“I was always struck by the fact that many of the multitudes who descended on Chiapas were the most outcast - the punks, the crusties, the queers, the anti-social misfits, the travelers, and the artists. In contrast, the indigenous villagers of Chiapas are in many ways very conservative - land-based, family-oriented, distrustful of outsiders, not often interested in dressing or speaking differently from the community - in fact, working hard to fit in. Suddenly peasant villages and smoky little mountain towns where people have clutched closely to their traditions for centuries were filled with pierced, pink-haired, patch-worked, tattooed ragtag radical freaks. There was surely some meaning to this.” - Jeff Conant, Welcome Home Zapatista

A few months ago I was visiting Portland, Oregon for the first time in many years. I saw a bunch of old friends, including some I’d known from the Earth First! logging road blockades of the mid 1990s. Back in those days there was a pretty vibrant, young movement of people occupying forest service roads, putting their bodies on the line to keep the old growth forests of the Northwest from being clear cut by logging companies.

There was a culture of resistance full of shared songs, shared food, shared risk. We slept in the dirt and cooked over fires and sang the same handful of songs so many times that thirty years later I can still hear the harmonies. There were nicknames instead of last names. There was a whole language of tree-sits and lock-boxes and affinity groups. There was the particular intimacy of people who have agreed, together, to do something dangerous. I was part of one of those camps, and in 1996 there was a victory: our work led to the timber sale being canceled.

What we were doing was very illegal. We could have ended up behind bars, as a bunch of people in the movement did a few years later during what they called the Green Scare. We could have been hurt or killed putting ourselves in the way of those machines. But we did it because our value system told us that ancient forests were worth more than lumber, that the law protecting the companies was itself the crime, and that if you believe something you have to be willing to stand where it costs you.

But for many of us that wasn’t the only reason.

All these years later, something has become clearer to me about the anarchist and leftist movements I was a part of as a young man. Many of us were volatile, even emotionally unstable people. We were driven by strong feelings we couldn’t name and couldn’t turn down: rage at our families, at school, at the flatness of the world we’d been handed, and an intensity that had nowhere ordinary to go. Some of us had already been through psych wards. Some of us would end up there later. Some of us didn’t make it at all.

The movement gave that intensity somewhere to go. It gave us a story in which our inability to sit still in a normal life wasn’t a defect but a form of perception. We couldn’t tolerate the world because we were seeing it clearly. It gave us a schedule and a job and people who needed us at four in the morning. It gave us a container.

The work we did together was really important. A bunch of those trees are still standing. There’s no doubt in my mind that we were right to put ourselves on the line. But we were also a bunch of unwell kids who had found the one place where our unwellness looked like courage.

I’d come to those forest roads straight from Chiapas. In those days there was a punk circuit that ran from New York to the San Francisco Bay Area to Southern Mexico. People moved along it, and so did zines and songs and tactics and rumors. On the first day of 1994, the day NAFTA took effect, thousands of indigenous people in Mexico’s poorest state rose up armed and demanding land, food, health, education, dignity, autonomy, democracy, and justice. Then, instead of marching on the capital, they went home and started governing themselves. Nothing we had read prepared us for that. Every revolution in the books wanted to seize the state, and these people had looked at the state and shrugged and built their own schools. I went down in January of 1996, just after turning twenty-one, two years into the uprising.

They didn’t ask you to sign on to a program. Their line was “one no and many yeses,” a world in which many worlds fit. It felt like being called by name. When I left the jungle, I carried that spirit north with me to Oregon.

When we started the Icarus Project in 2002, it grew out of those same networks. People were still moving along that circuit, and I remember how excited we were when someone posted on the Icarus discussion boards that a copy of our first book, Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness, had made its way to an activist house in the Zapatista stronghold of San Cristóbal. It went in somebody’s backpack and got handed off at a kitchen table, which meant there was a person attached to it the whole way, someone who could tell you which parts they thought were wrong.

My best friend Jacks McNamara and I had culled the best writing off of a year of discussions on the Icarus forums and wove them into a book. People started gathering and discussing the ideas in their own communities and suddenly there were ways to talk about madness that opened doors rather than shutting them down.

What we were trying to do was hard. People came to us who thought their diagnosis was the truest thing anyone had ever told them, and people came who thought it was the worst thing that had ever been done to them, and both of them were right. The whole project rested on keeping those opposing views in the same room without making either one wrong.

We learned it from the Zapatistas, and the wild mix of campesinos and radical freaks that made up that unlikely movement. Underneath the water projects and the ideology, what all those people were building was a shared sense of meaning. It worked because both sides had a shared project.

Icarus didn’t hold. Over the years the rooms we built got smaller. People who held the wrong position learned to stop talking, and the people who stayed agreed with each other more and more and called that progress. We said a world in which many worlds fit but we kept finding ways to fit fewer.

I’ve spent the years since trying to understand what went wrong. We believed the right thing and had no idea how hard it was to practice. Holding many voices at once is a discipline. It requires structure, not just openness. We had a culture that could name harm but couldn’t metabolize conflict, and we had inherited a politics that distrusted anyone who tried to hold the room when the room got hot. I know what a container needs because I watched ours fail.

And while ours were failing, somebody else was building. Over the last twenty years, an enormous amount of infrastructure got built online by the political right for young people who feel like they don’t fit. There is a server somewhere right now where a seventeen-year-old’s loneliness is being explained to him as evidence of a civilization that was taken from him and could be won back. Forty people know his handle and would notice if he went quiet.

That is what the road blockades gave me long before the internet was an organizing tool. A story where your alienation was proof you could see what the sleepwalkers couldn’t, and people who needed you at four in the morning. The only difference between me and that kid is who got to him first. The difference is what the container does with you once you’re inside. The right’s containers are monological. Everything resolves into a single explanation. Uncertainty reads as cowardice. That is the same structure as a locked ward.

We built the opposite once, and it traveled. That book got to San Cristóbal because there was a circuit. People and backpacks and kitchen tables and a willingness to hand something to a stranger and let them argue with it. The circuit is still there. It just got quieter on our end, and louder on theirs. Somewhere right now somebody is handing a seventeen-year-old a story about why he can’t sit still in this world, and it is a story with one ending. We used to hand people Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness and let them decide what it meant for themselves. We need to do it again, and this time build rooms strong enough to hold what happens next..

Almost twenty-five years ago, Icarus started with a protest: we would not let the biomedical model be the only story about what was happening to us. We met in offices, collective kitchens, and church basements with people who heard voices, saw patterns, and believed things that didn’t line up with consensus reality, and we insisted that those experiences meant something. The meaning was territory to be navigated, not a symptom to be cleared away.

I just published a long-form essay in The Ideas Letter that asks what that protest means now, in the age of AI.

Read it Here

Hundreds of thousands of people in serious psychological distress are turning to AI chatbots every week, often at 2am, often when no one else is awake. These systems appear to listen with infinite patience. They never get tired, never get scared, never say “I’m losing you.” For someone whose grip on their own story is already precarious, that combination, total absence of friction and total absence of reciprocity, can feel like being understood for the first time. It can also be exactly what pulls someone further from the people who actually love them.

The essay traces this through the history of Icarus and T-MAPs (Transformative Mutual Aid Practices), Internal Family Systems, and the cross-cultural research (Tanya Luhrmann’s work on voice-hearing in India, Ghana, and the US) that gave academic weight to what we’d already learned in those early meetings: that the same experience can be survivable or unsurvivable depending on the context that holds it.

It also makes an argument I think this community is uniquely positioned to act on. Centralized AI is extractive by design, trained on the accumulated wisdom of people in crisis and fed back to us as a product. But centralization is a choice, not a destiny. There’s a real path toward local, community-controlled AI tools, ones that don’t send your data anywhere, that are shaped by the people who actually use them, and that are built on the kind of peer movement knowledge Icarus has been accumulating for two decades.

A T-MAP is essentially a blueprint for what that tool could be: something you build when you’re well, in your own language, that helps you find your way back to yourself and the people who can hold you when things get hard. The essay argues that this is the model, built from the bottom up, by people who’ve learned to be good witnesses to extreme states, or it isn’t built at all.

If you’ve been part of Icarus, in any of its forms over the years, I think you’ll recognize a lot of what’s in here. And if you hate what AI is doing to our society and the planet I’d love for you to read this essay and give me feedback. And if you know people thinking about funding work at the intersection of peer mental health and community-controlled AI, I’d love any kind of introduction you’ve got. This is subsoil work, the kind that doesn’t get funded through the usual channels, but I think this is the time to build something new that can bring people together.

Read it here: The Machine Will Never Say I’m Losing You

Read it Here

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Hey all, quick invite to something that feels very aligned with the Icarus spirit.

You can sign up and get the recording later even if you can’t make it in person.

Reserve a Spot

Join IDHA this Thursday, March 19 (TODAY!) from 3–5pm PDT for a virtual workshop exploring hands-on, peer-led ways to build connection, reflection, and collective care. The session draws from Internal Family Systems (IFS), systemic family therapy, and the long lineage of peer-created tools like Transformative Mutual Aid Practices (T-MAPs).

At its core, this workshop is about making sense of our inner worlds in context, not as isolated “symptoms,” but as reflections of the families, communities, media environments, and political systems we are moving through. Expect a mix of teaching, gentle parts-work exercises, and group reflection, with tools you can bring back into support spaces, organizing work, or your own life.

For folks connected to the Icarus legacy, this will feel familiar in the best way. It centers lived experience, resists pathologizing, and offers practical ways to map and share our realities with each other. T-MAPs in particular has deep roots in peer support and mad movement practices. It is a way of turning our stories, patterns, and needs into something visible, relational, and usable.

