hebden Bridge, where we entered the magic little world of Rufus and Becky's old stone cottage perched on a hillside above towns and moors that stretched in all directions. We all shared a late night picnic at the dining room table and then made our way to bed.

The next morning brought more exchanging of books, magazines, websites, films, and contacts over a breakfast of porridge, and then Becky took us on an enchanted walk through secret pathways, broad hillsides, gushing streams, fanciful bridges, and old twisted woods full of serpentine stone staircases and megalithic cliffsides. It was a landscape unlike anything I had ever seen except in my imagination as a child when I read old British books by the Brontes.

After all the walking Sarah was feeling quite ill again, and went to bed. I took the bus down into the tiny town of Hebden Bridge, where I meandered through the charity shops and cobbled streets, eventually sitting down at a lovely little organic cafe to eat a lunch of goat cheese, apples, salad, and fresh fennel. The place was covered in advertisements for holistic health care -- massage, reiki, herbs, homeopathy, and so forth - and full of people in colorful clothing. I read the newspaaper and was amazed to see 3 different stories on global warming, including an indictment of Prince Charles -- who was chartering a private transcontinental jumbo jet to go accept an environmental award in New York; an article about the U.S.'s "whacky winter" and the prominent meteorologist at the weather channel who declared that any meteorologist denying the human impact on global warming should be disbarred; and a comparison of which UK grocery chains are promising to do the most to reduce their environmental footprint, with activities like labeling which food had to be flown in, using biodiesel in delivery vehicles, and attempting to become carbon neutral by 2008.

It seems that people here are so much more globally connected, living so close to other cultures and countries.
I am blown away by the possibilities offered by socialized medicine. And the restrictions.
There are pedestrian footpaths everywhere. You can take the train anywhere. You don't have to have a car.

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And then two older women walked into the cafe and asked to sit down at my table. Inevitably, in turned out that they had a schizophrenic sister and a bipolar best friend, and we got into long conversations about forced anti-psychotics, the global political situation, doctors, the economy, the ethics of bringing more children into the 21st century, and The Icarus Project. I'm going to try to hook their bipolar friend up with existing local mental health groups and the budding Icarus UK network that seems to be about to burst up.

Eventually I caught the bus back up the hill in the dark, made everyone some dinner, and then Sarah and I passed out while trying to watch a fascinating documentary about life at the bottom of the ocean.

The next morning we woke early, I did some yoga (so good! remind me to do more yoga), and then we hopped on the train to Leeds to go to the Feminist Health Conference.

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The Feminist Health Conference!!!

has been incredible. We got here at 9 in the morning in time for a big communal breakfast in the conference room of the university student union, where all the workshops are being held. There are about 300 radical women here from all over the UK. While the majority is definitely white and young (20s and 30s), there are people from many generations, including children and first-wave feminists, and a tremendous sense of excitement and community is buzzing throughout.

After breakfast there was a plenary session on Feminist Health Then and Now in which the original author of the UK version of Our Bodies, Ourselves talked about what it was like to begin organizing around women's health in the early 70s, and what she sees as challenges for women now. One fascinating poing of identification was the process that led women to assemble Our Bodies, Our Selves. In her words, the literature which existed at the time about women's health was almost all written by male doctors or by women who had been trained by men, and was "bland, insipid, and patronizing." Our Bodies, Our Selves represented the first major gathering of information, experience, and analysis by women, for women. It sounds like they were operating from a very similar place to what motivated Sascha and I to assemble Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness a few years ago, except that we were collecting experience, analysis, and creative work by and for people with the dangerous gifts commonly labelled as "mental illness." I felt a tremendous sense of momentum and continuity listening to the history and impact of the women's movement (however problematic it has also been, especially in terms of focusing on what can be a narrow definition of women rather than an openness to more fluid expressions of gender) and the ways that our own mad movement is expanding in similar ways.

