UPDATE: The National Empowerment Center has reversed its controversial decision amid public outcry, including the emails and calls of many Icaristas, and the workshop will be restored. Read about the reversal here: http://www.madnessradio.net/update-coming-off-medication-workshop-restored 

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

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

Crooked Beauty is a documentary film on the experiences of Icarus co-founder Ashley McNamara set to powerful visual images. The documentary is premiering at San Francisco's Cinematheque on April 17, at 9pm! For more info, and to see the trailer online, go to www.crookedbeauty.com. Facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=116462821701469

Angel Adeyoha writes: I was happy to attend the annual NASCO (North American Students of Cooperation) Institute as a representative of TIP. I presented a workshop on "Radical Mental Health on Campus and in the Community through an Anti-Oppression Lens" I have been considering so much lately how my work organizing in explicit anti-oppression circles around topics of race, gender and class converge with my work as a coordinator for TIP. This weekend and this workshop really merged those parallel lines for me.

Icaristas Sam Kendakur, Will Hall, and Bonfire Madigan Shive presented at the Rethinking Psychiatric Crisis: Alternative Responses to First Breaks conference in New York City. They joined more than 200 researchers, people with psychiatric diagnoses, policymakers, clinicians, advocates, and family members from several countries including Finland and the UK to discuss effective hospital, labeling, and force alternatives. Check out the slideshow here, and more info at the International Network Towards Alternatives for Recovery website.

Annie Robinson's article "College Mental Health: A Different Diagnosis" is in Wiretap Magazine, a leading online youth activist website: School health providers are supposed to act in the best interests of the student. But who it is that gets to define these "best interests" is a subject for debate among students and counseling staff.