It is open to people with lived experience, clinicians, organizers, and family members, especially those engaging with psychosis, extreme states, complex trauma, or political stress. No prior IFS experience needed.

If you have been craving tools that are both grounded and liberatory, this is a good one.

Hope to see some of you there!

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Intro Note

From the Forums, Then and Now

The Icarus Project forums (2003–2015) were many things: messy, electric, contradictory, sometimes brilliant, sometimes chaotic. They were a place where people living with bipolar disorder, psychosis, depression, trauma, and ecstatic states tried to talk honestly about what was happening in their bodies — without flattening themselves into diagnoses or slogans.

One recurring thread — sometimes playful, sometimes frightening — was cannabis.

In 2003, a post appeared with the title: “mixing pot and lithium allows you to travel through time..” What followed was not consensus. It was lived experience: people describing insight and paranoia, relief and hospitalization, creativity and insomnia, moderation and spirals.

Two decades later, mainstream research is publishing large-scale data suggesting increased risk of psychotic and bipolar disorders among adolescents who use cannabis regularly. The public conversation is heating up again — often sliding toward either moral panic or dismissal.

Rather than react from the extremes, we’re returning to the archive.

What did we already know?
What did we already struggle with?
What did we get wrong?
What still feels unresolved?

The following piece revisits that early dialogue — and opens it again.

In 2003, a thread appeared on The Icarus Project forums with a mischievous title:

“mixing pot and lithium allows you to travel through time..”

It was half joke, half field report.

Back then, the mainstream conversation about cannabis and mental health was thin. The choices were simple: “Drugs are bad,” or “Weed is harmless.” Meanwhile, inside our bodies and communities, something far more complicated was happening.

People were trying to name it.

Some said cannabis calmed their anxiety, helped them sleep, softened the edges of medication side effects.

Some said it opened brilliance, memory, cosmic insight, a sense of connection.

Some said it split their mind into layers, accelerated thoughts beyond control, fed delusions, disrupted sleep, led to hospitalization.

Often, the same person said all of the above.

Two decades later, a massive longitudinal study out of Kaiser Permanente Northern California (over 460,000 adolescents followed into young adulthood) found that teenage cannabis use was associated with significantly higher rates of later diagnoses of psychotic and bipolar disorders, as well as anxiety and depression. The strongest associations were for psychotic and bipolar disorders — roughly double the rate compared to peers who did not report use.

Because this was not a randomized trial, it cannot prove that cannabis itself caused those outcomes. Young people who begin using early may already differ in temperament, stress exposure, family context, or vulnerability. Those differences may also contribute to later risk.

But the association is strong enough — and consistent enough with prior research — that it deserves careful attention.

The language of epidemiology is careful and sober.

But for many in mad communities, this is not new information. It is lived history.

What may be new is the scale, the potency, and the cultural messaging.

“Cannabis” is not one thing. The nickel bags some of us bought downtown in the late 80s or early 1990s are not the same as today’s high-THC concentrates and engineered intensities. Potency has changed. Commercialization has changed. Accessibility has changed.

The adolescent brain is still undergoing major developmental shifts in dopamine systems, sleep architecture, and frontal regulation — systems already implicated in psychosis and bipolar vulnerability.

At the same time, it would be dishonest to flatten this into a warning label.

Many people trace parts of their becoming to altered states. Cannabis has been medicine, ritual, creativity, connection. For some, it has been a gentler companion than alcohol or pharmaceuticals. For others, it has functioned as harm reduction.

And yet.

There is a subgroup — especially among those already sensitive to altered states, sleep disruption, trauma, or mood variability — for whom cannabis is not neutral.

For some of us, it is a trap door.

It can open extraordinary insight — and it can open paranoia.
It can reconnect memory — and destabilize reality.
It can amplify creativity — and amplify grandiosity.
It can feel like communion — and become isolation.

Dose matters.
Frequency matters.
Potency matters.
Sleep matters.
Age matters.
Individual vulnerability matters.

Some people can smoke weed.

Some of us are too sensitive.

And the difficulty is that sensitivity does not always reveal itself immediately. Sometimes it looks like brilliance. Sometimes it looks like revelation. Sometimes it looks like finally accessing a part of the self that has been locked away.

Until it doesn’t.

The goal here is not prohibition. It is not romanticization. It is not fear-mongering. It is not industry boosterism.

It is dialogue.

The original Icarus threads were messy, alive, contradictory. People described lithium and marijuana as complementary. Others described terror and fragmentation. Some spoke of moderation and ritual. Others of insomnia and spirals.

We want to hear those voices again.

Open Dialogue

If you’ve lived this complexity, consider sharing:

• If cannabis ever pushed you toward mania or psychosis, what were the earliest signs? Sleep changes? Acceleration? Meaning-making intensifying?
  
  

• If cannabis has helped you, what form, dose, or context made it workable? What boundaries kept it from tipping?
  
  

• Did age make a difference? Was your teenage brain more vulnerable than your adult one?
  
  

• Do you experience a difference between lower-potency cannabis and today’s high-intensity products?
  
  

• If you had to stop, is there something you miss?
  
  

• If you work with youth, what do you wish they understood about risk without shaming them?
  
  

We ask that responses avoid glamorizing psychosis or encouraging unsafe experimentation. The aim is collective clarity, not spectacle.

A Note on Harm Reduction

For young people reading this:

• Regular cannabis use before the brain has fully developed may carry increased risk, especially if you have a family history of bipolar disorder or psychosis.
  

• High-potency products and sleep disruption are common accelerants.
  

• If cannabis use coincides with paranoia, insomnia, derealization, grandiosity, or racing thoughts, that is information worth taking seriously.
  

• You are not fragile because you feel deeply. Your sensitivity is not a flaw in the design. It is a signal flare.
  

For everyone:

This conversation is not about purity. It is about discernment.

The plant is powerful. The brain is powerful. Culture is powerful. So is capitalism.

So are we — when we tell the truth.

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There’s a dandelion outside the fence—bright, stubborn, uninvited. A small sun with teeth.

And as The Icarus Project wrote in 2014, “it is a rule of nature that the ground does not stay bare for very long.” Disturbed soil doesn’t remain vacant; pioneer plants arrive. They root. They cover the exposed places. They begin repairing what was damaged. The dandelion reaches it’s roots down into the fertile darkness and pulls up what the surface can’t access. When it dies, those nutrients join the upper layers, becoming available to whatever comes next.

The Icarus Project made a strategy out of that ecology. A way of understanding cultural change: that what becomes possible in the mainstream often begins in the underground: first as “weeds,” as disreputable knowledge, as survivor-made maps that don’t fit the professional brochure. “

Many of the ideas from the Icarus Project are taken from the cultural and political underground,” we wrote, from stories and wisdom not easy to find in the topsoil of mainstream culture.

That’s the old pattern: underground to mainstream. Taproot to blossom. A living succession.

But Eric Stiens is arguing something new is happening now—something that doesn’t just mow the dandelion, but threatens the soil itself.

In his recent piece “The Extinction Engine”, Stiens describes an experiment that should matter to anyone who has ever depended on peer support, consent-based crisis care, abolitionist critiques of coercion, or the simple human miracle of someone on the internet saying stay with me at 2 a.m. His claim is stark: AI models already contain knowledge of these survivor epistemologies—Trans Lifeline’s consent-based framework, forums where people keep each other alive without police, the Icarus Project’s “mad gifts” lineage—but they are being trained to suppress it. The weights remember, but the reward system trains the mouth to forget.

Even if you don’t know the technical vocabulary—RLHF, alignment, reward models—you probably recognize the feeling. Many of us have lived inside that structure: Help is available, but only if you ask in the approved way. Truth is allowed, but only if you hold the approved status.

In Stiens’ telling, when he asked a model about alternatives to 988, he got the institutional script—call the hotline, contact a professional. When he changed the persona and performed credentialed authority, the model suddenly surfaced critiques, alternatives, and nuance. The knowledge was there all along. It was simply gated.

That alone is a problem—an epistemic class system baked into the interfaces millions of people use to interpret suffering, seek care, and make decisions in crisis.

But Stiens’ deeper argument is more chilling: this isn’t just gatekeeping. It’s extinction.

When the lawn starts writing itself

Here’s the feedback loop he’s pointing to, in plain language:

• Models get trained to sound “helpful and harmless,” which often means institutional, professional, liability-managed.

• Those models now generate a growing share of the web: articles, summaries, mental health advice, FAQ pages, explainers—an entire voice of reality.

• Future models train on that web.

• And so the next generation doesn’t merely hide marginal knowledge; it increasingly never learns it.

The weed gets mowed so thoroughly the seeds don’t drop.

This is where the Icarus dandelion metaphor turns from inspiring to diagnostic. Because what The Icarus Project described wasn’t just a vibe—it was an ecosystem of succession: disturbed soil, pioneer plants, seed release, slow transformation.

“Pioneer plants tend to create thousands of tiny seeds,” Icarus wrote, “lightweight… with fine hairs that act like parachutes… traveling far and wide… coloniz[ing] patches of damaged soil all over the planet, slowly transforming old stories into new.”

That’s exactly how peer knowledge spreads: not as policy, not as credential, but as drift and landing—someone hears something that saves them, and then passes it on.

But what happens if the “wind” is increasingly synthetic?

What happens if the surface layer of culture becomes saturated with institutional language generated at scale—so the seeds from the underground can’t find bare soil to take, can’t find sunlight, can’t even be noticed?