After the plenary I went to a workshop on DIY gynaecology, and then lunch, and then it was time to facilitate The Icarus Project workshop on "Building Radical Mental Health Support in a World Gone Mad." Ironically, the workshop was held on the dancefloor of a night club, which was a bizarre and echoey space, but nonetheless 55 PEOPLE!!! ended up attending and we had what felt to me like an incredibly inspiring and rather historical conversation which led, among other things, to the formation of an E-Group/listserv for all the folks interested in starting local Icarus-inspired groups across the UK! We distributed tons of books, posters, zines, and stickers, answered zillions of questions, told lots of stories about Icarus in the U.S., and took down contact info for bookshops, distros, and individuals interested in distributing Icarus materials everywhere from Brighton to Edinburgh. We will have a lot of mailing boxes to do when we get back...

After a short break there was a follow up workshop for individuals to brainstorm about how they can start doing local organizing, with the exchange of concrete details like email addresses, phone #s, contact info for groups that already exist, details of events that have already taken place, and lots of scheming and dreaming about events that could be organized and groups that could form. The Leeds contingent set a date for their first planning meeting, and everyone else is going to correspond by Egroup. I told them we would set up a UK forum that they could use on the Icarus Project website, and offered any guidance, technical support, or materials that would make their organizing easier. People were thrilled to get copies of our organizing guide, Friends Make the Best Medicine, and I brought along copies of the infosheet the NYC icarus group put together about their activities as an example for folks to use. Altogether, it was a resounding success, and I am totally blown away by the possibilities for national and transcontinental networks of support. People were so grateful, enthusiastic, and eager to get started trying to make some kind of Icarus UK a reality. My little old heart is about to burst.

After all the workshops I was exhausted and started to wilt. We walked to a friend's house to stay the night, and then got amazing curry..."

Later that evening, Sarah caught up on sleep and Ashley performed poems and was dazzled by the talent of all the women at the open mic/cabaret held at The Common Place, an activist community center in Leeds. The next day, one of the gathering's organizers, who's spearheading an Icarus-inspired group in Leeds, facilitated her first workshop on bipolar experiences - which was a big success! - and several other mental health workshops were offered. Sarah and I took it easy, reading books, sending emails, going to a back massage workshop, and taking walks around town. The gathering closed with a plenary session on the future of feminist health organizing in the UK, and then everyone dispersed back to their homes...

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After the whirlwind in Leeds, Ashley headed to London with Max and Sarah hopped a ride south in a mini bus full of activists from the Feminist Health Gathering...

Sarah writes:
We sang classic rock tunes at the top of our lungs and I took the low, scratchy Rod Stewartish parts since I was so so sick. We headed to the Cowley Club, a radical meeting place/bookstore/pub in Brighton. Smelling the cold salt air was a delicious way to arrive...

Ashley and Max spent some time on the cold gorgeous Brighton beach watching birds and sunsets, and then met up with Sarah for the final Icarus workshop at the Cowley club. Sarah had had a very intense day:

"The next day, Becs (an amazing radical woman who put me up in Brighton) got me an appointment with her friend who performs acupuncture. I came in to the office with very little money, a raging fever, and lungs full of fluid. After bleeding a lot and breathing in to some really intense needle work, I walked out with a normal temperature...feeling better. I am wiped out and still ill of course, but I have to say that that single treatment allowed me to actually enjoy our final night of workshopping at the Cowley Club and made for a much happier flight home. I'm so eager to make my next appointment in NYC and to try treating my mental health symptoms, insomnia, anxiety, etc. with acupuncture.

The presentation at the Cowley Club was intense and really well received. The place was packed and the crowd seemed really rapt. The group was quieter and more closely knit than those previous, but seemed genuinely interested in learning ways to support each other."

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The next morning England was covered in a surprise layer of magical snow, which effectively delayed all the trains and drove everyone crazy, but was gorgeous to watch out the windows of the trains carrying us to the airport. We boarded our plane just in time and flew back across the Atlantic...