9 months of research, writing, editing, discussing, consulting, planning, designing, sweating, panicking, despairing, freaking out, emailing back and forth, mutual aid, dreaming, community solidarity, and crazy-outta-control mad love later, the much-awaited 40-page book about reducing and coming off psych meds hits the presses...

Hello everyone, this is Ashley typing from the train on the way back from a marvelous trip to Buffalo, NY. I got invited up there by an awesome Icarus member who works as a peer advocate at one of Buffalo's peer-run mental health agencies. She asked me to come give a workshop to the monthly advocate's assembly and to be one of the featured speakers at Buffalo's first ever Mental Health Empowerment Rally, which was called "Resisting the Myth." It was really inspiring to learn more about the network of mental health peers/consumers/advocates who are working together to try to change the system from the inside, and to get a glimpse into some of the arts and activism going on in Western New York...

Icarus San Francisco & organizer Brooklynne Michelle were just profiled in a cover story in the San Francisco Weekly newspaper on people choosing to live without meds. Download it here, or go to: http://www.sfweekly.com/2007-05-23/news/just-say-no/

so it was a whirlwind weekend for nyc icarus - it was a great success in a whole bunch of different ways. the first ever nyc anarchist bookfair at the judson memorial church was incredibly well attended by folks from all over the continent and the world.

A member of the Icarus Project in California recently received a rejection letter from the Goenka Vipassana Meditation Center for no other reason than they had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder years ago. Join a campaign to protest this discrimination.

Icaristas Jonah Bossewitch, Madigan Shive, and Will Hall were hosted by a local Icarus website member at the Bay Area John F. Kennedy University forum with clinical psychology graduate students. 2-07

50+ people crowded into the Long Haul infoshop in Berkeley CA Feb. 18th for a training and skillshare on Trauma Awareness with Icarus staff Will Hall.

There are several items that we are seeking for our office, in order to make it homier and more functional/permanent-feeling. If you have any of these things laying around, we'd love to have them! Please feel free to forward this list as well.

Longtime Icarus NYC organizer Jessica Stein at Reading Frenzy in Portland Oregon, reading from her zine Long Walk Back To Myself "the picaresque tale of her three-day, fifty-mile walk from Brooklyn to Croton-on-Hudson. The zine brings together anarchism, alternative transportation, and radical mental health with beautiful hand-drawn maps and illustrations." Check out the photos and audio from this inspiring event.

Icarus staff Will Hall is on a gag order list filed in court by pharmaceutical giant Eli-Lilly, in an effort to stop the spread of leaked documents showing criminal fraud in marketing its blockbuster schizophrenia drug Zyprexa. Read the New York Times story about the growing free speech issue, and also the local Northampton, MA front-page story.

Anyway. Right before the holidays we got invited to send some Icarista staff to speak at a Feminist Health Gathering in Leeds, England (http://www.feministhealth.org.uk/) on January 19th-21st. In a rapid last-minute organizing spree, some of our consistent funders generously agreed to sponsor the trip, we got in touch with UK allies and activists about the possibility of visiting and doing talks, submitted a workshop proposal to the conference, and got the ball rolling on an unexpected visit to cross-pollinate with folks in Europe!