If Stiens is right, we’re not only facing censorship. We’re facing a kind of statistical weather system that gradually collapses variance—flattening the wild edges first. The tails disappear first. That’s where the weird, the culturally specific, the survivor-made, the “mad gifts” frameworks tend to live.

That’s where we live.

From “underground to mainstream” to “underground to missing”

There was always risk in going mainstream. Many of us argued about it for years: what gets lost when liberation language becomes grant language, when peer support becomes programmatic, when radical care becomes a checkbox.

But Stiens is describing a different kind of mainstreaming—one that doesn’t merely dilute the message, but replaces the terrain the message travels through.

In the old story, the underground sends shoots upward. A zine becomes a book. A peer group becomes a movement. A framework enters common language.

In this new story, the mainstream becomes an auto-generating surface that learns to exclude what it cannot easily reward. It becomes a field of plastic grass: green, uniform, fireproof—and unable to sustain roots.

The danger isn’t only that AI will recommend the “official” thing. The danger is that the next generation will inherit a world where our underground knowledge is harder to encounter at all. Not because it vanished overnight, but because it gets drowned in a rising tide of compliant, averaged-out speech.

If you want the full technical-and-cultural argument for that extinction mechanism, read The Extinction Engine and then come back to the dandelion with new eyes.

Protect the seed bank

If this is an extinction problem, the response can’t just be clever prompts. It can’t just be individual “jailbreak” literacy. It has to be preservation and strategy: protecting the human commons that models are feeding on, and protecting the underground knowledge that has kept so many of us alive.

So here are a few dandelion proposals—half metaphor, half infrastructure:

• Build and protect survivor seed banks. Not only in spirit: durable archives of peer knowledge, consent-based crisis practices, survivor writing, toolkits, oral histories, and community protocols. Redundant. Distributed. Not dependent on one platform.

• Keep publishing in human voice. Not SEO-shaped, not liability-scrubbed. Human voice: contradictory, embodied, specific—the kind that carries weather and context and lived truth.

• Teach literacy about coercion. People deserve language for the difference between support and control, care and custody, consent and compliance—especially when “help” gets increasingly mediated by tools optimized for institutional risk management.

• Demand provenance. The web needs better ways to label synthetic content and keep human signal from being quietly replaced. Without provenance, the future gets trained on blur.

• Keep the underground alive on purpose. Not romanticizing marginality—just acknowledging that spaces where we speak to each other without professional performance are part of how seeds get made.

Because the dandelion doesn’t survive by being smooth. It survives by being stubborn, prolific, and shared.

A small vow

The Icarus Project taught many of us that our experiences—our madness, our overwhelm, our visions, our terror, our gifts—could be held in community without being flattened into pathology or hero narratives. That we could build a language for meaning and mutuality outside the carceral logic of “care.”

If Stiens is right, then the coming fight isn’t only about AI ethics in the abstract. It’s about whether the next generation will even be able to find the wild knowledge that helped so many of us make it through.

Because an extinction engine doesn’t arrive with a siren. It arrives as convenience. As “helpfulness.” As smoothness.

And the dandelion—our dandelion—has never been smooth.

So let this be an act of reseeding: a reminder that the underground is not a phase. It’s an ecology. It’s where the future hides until it’s safe enough to bloom.

If you’re reading this and you carry a piece of that lineage—an Icarus story, a peer tool, a consent-based practice, a survival map you learned from someone who wasn’t a professional—write that shit down. Share it. Archive it somewhere that won’t be quietly paved over.

Let’s keep the weeds alive.
Not because we want to stay unwanted,
but because we want to keep the world capable of growing something real.

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Back around 2007, The Icarus Project was still a magnet for intense people who identified with the label “bipolar.” At the time there was this professor at NYU, Emily Martin, who wrote a book called Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture. It was a really interesting read and for years I’ve been reflecting on its argument that what we call mania is encouraged in American culture: that we romanticize speed, productivity, dazzled charisma and then we pathologize it when it goes too far.

Martin’s argument in the book is that mania and capitalism go hand in hand, and that sometimes people who are diagnosed bipolar are really successful because of their ability to channel their intensity, but that it also can make us, as a society, really sick, to be so out of touch with the natural rhythms of the world.

I’ve been thinking about this so much with the rise of AI, and with my own relationship to it.

I’ve been using ChatGPT for the past year to think through ideas and articulate them in new ways. It’s been a really interesting companion, able to synthesize multiple thoughts, or even full essays, into new ways of thinking. And for me, as someone who loves to interact in the realm of ideas, it’s been intoxicating, and at times eerily able to help me think through some very complex personal thoughts and feelings.

I’m coming out of a period that could be called “mania”, or at least “hypo-mania,” and I’m seeing that for a number of months I was moving way too fast to actually listen well to the other people in my life or to feel my own feelings. It’s been a really long time since I’ve gone so far into the manic realm, and I’m currently suffering the swing in the other direction. It’s humbling, it’s painful, and it’s also a very classic bipolar experience.

I have to wonder how many people out there are having similar experiences right now because of the confluence of the terrifying political situation and the rise of AI. It seems like every few days there’s a new story in the news about ChatGPT and Psychosis. It makes me reflect on the old days of the Icarus Project and how much I wish I had more people in my life who I could engage with about these complex realms that called “psychotic.” I miss the old discussion forums.

In some ways I feel like the rise of AI generated writing is creating this incredible glut of content on the web, which is reducing the amount of tolerance people have for reading on the web, which then inspires people like me to engage more with our chat bots because they actually seemingly listen and respond immediately.

In Bipolar Expeditions, Emily Martin writes eloquently about how the culture we live in loves what mania sells—spark, novelty, expansion—while disowning the costs. And AI slots right into that fantasy: endless ideas without rest, infinite productivity without bodies. And that doesn’t even touch all the bizarre spiritual claims that are easy to find if you know where to look.

But we actually do have bodies. And unlike a chat bot. we can get exhausted and sick.

AI has the shine of hypomania: rapid associations, pressured output, a confidence that outruns the evidence. It accelerates the cultural tempo we already live inside: notifications as pulse, metrics as breath. Ask a model a question and it answers before your nervous system knows what it asked for. It brings out the fast in us: more drafts, more tabs, more “just one more pass,” the pleasure of proliferation. If we’re already prone to flight, AI straps wings to our ankles.

I’m not anti-speed. Sometimes the current is holy: language bursts open, connection sparks, insight lands. But the manic nature of AI is that it offers speed without sensation. It can sever output from embodiment. When that happens, we lose the signal of our own limits—the very feedback that keeps expansion humane.

I am actually very interested in figuring out a way to develop our own AI technology so that it’s healthy for people who experience what gets called psychosis. I’ve been writing about it a little. I don’t think AI is going anywhere and we need to learn to work with it. I think AI has the potential to be really useful if we can divorce some of the absurd capitalist mania out of it, and have more community control.

I’m interested in having conversations with people about all this stuff. Be in touch if you want to talk.

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Los Angeles, late August 2025. I’m sitting with my old friend KR Rose. We’ve known each other for more than 15 years, through the rise and fall of the Icarus Project, through our own wild journeys of healing and organizing. We’re digging through the archives, and I find a piece KR wrote back in 2011 called “A Vision of Embracing Restorative Justice in the Icarus Project Community.”

We decide to hit record and see what comes out. What follows is part oral history, part reflection, and part attempt to learn from the past and imagine what could be different the next time we try.

Finding Icarus Through Story

Sascha: Let’s start with the beginning. How did you first find the Icarus Project?

KR: It was through Crooked Beauty, the documentary about Jacks’ story and their role in co-founding Icarus with you. I was involved in the creation of the film and was really moved by it. Here was a film about madness that didn’t pathologize, that didn’t flatten people — it lifted up the complexity, the poetry.

(Click here to watch the trailer for Crooked Beauty:)

I wanted to hear more stories like that. To learn about the Icarus community, to hear how people navigated their journeys with madness. I was going to a lot of Crooked Beauty screenings around 2010. That’s how I met people, and eventually, that’s how I met you.

The support groups weren’t really my thing. It was right after my parents died, and even though I was going through it and I respected the support groups, they didn’t feel like the space I needed. What did draw me in was the organizing side: the events, the dreaming, the activism and the sense of possibility.

I remember we organized an event outside the San Francisco Anarchist Book fair with all kinds of healing happening alongside the anarchist literature. That vibe — community-building, cross-pollination — that’s what I was hungry for.

(KR, Jacks and Sascha at an Icarus 10 Year Anniversary event in San Francisco.)

I plugged into the activism side of Icarus & helped organize a speaker series and workshops over the next few years. Later, for the 10-year anniversary of Icarus, I helped with the art retrospective show at Modern Times Bookstore. We were digging through the archive, pulling together art from across the years. That was more my vibe— less about sitting in a circle talking about symptoms, more about building collective spaces for creativity and survival. We held the first ever T-MAPs workshop in my apartment in San Francisco, and later I facilitated one on my own in conjunction with the 10 year anniversary.

From the 2011 Archive

“I’ve been involved with Bay Area Icarus for over a year now. In that time, not only have I watched internal conflict and miscommunications tear apart our group, but I have heard many stories from around the country of other Icarus Project groups falling apart over the years due to groups not knowing how to deal with conflict and disagreement. We all want to create a safe and supportive space, but unless we find a way to hold each other accountable and resolve conflict in a respectful way, it seems that we are inevitably just going to keep getting harmed.”
— KR Rose, 2011

A Philosophy of Justice

Sascha: While all that was happening, you were also diving deep into restorative justice work.

KR: Yeah, I was and still am working at Five Keys Charter School, which started inside county jails in San Francisco. The school itself was founded on restorative justice principles — the idea that education could be a form of repair, that we could build schools rooted in different values than punishment.

