I have a vision of a day when there are established communities on college campuses across the nation where the stigma surrounding “mental illness” has been eliminated, communication has been opened, and there is a network of students committed to supporting one another through their struggles. We are building a strong community, both outside and inside the NYU community, and moving in the right direction.

Icarus on Campus: Charting the Course

In December 2008, a couple months and a winter break away from when my semester as an Icarus Intern actually began, a brainstorming meeting with our club’s academic advisor Brad Lewis yielded the following concepts. We discussed what “creating a culture” involves; in some ways that would be our mission. The previous semesters in which The Icarus Project slowly seeped into NYU’s student life led to the stage we found ourselves in this past winter. It was time to self-define, to clearly sort out what Campus Icarus meant, what kind of Icarus culture NYU’s community needed most and for which it would make space.

"The Politics of Rationality: Psychiatric Survivors' Challenge to Psychiatry," Gabriella Coleman's chapter in the Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience book, examines the history of psychiatric survivor movement to assess its radical political position in the face of changing conditions, notably the growing legitimacy of a neurochemical model of illness and a pervasive culture of seeking, prescribing, and taking drugs.