Gallatin’s Campus Icarus was created by a group of students who recognized a need for open dialogue about issues surrounding mental health. We believe such matters are too often silenced, shunned, and shamed, which adversely affects the student population. Fundamentally, we consider Campus Icarus a learning community and mutual support network developing creative approaches to psychic diversity and mental suffering. Committed to challenging these trends, we bring together a collective of voices, open up discussion in the community, and offer access to essential tools and resources.  Modeled after The Icarus Project, an innovative mental health collective, Gallatin’s Campus Icarus endeavors to build peer support networks on campus to overcome the alienation and estrangement that often exacerbate student struggles.  Beyond serving as a social forum, we strive to create a successful alternative and/or supplement to the existing mental health services available to college students. This involves creating safe spaces where students can come together to share their personal stories, receive support from others, explore alternative means of attaining mental and emotional wellbeing, and expand the restrictive and reductive language dominant in our culture.

Gallatin's Campus Icarus works to break down the barriers between what is considered "normal” and “disordered”. We recognize the multiplicities of mental health experience and strive to maintain a community that regards mental diversity as something to be respected and even rejoiced in. In our culture, it is easy to view ourselves as broken and in need of fixing. Rather than define ourselves according to an ever-narrowing conception of “normality”, our community encourages personal engagement in a process of self-determination and self-definition. Offering more than support, Gallatin's Campus Icarus fosters a forum for change – a space where anyone, with personal, academic, or professional intentions, can come to challenge and reform the social binary of psychic "sameness” and “difference”. By sharing, learning, and building upon one another’s ideas and experience of life and madness, we collectively create an open, accepting environment essential to everyone’s wellbeing.

Our Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/groups.php?id=5903472#/group.php?gid=35969939311

Our student club website: http://www.gallatinstudent.com/club-pages/campusicarus/

Our email: GallatinCampusIcarus@gmail.com