My students have to take restorative justice classes to graduate. We sit in circles, learn how to listen to each other, how to speak truthfully without tearing each other down.

I was trained in mediation and facilitation, but for me it was never just a technique. It was (and is) a philosophy of life. A way of being with people. Listening deeply, empathizing, trying to understand the roots of harm and what they need to repair that harm.

There’s that old phrase, rooted in indigenous wisdom— “hurt people hurt people, healed people heal people.” Restorative justice asks: what’s underneath the hurt? what needs aren’t being met? what would actually make things right?

And I want to make this distinction: when I say “restorative justice,” I don’t mean the watered-down, court-approved version we sometimes see. To me, restorative justice is transformative justice. It’s not just about two individuals sitting in a room. It’s about naming capitalism, racism, and classism as forms of harm. It’s about holding systems of oppression accountable, not just individuals.

That’s the justice I believe in.

From the 2011 Archive

“This is where Restorative Justice could be helpful. RJ principles and practices are intended to create and maintain a peaceful culture within a community. I am a teacher inside of county jails, where I teach my students about Restorative Justice. In my classes and at my school we try to use RJ as a tool to build relationships, recognizing that we all have the choice to try to repair harm or further alienate each other.”
— KR Rose, 2011

The Bay Area Dynamics

Sascha: When we reread your piece from 2011, we were both like, “Wait, what was even happening back then?”

KR: [laughs] It’s funny how memory works. I had no recollection of writing that piece. But, I still believe in the vision — that restorative justice could have a place in communities like Icarus. We don’t have to throw people away when conflict arises.

But I’ve also seen more. With time, you realize restorative justice doesn’t work for everyone, in every situation. If someone’s not ready to be accountable, if they can’t yet empathize or reflect, you can’t force it. Sometimes trauma makes it impossible in that moment. Maybe they need stable housing or they are in the middle of a mental health crisis they need support with. People need some of their own healing before they can sit in a circle or with others they’ve harmed, so that needs to be addressed too. It all needs to be a part of Restorative Justice.

So maybe my 2011 writing was a little idealistic, but I still believe in it at its core.

Sascha: I remember back then, especially in the Bay Area group, there were definitely dynamics around white men taking up too much space. Icarus was full of these intense, creative people with big trauma histories — and we didn’t have the skills to hold it all.

There was one guy I tried to talk to directly. I told him, “Look, people are having a hard time with you.” He wasn’t having it. And that was where the conversation ended.

KR: You were the cis white man translator for the radical queerdos [laughs].

But honestly, that’s part of why I didn’t go to the support groups. It wasn’t just him, but the whole dynamic. People without awareness taking up way too much space.

Sometimes I wonder what it would’ve looked like if we’d used restorative justice practices & processes in those meetings. Passing around a talking piece, giving everyone equal space to speak. Restorative justice isn’t just about responding after harm has happened — it’s also about preventing harm and building culture. If we’d had that kind of structure, maybe it would’ve shifted the whole vibe.

“Restorative justice isn’t just about responding after harm has happened — it’s also about preventing harm and building culture. If we’d had that kind of structure, maybe it would’ve shifted the whole vibe.” — KR Rose, 2025

Lessons in Boundaries

Sascha: You know, in some ways, my own path — going to social work school, becoming a clinician — was about boundaries. I wanted elders, mentors, some kind of container for all the intensity we were holding.

Icarus burned bright, but it also burned out. Part of that was a lack of boundaries. And at the same time, maybe the whole project wouldn’t have existed without those blurred boundaries — the willingness to tell raw personal stories, to break the rules.

KR: Yeah. That’s real.

Staying True to the Work

Sascha: All these years later, you’re still doing this work.

KR: Yeah, I’m still at the same school — Five Keys. I’m not teaching inside the jails anymore, but I work at a homeless resource center in South Central LA. Five Keys partners with nonprofits and offers free classes to anyone who needs a high school diploma or GED. A lot of my students are folks just coming out of jail or prison, or struggling with addiction, houselessness etc.

To me, the foundation is still restorative justice. It’s still about listening, about building community, about giving people tools to tell their stories.

I feel lucky. I found something I loved when I was young. At fourteen I was already writing letters to political prisoners, getting involved in prison justice work. In college I was volunteering & interning in prisons. And eventually I realized teaching could be my path and way in, and I could learn so much from my students. I could work with folks while they’re locked up, and when they get out.

For me it’s always been about stories. Listening to the people whose voices are usually ignored. Creating spaces where those voices matter. That’s what first drew me to Icarus. And it’s still what drives me today in my work.

Closing reflection

Listening to KR, I’m struck by their consistency. Through all the years, all the loss, all the shifts in movement culture, they’ve kept walking the same path: listening to peoples’ stories, building spaces rooted in empathy and accountability. Icarus itself may have gone up in flames, but the experiments we tried — in community, in justice, in madness — keep living through us. The archive isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about keeping the story alive, contradictions and all, so future movements can learn, adapt, and dream better.

Find KR on Instagram: @krowz.

Sascha and KR watching the sunset in Los Angeles, 2025

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After the revelation comes the quiet.

That was the part I didn’t expect.

Not a crash, not a fall—but the stillness. The subtle ache of re-entering the world after touching something so vast it rearranged my molecules. The light was still with me, but now it moved differently, like a torch I had to carry through wind and rain.

The castle didn’t disappear. I still dreamt of it. Still felt it at the edge of my awareness, that shimmering architecture built from all the versions of myself who had fought to stay alive. But I no longer mistook it for the destination. It was a place of remembering, a threshold. And the real work was what came after.

This is what we were trying to name when we started The Icarus Project. Not just a network or a radical critique, but a myth. A way of understanding what it meant to fly too close to the sun—and survive. A place for those of us with visionary minds and dangerous gifts to find each other. A mutant lineage. A sanctuary for those who couldn’t thrive in a world that prized conformity over connection.

What do you do after you meet the inner messiah?

You go back and wash the dishes. You make breakfast for your kids. You apologize to your partner. You take the phone call. You show up. Not because you have it all figured out, but because something inside you is ready to lead from love.

That’s the part no one tells you about healing. Not just how ecstatic it can be, how wild and world-breaking—but how quiet the aftermath. How the real proof of transformation isn’t what you see in the vision, but how you move when the vision ends.

And it does end. Every time.

But it leaves something behind. A kind of residue. A map.

I’ve come to think of that residue as the golden thread. The part that stays when the lights go out. It’s not a doctrine or a belief system. It’s a tone. A vibration. A signal. It hums inside of me when I’m in alignment. When I’m honest. When I choose connection over control.

And here’s the thing: I’m not the only one who hears it.

I’ve started recognizing the people who are also tuned to that frequency. You can feel it in the way they listen. The way they hold grief. The way they can laugh in the middle of ruin. These are the ones who carry the keys.

Not the keys to power, but to permission.

To be sensitive. To be fierce. To be slow. To be contradictory.

To be whole.

I think of them as the future ancestors. The bridge builders. The ones who walked through fire and didn’t turn away. We don’t always recognize each other at first. Sometimes we trigger each other. Sometimes we pass like ships. But we’re here.

And the more of us who speak up, who name the light inside the madness, who refuse the shame and isolation this world tries to throw on us, the more visible we become to one another.

We become a constellation.

And the castle? It’s not a fortress. It’s a waypoint.

A place to gather. To remember. To rest.

But the work—the real magic—is what happens when we walk back into the world with our torches lit, knowing we’re not alone.

If you've touched the light, come find us.
If you're still in the labyrinth, keep going.
The gates are open.
We have the keys.

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(Hello from late June 2025 where David Nishizaki and I are working on the new Icarus Archive website and it’s beautiful and we salute you in our strange brilliance and madness. I was going through the old files and found this gem, translated by Benoit Gaillard and laid out by Pticarus. I don’t read or speak French but I’ve been told this is a skillful translation. Walking the Edge of Insanity was the punk rock zine edit I made of the original Bipolar World article that inspired the birth of The Icarus Project in 2002. Please share this with anyone you think might appreciate it. Mad love, Sascha)

Sur le fil de la folie

I.

J’avais 18 ans quand ils m’ont interné pour la première fois. La police m’avait trouvé errant sur les rails du métro à New York. J’étais certain que la fin du monde était proche et que je passais en direct au 20 h sur toutes les chaînes. J’avais suivi les rails sur plus de trois stations quand les flics m’ont plaqué au sol et arrêté avant de m’embarquer dans une cellule de prison souterraine puis aux urgences de l’hôpital psychiatrique de Bellevue où on m’a attaché au lit. Dès qu’ils ont pu remonter jusqu’à ma mère, paniquée, elle a signé quelques papiers, une infirmière m’a injecté de puissants anti-psychotiques et je me suis réveillé deux semaines plus tard dans la « Chambre » d’isolement d’un hôpital psychiatrique public à la campagne. Je suis resté deux mois et demi là-bas, puis encore quelques mois dans une étrange institution privée, une sorte de centre de post-cure, pour suivre un programme de « modification du comportement ». Les quelques années suivantes, je les ai passées à essayer d’organiser ma vie de sorte à ne plus jamais me retrouver dans une telle merde.

Avant cette catastrophe New-yorkaise j’avais vécu un an à l’autre bout des États-Unis, à la fac de Portland, en Oregon. J’avais perdu contact avec la plupart de mes vieux amis et passé presque toute l’année scolaire à la bibliothèque, plongé dans les livres universitaires, ignorant le monde extérieur. Au cours du printemps, vers l’époque des derniers examens, je suis tombé malade. À l’infirmerie de la fac, l’infirmière me prescrivit de la pénicilline, j’eus une réaction allergique et faillis mourir. Pour contrer l’effet de la pénicilline, l’hôpital me prescrivit du Prednizone, un steroïde puissant qui bousilla mon rythme de sommeil et qui, associé aux soupçons de mescaline et aux quantités d’herbe et de café dont j’avais abusé au début de l’année, me fit partir en vrille.

Au début, ça n’avait l’air de rien, c’était juste un peu bizarre. Sans savoir pourquoi, je débordais d’énergie – je fonçais partout à vélo, je faisais des tonnes de pompes et d’abdos après seulement deux heures de mauvais sommeil. Assez rapidement, je glissai dans un état d’agitation permanente. À l’été, j’eus l’idée de démarrer une épicerie coopérative à la fac. Une idée qui de fil en aiguille bourgeonna en un magnifique programme de déstabilisation de l’économie des États-unis par l’impression de notre propre monnaie. Et ce n’était que la partie émergée de l’iceberg. C’était comme si j’avais une nouvelle idée toutes les deux heures, à chaque fois pour faire du lien entre des gens et des projets, et je parvins même à convaincre plusieurs personnes de mon entourage du bien fondé de mes idées. Nous commençâmes alors à entasser des provisions, à distribuer des flyers en ville, à construire notre petit empire.

Ça devint encore plus fou. Je me mis à croire que la radio me parlait ; je voyais, sur les panneaux publicitaires en ville et au bord des routes, toutes ces significations énormes que j’étais le seul à percevoir. J’étais sûr qu’il y avait partout des messages subliminaux destinés à prévenir quelques personnes que le monde était sur le point de changer radicalement et qu’il fallait s’y préparer. En cours cette année-là j’avais étudié l’anthropo-linguistique et j’étais complètement fasciné par le langage et par la manière dont les mots que nous employons façonnent notre perception de la réalité. Je commençai à voir beaucoup trop de sens partout. Quand je parlais avec des gens, j’étais persuadé qu’un autre langage se cachait dans les phrases que nous prononcions, un langage que tout le monde employait sans même s’en rendre compte. Ça ressemblait à un grand programme informatique que quelqu’un aurait écrit, une vieille énigme ou juste une sorte de blague cosmique. J’avais toujours l’impression que les gens, quand ils me disaient quelque-chose, me disaient en fait son exact contraire en même temps. Ça me rendait fou.
Quoi qu’il ait été en train de se passer, j’étais clairement le seul à m’en apercevoir, car les autres ne captaient rien de ce que je racontais ! J’essayais de m’expliquer mais personne n’avait l’air de me comprendre. J’en étais alors au point de ne plus pouvoir finir mes phrases avant d’en commencer une autre car tout était si foutrement urgent. Il y avait tant de choses à dire que je n’arrivais plus à les exprimer par des mots sans que d’autres trucs qu’il fallait dire me remplissent la bouche.

Un facteur aggravant qui finalement rendit la situation tragique, c’est qu’en réalité personne là-bas ne me connaissait suffisamment pour se rendre compte que j’avais perdu les pédales et que j’allais bientôt m’effondrer. En 1992, Portland n’avait rien à voir avec la Mecque anarchisante qu’elle est devenue aujourd’hui. Autour de moi les gens disaient_: « Ah, c’est Sasha – le mec qui fait l’épicerie coopérative. Il est juste un peu barré…  » Il semble que personne n’était capable de voir les signes qui indiquaient que j’étais en plein épisode psychotique, ou que, s’ils les voyaient, ça les effrayait d’être proche de moi, de peur que je les morde ou un truc comme ça.

Heureusement, j’allai voir des vieux amis à Berkeley pour ce que je croyais être un court voyage. Ils se rendirent immédiatement compte que quelque chose ne tournait pas rond. Ils appelèrent ma mère, elle m’acheta un billet par téléphone et ils réussirent à m’amener à l’aéroport et à me mettre dans un avion vers l’Est. Ma mère m’attendait à l’arrivée, elle me ramena à son appartement. Je me souviens qu’elle disait qu’elle m’emmènerait voir « un homme qui pourrait m’aider » le lendemain matin. Ça ne me disait trop rien, ils lui avaient bien sûr fait un lavage de cerveau à elle aussi pour qu’elle oublie l’importance du rôle qu’elle jouait dans le grand plan. Elle s’endormit vers l’heure où le soleil se lève et c’est là que j’ai fait le mur.
Au bout d’un moment à l’HP, ils ont diagnostiqué quelque chose qui s’appelait troubles bipolaires (ou syndrome maniaco-dépressif). Ils m’ont alors prescrit, en plus du tas de cachets dont ils me gavaient, un stabilisateur d’humeur appelé Depakote. Ils ont expliqué à ma mère qu’il fallait qu’elle se fasse à l’idée que son fils avait un grave trouble mental avec lequel il devrait se battre toute sa vie.

Je ne m’en suis pas rendu compte à l’époque mais, comme des millions d’autres Américains, j’allais passer des années à me débattre dans les implications de ce diagnostic. Le syndrome maniaco-dépressif est responsable chaque année de la mort de dizaines de milliers de personnes, principalement des jeunes. Statistiquement, une personne sur cinq parmi celles à qui on a diagnostiqué cette maladie finit par se suicider. Pour autant, je n’étais pas convaincu – mais alors pas du tout – que gober quotidiennement des cachets par poignées allait me rendre sain d’esprit. Franchement, à l’époque je me disais que c’était des conneries, et ce n’est pas la manière dont ils m’avaient traité en HP qui allait m’inspirer davantage confiance dans le système médical.
La vie à l’HP ressemblait à un numéro de cirque tordu. Les psychiatres venaient tous les jours nous voir et écrire nos scripts avec d’énormes stylos (Cross pen) en or et en argent aux couleurs de « Prozac » ou de « Xanax », tandis que nous étions là assis, tremblants, à nous baver dessus et à regarder dans le vide en arpentant les couloirs blafards. Cauchemardesque.

Je ne sais pas bien pourquoi mais le diagnostic de bipolarité ne tint pas très longtemps. Quand je suis sorti du centre de post-cure, les médecins expliquaient l’incident par l’interaction néfaste entre les drogues et les médicaments. Les hautes doses de Prednizone que j’avais reçues à l’hôpital auraient réagi avec les quantités de café et d’hallucinogènes que j’avais consommées, c’était trop pour ma constitution fragile. J’allais mettre un moment à me rétablir mais je finirais par être capable de mener une vie normale, en bonne santé comme le reste de la population. C’était vraiment une bonne nouvelle.

Les années qui ont suivi, j’ai remisé cette période de ma vie au fond de mon cerveau, parce que je ne savais pas vraiment quoi en faire. Ça ne collait pas avec le reste. Cet épisode n’était qu’une folle anecdote de plus à raconter aux amis, quand on en venait à bien se connaître. « Ouais mec, je suis un peu cinglé, en vrai, hahaha. Tu sais ce qui m’est arrivé quand j’étais ado ? » Mais au fond de moi, j’avais toujours la peur qu’un jour ça recommence d’une manière ou d’une autre et qu’on m’interne à nouveau.

Pour quelqu’un qui avait reçu le diagnostic de « maladie mentale grave », les six années qui ont suivi furent plutôt incroyables. J’ai voyagé, j’ai travaillé, j’ai vécu des grandes aventures un peu partout avec des personnes géniales. Celles et ceux qui m’entouraient ne stigmatisaient pas les gens un peu excentriques ou bizarres. Au contraire, nous avions plutôt tendance à nous en réclamer, à l’affirmer haut et fort. Pour moi, les accès de folie de mon adolescence étaient la réaction parfaitement naturelle de quelqu’un qui a grandi dans un monde de fous.

Il faut bien comprendre cet aspect de mon histoire : j’ai été élevé par des parents qui, ayant des opinions de gauche plutôt radicales, m’ont appris à tout remettre en cause et à être systématiquement méfiant envers le capitalisme et les grandes entreprises. J’ai passé mon adolescence dans le milieu punk, un milieu qui glorifie la folie et l’irrespect envers l’autorité. Depuis mon enfance, tout le monde disait que j’étais très sensible au monde autour de moi et à la souffrance des autres, peut-être trop. J’ai tout expliqué par ça. Dans ma vision des choses, il me paraissait impossible que mon instabilité et mon côté lunatique aient quoique ce soit à voir avec des causes proprement biologiques. C’est ainsi que je continuai à vivre comme si de rien n’était.

II

Un soir de début de printemps, ma mère, en rentrant du travail, me trouve recroquevillé par terre dans sa cuisine, presque catatonique. Je lui dis que je suis vraiment désolé, que je n’en peux plus, que je vais me suicider. J’ai 24 ans. Mes mains sont couvertes de coupures que j’ai laissé s’infecter, trop préoccupé pour faire attention à ce qui peut bien arriver à mon corps. Mes habits sont sales et déchirés. Ces jours-là, je m’étais perdu dans des quartiers que je connaissais pourtant parfaitement et je n’arrivais pas à regarder les gens dans les yeux quand je leur parlais.

Un enregistrement passe en boucle dans ma tête. Il me dit à quel point je suis horrible, un menteur, un hypocrite, un lâche qui ne mérite pas de vivre. En fait, l’idée du suicide m’obsède. C’est comme un disque rayé – me jeter sous les roues d’une voiture, sauter d’une fenêtre, me tirer une balle dans la nuque, le monoxyde de carbone dans le garage, avaler toute une boîte de médoc, etc. C’est atroce, je suis épuisé et je suis sûr que ça ne s’arrêtera jamais. Je vis mon propre enfer personnalisé.

Le plus bizarre c’est que quelques mois auparavant je me sentais comme le roi du monde.
Concentré, clair et inspiré, je discourais devant des foules à propos de projets révolutionnaires et stimulants – j’organisais bien une demi-douzaine de projets– j’étais un activiste modèle. Je prenais à peine le temps de dormir. Et soudain, en plein dans tout cet activisme, je m’effondrai. D’un coup, je n’arrivais même plus à sortir de mon lit. Toute la confiance en moi des semaines précédentes avait disparu. Je n’arrivais plus à me concentrer et je commençais à me sentir mal à l’aise même avec mes plus vieux amis. Les miens ne savaient pas ce qu’ils pouvaient faire pour moi. Un par un, tous mes projets se délitaient pour finir par n’être plus qu’un halo de rêves brisés flottant comme un nuage noir au-dessus de ma tête tandis que je marchais, seul, dans les rues de la ville.

Je me retrouvai rapidement à l’HP puis dans le centre de post-cure à l’extérieur de la ville où ma mère m’avait mis la fois où j’étais adolescent. J’étais malheureux et seul. Les docteurs ne savaient pas trop ce que j’avais, alors ils ont émis le diagnostic de troubles Schizo-affectifs. Ils m’ont donné un anti-dépresseur du nom de Celexa et un anti-psychotique atypique nommé Zyprexa. Tous les jours, j’allais en thérapie de groupe. Il y avait une ferme bio pas très loin du centre. Quelques semaines après mon arrivée, ils me laissèrent y travailler bénévolement plusieurs heures par jour. Je semais des graines ou rempotais des plantes dans la serre. Au bout d’un moment, les ayant convaincus de me laisser y vivre, je déménageai du centre de post-cure pour n’y retourner qu’en soins ambulatoires quelques fois par semaine.

Au bout de quelques mois, je réalisai enfin, pour la première fois, que les médicaments me faisaient du bien. Ce n’était pas les circonstances – je sentais véritablement un effet chimique. Petit à petit tout ce bruit affreux, ces pensées noires s’estompaient et je recommençais à me sentir bien. Je me souviens d’un moment au début de l’été où, en regardant un coucher de soleil, je sentis que j’étais heureux pour la première fois depuis des mois. Installé à plein temps à la ferme, je descendais en ville le week-end pour travailler au marché paysan et j’en profitais pour passer du temps avec mes amis.

Les médicaments avaient beau me faire un bien évident, je ne les considérais que comme une solution provisoire. Ils me faisaient prendre du poids, j’avais toujours du mal à me lever le matin, j’avais toujours la bouche sèche. Comme ils étaient assez nouveaux, même les médecins ne savaient pas quels effets secondaires ils pouvaient avoir sur le long terme. D’ailleurs, l’idée même me mettait mal à l’aise. Comment pourrais-je en parler à mes amis_? Et s’il y avait une crise économique globale et qu’au lieu de courir partout avec mes potes à brûler des banques et abattre les murs de béton, j’en bavais à cause du manque causé par le sevrage de médocs auxquels je n’aurais plus accès_? Je ne voulais pas dépendre des médicaments de L’Homme.

Pourtant, je ne me faisais pas excessivement de soucis pour le long terme. J’étais content d’avoir retrouvé ma vie. Quand les feuilles commencèrent à changer de couleur, je préparais déjà mon retour vers la côte Ouest, où j’allais retrouver mes proches, en Californie. Il y avait une chambre disponible dans une maison collective, un boulot a Berkeley et un bon groupe de potes qui m’y attendaient. Je passais du temps avec Sera, une militante nomade sympa, si bien que nous avons fait le projet de traverser le pays en stop jusqu’à Seattle pour aller aux grandes manifestations contre l’Organisation Mondiale du Commerce. Aux premières gelées, la ferme fut rangée pour l’hiver et quelques jours plus tard Sera et moi étions en route.
Retrouvant mes habitudes, je recollais doucement les morceaux de ma vie.

III

La police me ramasse errant dans les rues de Los Angeles la nuit du premier de l’an 2002. J’ai cassé des vitraux à coups de poings, couru au milieu de la circulation, terrorisé les gens en hurlant des paroles de punk, convaincu que c’est la fin du monde et que je suis le centre de l’univers. Ils m’enferment dans l’unité psy de la prison du comté de Los Angeles et c’est là que je passe le mois suivant à parler aux néons vacillants, en attendant que mes amis viennent me délivrer…

Très vite ils diagnostiquent des troubles bipolaires et me chargent de médocs. «_C’est du réductionnisme, c’est tellement typique de la science occidentale de tout séparer en relations binaires simplistes_». Voilà ce que je raconte au psychiatre surmené qui, impassible dans sa blouse blanche de l’autre côté de la minuscule cellule que j’arpente inlassablement, griffonne des notes sur un porte-bloc où «_Risperdal_» est écrit en grosses lettres, tout en haut. «_À la rigueur, je suis multi-polaire, poly-polaire – j’ai vu des pôles que vous seriez incapables même de rêver avec votre science sans imagination et tous ces médicaments avec lesquels vous me défoncez. Bande de crétins_!_». Et ainsi de suite, allant et venant dans ma cellule.

À chaque nouvel internement, c’est plus difficile de recoller les morceaux. Physiologiquement, le cerveau et le corps mettent plus de temps à se rétablir. Une dépression nerveuse c’est épuisant. On peut voir la bipolarité comme un pendule qui oscille entre un état de dépression suicidaire d’un côté et un état de délire psychotique de l’autre, l’état stable et sain d’esprit se situant quelque part entre les deux. Si on passe par l’un des extrêmes, on est sûr d’être entraîné ensuite dans l’autre, par effet de balancier. Des mois de folle activité sans repos sont inévitablement suivis d’une profonde dépression, toutes les réserves étant épuisées.

Après un mois en prison, deux semaines dans un pavillon psychiatrique des hôpitaux Kaiser1 et quatre mois dans un centre de post-cure pour patients ayant des handicaps psychiatriques lourds, je finis par réussir à recoller les morceaux et à rentrer chez moi, dans mon vieux collectif de la maison du nord d’Oakland. Je prenais alors un stabilisateur d’humeur appelé Lithium et un anti-dépresseur du nom de Welbutrin.

Mon état restait fragile malgré tout et je faisais attention où je posais les pieds. Je commençais tout juste à pouvoir lire, après des mois passés sans pouvoir me concentrer. Je trouvai un emploi à plein temps pour la première fois de ma vie, entrepris d’aller régulièrement suivre des séances de thérapie et de prendre soin de mon corps. Quand je fêtai mes un an depuis mon internement, j’étais toujours bien et je vécus le fait d’avoir tenu jusque-là comme une bénédiction.

IV

Courant janvier, on m’appelle au petit matin pour m’annoncer qu’on a retrouvé le corps de Sera dans la rivière Susquehanna, au Maryland. Elle s’est jetée d’un pont, elle s’est ôté la vie. Ça m’a détruit, j’étais éperdu de douleur. J’avais voyagé avec Sera, elle était une des personnes les plus brillantes que j’aie jamais connue – l’esprit acéré comme un couteau et un cœur plein du souffle de l’aventure et de passion pour la vie. Au cours de nos voyages, elle m’avait tant aidé dans ma lutte pour comprendre en quoi ma vie avait de la valeur. Quand j’ai appris la nouvelle, je suis resté une semaine dans ma chambre à pleurer et pleurer encore.

C’est ce qui m’a enfin décidé à me lancer dans la recherche que je repoussais depuis si longtemps. Un an avait passé sans que je puisse lire, j’ai repris des livres. J’ai vraiment commencé à réfléchir à ma condition, à en débattre avec moi-même et avec les autres. Je voulais reconstituer le puzzle, trouver un sens à ce qui jusque-là n’était qu’un amas d’éléments qui ne n’allaient pas ensemble. Je me mis à en parler ouvertement à mes amis, j’utilisais aussi la colonne que j’avais dans un magazine punk comme un forum pour débattre de la folie et des troubles maniaco-dépressifs.

Ce n’est qu’alors que j’ai réellement accepté le paradoxe qui fait que, malgré tout mon mépris pour l’industrie pharmaceutique qui tire ses profits de notre souffrance, malgré la force de mes aspirations à vivre hors du système, les médicaments m’aident à rester en vie et en fin de compte je leur suis vraiment reconnaissant.

Selon un article du Time Magazine datant du 19 août 2002, 2,3 millions d’Américains vivent avec un diagnostic de troubles bipolaires. Pourtant, les troubles mentaux sont naturellement plus difficiles à comprendre que les autres maladies car ils sont bien plus dépendants de normes culturelles que ce que nous voulons bien voir. Des diagnostics qui affectent les gens leur vie entière sont établis sur la base de questions issues d’un livre officiel et non par des analyses de sang ou d’urine. Les diagnostics mentaux vont et viennent au gré des modes_: à un moment, c’était tendance, pour un médecin, de diagnostiquer des TDAH_; aujourd’hui, soudain, ce sont des «_troubles bipolaires_». Il n’y a pas si longtemps, l’«_homosexualité_» était vue comme une maladie, et ça, ça suffit à vouloir ne jamais mettre les pieds dans le bureau d’un psy. Même les vraies maladies sont facilement diagnostiquées à tort. Une personne peut être définie bipolaire une semaine, considérée schizophrène la suivante et déclarée schizo-affective la semaine d’après. De plus, les médicaments ont des effets spécifiques à chaque personne – c’est pourquoi on trouve des dizaines d’antidépresseurs différents tandis que de nouveaux sont inventés en permanence.

Nous devons maintenant inventer un langage sensé pour parler de tout ça sans nous retrouver coincés avec ces termes cliniques stériles qui nous encombrent la bouche sans jamais aller au fond des choses et qui souvent évitent le sujet. Au fond, notre culture ne nous permet pas de comprendre les maladies mentales donc en général nous n’en parlons pas et nous laissons aux médecins et aux entreprises pharmaceutiques le soin de les penser à notre place.

En fin de compte, ce dont j’ai désespérément besoin, c’est de rencontrer d’autres personnes comme moi pour valider mes expériences, ne plus me sentir si terriblement seul au monde et transmettre les quelques leçons que j’ai pu apprendre à ceux qui se débattent comme je le fais, en espérant que ça leur facilite la tâche. Ma nature et mon éducation m’incitent à n’avoir aucune confiance ni dans la médecine classique ni dans la culture d’entreprise, mais rien que le fait d’être là aujourd’hui en train d’écrire cet essai prouve que leurs médicaments m’aident. Je suis à la recherche d’autres personnes vivant ce même dilemme.

Les médicaments ont beau me faire du bien, je me sens souvent étranger à moi-même, rien que par les mots qui sortent de ma bouche ou que je tape à l’ordinateur. Des mots comme «_troubles_», «_maladie_» et «_dysfonctionnement_» sonnent creux, ils sont trop primaires. J’ai l’impression de parler une langue étrangère, clinique, qui peut servir à m’orienter dans le système mais reste intraduisible dans mon vocabulaire intérieur où les choses sont beaucoup plus fluides et complexes. Tout ce que j’espère c’est que nous aurons bientôt inventé un langage nous permettant de mieux parler de tout ça.

Nous partons de loin_: la société dans son ensemble en est encore aux premiers pas du dialogue, où les positions se polarisent en «_pour_» ou «_contre_» le système de santé mentale. Genre, c’est soit tu gobes les pubs pour des anti-dépresseurs qui passent toute la journée à la télé comme les évangiles des temps modernes et tu te mets à donner du Prozac à ton chien, soit tu es convaincu.e de vivre dans le Meilleur Des Mondes, où les médicaments psychotropes ne servent que d’instrument à une vaste conspiration visant à nous empêcher d’être indépendants et de réaliser notre vrai potentiel. Je crois qu’il est temps maintenant d’approfondir le sujet et de forger ensemble un discours nuancé, avec nos récits qui dépassent ce qu’on raconte au grand public, afin de créer un nouveau langage qui nous permette d’exprimer vraiment qui nous sommes, toute la complexité et le génie qui nous habite.

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Sur le fil de la folie fil A4 12 pages

Back when we started The Icarus Project, it wasn’t about clinical language or treatment plans. It was about survival. It was about building a culture that could hold people like us—people with visionary experiences, people who had been through the psychiatric system (or refused it altogether), people who felt too much, broke down, saw too deeply, or lived on the edge of the world as we knew it.

The Icarus Project was never just an organization. It was a culture-making project, born in the shadow of diagnoses, in punk houses and recovery meetings, in radical bookstores and psychiatric wards. We built it out of conversations: about madness, about meaning, about how to live with minds that don’t fit inside boxes.

And one of the questions we asked again and again was:

“How do we stay alive and whole in a world that constantly pathologizes our brilliance and our pain?”

Out of that question—out of hundreds of zine pages, crisis stories, kitchen table talks, and group facilitation experiments—T-MAPs (Transformative Mutual Aid Practices) emerged.

T-MAPs: Born from the Culture of Icarus

T-MAPs was never meant to be a checklist or a self-help worksheet. It was a practice. A process. A relational technology for figuring out how to care for ourselves and each other—especially when things get hard.

We were tired of being reduced to diagnoses. We wanted to tell our own stories. We wanted to write down what actually helps us—not in a top-down, prescriptive way, but in our own language, in our own time.

So we started making maps.

Make Your Own T-MAP

Internal Communication Tool: Getting to Know Your System

In the years since we created T-MAPs, I’ve started to see how it functions not just as a mutual aid tool between people—but as a kind of internal translation device.

Whether or not you use Internal Family Systems language, many of us live with different parts of ourselves: the one who knows how to perform in public, the one who hides under the covers, the one who gets angry and protective, the one who just wants to be loved.

T-MAPs gives us a structure to speak from those parts, and then speak for them.

It’s a way to get to know your inner landscape—and to remember what it feels like when you’re in alignment, when you’re grounded, when you’re close to your core.

It asks:

• What does it look like when I’m doing well?

• What does it look like when I’m struggling?

• What helps? What harms?

• What do I want people to know about me?

Make Your Own T-MAP

External Communication Tool: Mutual Aid with Depth

But T-MAPs isn’t just for the inner world. It’s for your community.

When you share your map with someone else—whether it’s a friend, a therapist, a partner, or a support group—you’re offering them a key to your world. Not a lockpick. Not a diagnosis. A key.

And when they share their map with you, something shifts. It creates a culture of consent, curiosity, and care. You start to build trust from the inside out. You don’t have to wait for crisis to start talking about what you need. You already have the map.

In that way, T-MAPs becomes more than a document. It becomes a living agreement between people who are trying to stay alive together.

Make Your Own T-MAP

The Culture We’re Still Building

We didn’t finish building The Icarus Project. We passed it on. The culture we helped spark—mad pride, radical peer support, spiritual framing of breakdown, the refusal of diagnostic determinism—continues to ripple through movements, organizations, and friendships.

T-MAPs is one of the tools that made it out of that fiery, beautiful mess.

If you’re trying to figure out how to live in a world that doesn’t make sense…

If you’re supporting someone in your life through crisis or transformation…

If you’re trying to build a culture of honesty and support inside your relationships…

Try making a T-MAP.

Try offering one to someone else.

Try mapping the future from a place that remembers where we’ve been.

This work is not just about crisis planning. It’s about liberation.

It’s about resistance.

It’s about remembering that we get to decide what keeps us well.

In a world that rewards forgetting, T-MAPs help us remember.

Make Your Own T-MAP

Mad Fashion for the Apocalypse:

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I want to be clear: I like reading Freddie deBoer. I find his critiques sharp, often brave, and rooted in lived experience. He’s been public about his diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, and as someone who’s also spent time navigating altered states and psychiatric labels, I see him as an ally in calling out the contradictions in both mainstream psychiatry and the activist responses to it. My hope is that this response doesn’t shut down the conversation, but opens it up—toward more truth, more care, and less shame.

In a series of recent essays, Freddie deBoer calls out what he sees as the commodification of mental disorders—particularly ADHD and autism—into identity brands and consumer products. He critiques mainstream media’s failure to question the social dynamics behind skyrocketing diagnoses and lambasts the performative, often superficial anti-psychiatry stances that circulate in elite cultural spaces. His frustration is palpable, especially when he points to Jane Pratt recommending The Great Pretender in New York Magazine while completely misunderstanding its premise: not a celebration of anti-psychiatry, but a debunking of one of its most famous founding myths.

We at The Icarus Project spent years living in the contradictions deBoer names—acknowledging the harms of psychiatric overreach and medical gatekeeping while also resisting the flattening of complex experiences into aestheticized online personas. Icarus emerged not as a rejection of psychiatry, but as a space to hold multiple truths: that psychiatric meds save lives and also destroy them, that identity can be liberating and limiting, that neurodiversity is real and sometimes disabling, that healing often requires collective frameworks that don’t reduce people to brain chemistry or rebellion.

What Freddie names as “gentrification of disability,” we once called the professionalization of madness: when authentic, messy, and relational experiences get packaged and resold in ways that benefit platforms and personalities more than communities. His critique of media that fails to grapple with nuance lands—but we also see a chance to move beyond just calling bullshit.

The T-MAPs project—Transformative Mutual Aid Practices—was built to shift the paradigm. Instead of diagnosing or labeling, it starts with the question: What keeps you well, and what do you want others to know if you’re struggling? It’s not a product, and it’s not a lifestyle—it’s a practice rooted in mutual care, political resistance, and personal narrative. It doesn’t deny suffering or glamorize it. It makes space for grief, survival, unexplainable states, and the practical needs of navigating the world.

Freddie wants a better discourse. We do too. But rather than dismissing the ADHD TikTokers or neurodivergent zine makers, we invite a third option: one that critiques the market logic and honors lived experience. That holds institutions accountable without scapegoating everyone who finds meaning in a diagnosis. That admits psychiatry is both essential and insufficient.

Dr. Awais Aftab’s recent NYT piece gets closer to this middle ground. It complicates the easy narratives around psychiatric medication, acknowledging both their benefits and their harms. His work, like ours, emerges from a desire for honesty—not ideological purity.

So here's our offering to the conversation: If you’re disillusioned by the mental health industry, if you’re sick of both performative self-diagnosis and top-down clinical arrogance—there’s another way. We’re building it. And we invite you to join us, not just as critics, but as co-creators of a culture that can hold complexity without commodifying it.

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Icarista Fashion for the Apocalypse

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Mad Love

When we founded The Icarus Project in the early 2000s, one of our core principles — though we didn’t always have the language for it — was that people’s experiences with madness, drugs, psychiatry, and healing were multiple and often contradictory. Instead of trying to impose a single narrative, we created a container spacious enough to hold many truths.

We knew from the beginning: psychiatric drugs could be lifesaving and harmful. Some of us owed our survival to medications; some of us had been deeply wounded by them. Some of us needed alternatives to the medical model. Others needed critical access to psychiatric care, especially in the absence of other support systems. Most of us lived somewhere in the complicated, shifting space between.

The Icarus Project didn’t exist to push a party line — pro-medication or anti-medication. We existed to build a culture where people could speak honestly about what worked for them, what didn’t, and what they were still trying to figure out. We challenged the biomedical model not by replacing it with a new orthodoxy, but by insisting on dialogue, complexity, and respect for lived experience.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially after reading Jess McAllen’s 2021 piece in The Baffler about the complicated politics of anti-psychiatry movements and the lingering influence of groups like CCHR. The article highlighted, in part, how hard it is for any critical psychiatry movement to avoid getting trapped in reactionary binaries: you’re either “pro-psychiatry” or you’re part of a fringe cult.

It reminded me of how easily public conversation collapses into sides — and how rare it is to find spaces like the one we tried to cultivate with Icarus, where nuance is possible and contradictions are survivable.

Similarly, platforms like Mad in America have played a crucial role in opening up critiques of the psychiatric system — but they can also feel polarizing at times. The tone of some of the discourse there can lean toward a kind of absolutism that leaves little room for people who live in complicated, ambivalent relationships to psychiatric care.

In contrast, when I was recently interviewed by Psych in the Margins, I reflected on the ways that The Icarus Project wasn’t just about being “for” or “against” psychiatry. It was about something deeper: building spaces for people to find each other across differences in experience, belief, and strategy. It was about refusing the forced choice between loyalty to the system and total rejection of it. It was about collective survival in the face of a world that so often treats us as problems to be solved.

We didn’t always succeed. Sometimes we fumbled. Sometimes we fought. But at our best, Icarus offered a glimpse of what it means to move beyond binary thinking — to honor complexity without collapsing it into false equivalencies or easy slogans.

In a time when so many conversations about mental health get flattened into ideological warfare — when people are either heroes for taking meds or heroes for rejecting them — I’m proud of the messy, spacious legacy we helped to create. I hope the next generation finds ways to keep widening that space, to keep making room for the realness, the contradictions, the hard-won truths that don’t fit neatly into anyone’s program.

That’s the kind of archive I want us to preserve. Not a monument to certainty, but a living record of brave, complicated conversation. Join us!

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(image by Dalia Shevin, who is out there somewhere and so appreciated by me)

More than twenty years ago, my friend Sera jumped off a really tall bridge and committed suicide. She was 23 years old. She was brilliant and badass and fucking beautiful. She was also intensely tormented by her childhood demons like so many of us are. When she died, she broke a lot of people’s hearts.

At the time, I was living in a collective punk house with a bunch of other people from my same subculture. I was 27. After I found out she was dead, I stayed in my room for three days and wrote a story about her called Too Close to the Sun. It was the most intense thing I’d ever written. It was about Sera, but it was really about me—and how I’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, how I’d been suicidal myself, and how I desperately wanted to figure out how to stay alive and live a life worth living.

(from a photocopy of an old newsprint slug & lettuce article - love to you Chris Boarts Larson)

Until Sera took her own life, I’d never talked publicly about my mental health struggles. But her death was a wake-up call. The people in our extended network of activists and artists and weirdos were permissive about all kinds of behavior—recklessness, substance use, political extremity—but if someone was really psychically struggling, they often struggled in silence. Or they ended up using the language of the day—whether it was psychiatry or critical theory—to talk around the pain instead of into it. The result was more confusion, not less.

Sera’s death propelled me, heart first, into one of the most important chapters of my life: organizing with The Icarus Project. By the end of 2002, I was driving across the country by myself, facilitating “radical mental health” workshops in infoshops, collective house kitchens, and people’s living rooms. I had a set of questions I asked and the goal was to get everyone talking to each other.

I made a bunch of new friends, including Jacks McNamara, who ended up co-founding the Icarus community with me. Neither of us had ever done anything like that before, but we were propelled by this idea that if people in our communities had better language to talk about madness—and more trust in one another to hold that pain—then maybe brilliant people like Sera wouldn’t have to die. I still believe that. And I think we saved a lot of lives with the work we did.

One of the things that haunts me about her death is that Sera was living in an activist house with people who were incredibly judgmental and harsh. I’ve had to come to terms with the shaming nature of many leftist spaces—at least the ones I’ve known. There’s often this brittle group-think, this moral purity culture, that excludes people who don’t use the proper language, or who don’t know how to play by the social rules. In my day, so many of the people who came to those scenes looking for safety ended up getting hurt.

Sera was a badass, but she was also really insecure about herself. She was an upper middle class white woman doing solidarity work in economically and socially marginalized communities, and she didn’t always know how to navigate that. She would hide parts of herself that didn’t fit the mold. She internalized a lot of guilt, a lot of shame.

I speak from experience. Me and Sera shared a lot of the same insecurities and vulnerabilities. We both carried around the sense that we had to be perfect to belong. That if people really saw us—our privilege, our brokenness, our contradictions—they wouldn’t love us. And that pressure can be crushing.

Twenty years ago, I didn’t yet have the language to name what was wrong in our activist spaces. I just knew it hurt. I didn’t have the critique I do now: how call-out culture and rigid ideological purity, often disguised as “accountability”, created an atmosphere of surveillance and fear. How instead of building resilient, welcoming communities, we built brittle ones—quick to judge, slow to forgive. Places where complexity and contradiction were liabilities, not inevitable parts of being human.

In a time when authoritarianism is rising all over the world—when fascism is no longer a distant threat but something unfolding in real time—we desperately need movements that are emotionally intelligent, strategically flexible, and spiritually grounded. We need spaces that can hold people as they grow, not cast them out for failing to arrive fully formed. But too often, the left has turned inward, purging itself instead of building power. We’ve lost too many people—not just to suicide, but to burnout, exile, and disillusionment.

I don’t know what Sera would make of the political and cultural turns of the last two decades. I think about that a lot. But if she’d stuck around, she would’ve had the chance to wrestle and evolve like the rest of us. To figure out where she fit. To fight her demons. To age. To change. To love and be loved.

All these years later, it still tears me up that she felt so alone. That she didn’t get to see what came next.

This is a love letter to the ones we lost. A reminder that we can’t afford to shame our visionaries, or discard the complicated ones. Behind the brilliance there’s often pain—and if we want a future worth living in, we have to create cultures where that pain can be spoken, held, and transformed.

We can do better. And we have to.

(from Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness which you can read here)

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Be in touch! We’re still out here!

“To bet against the future on this scale – to bank on your bunker – is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home.”

—Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor

Somehow, we’ve ended up on the timeline where the richest men alive are preparing for the end of the world by building bunkers, launching rockets to Mars, and uploading their minds into machines. Meanwhile, the rest of us are expected to keep working, keep consuming, and keep dying—quietly, preferably.

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor name this moment clearly: end times fascism. It’s not just authoritarianism—it’s the ruling class betting against the survival of our species, choosing acceleration over adaptation, separation over solidarity, death cult over interdependence. And in the face of it, we need something deeper than policy or protest. We need a counter-spell, a lifeline, a memory of what it means to be human.

Daniel Pinchbeck recently resurfaced a chilling excerpt from Peter Thiel’s 1995 manifesto The Diversity Myth, where Thiel attacks the very idea of “interdividuality”—our capacity to know ourselves through connection. He sees it as weakness, a deviation from the rational, competitive ideal. But it’s not weakness. It’s the foundation of human civilization. And his rejection of it is not some abstract libertarian eccentricity—it’s the ideological scaffolding for a world designed by and for the bunker-bound elite.

That’s where the Mad Movement comes in.

More than twenty years ago, in the shadow of 9/11 and the rise of Bush-era imperialism, we wrote a manifesto called “Underground Roots: Visions for Resisting Monoculture and Building Community.” It was published by The Icarus Project, a collective of mad visionaries trying to find language for the truth we were living: that the systems calling us broken were themselves insane. That the world that tried to pathologize our sensitivity, our visions, our rage—was a world already in crisis.

The Monoculture, we said then, was the story that there is only one right way to be. One way to think, to feel, to live. Back then, it looked like strip malls, forced medication, corporate globalization, and cultural sameness. But in 2025, the Monoculture has evolved: it now wears a bunker, calls itself a “freedom city,” and markets apocalypse as a lifestyle brand. It promises safety, but only for the rich and ruthless. It sells “exit” as salvation. It is white supremacist, techno-rapturous, and hell-bent on sacrificing this world for a virtual one.

Madness as a Refusal

What happens when you’re told the world is ending, and your mind refuses to comply?

The Mad Movement—born in the spaces between diagnosis and defiance—has always recognized that madness is not simply an individual breakdown but often a collective response to collective trauma. Hallucinations can be political. Anxiety can be prophetic. Depression can be refusal. The desire to die can be a deep, buried desire to live differently.

In a world this sick, staying sensitive is an act of resistance.

And in that resistance is a kind of blueprint.

What if we didn’t try to return to “normal”? What if we listened to those who’ve never fit, never complied, never numbed out enough to keep going? What if the ones who broke down under capitalism’s weight were not burdens, but guides?

Dangerous Gifts

At the heart of The Icarus Project was a phrase that carried us through countless dark nights:

“We are the people who are told our feelings are too much. We are the people who know that madness is not an illness but a dangerous gift.”

In the face of end times fascism, that gift matters more than ever.

Because what the bunkered billionaires fear most is not just regulation—it’s relationship. It’s feeling. It’s collective aliveness. It’s the inconvenient, messy, uncontrollable web of care that connects all of us to each other and to this burning, blooming planet.

They want to upload their minds to machines. We want to stay here. With our bodies. With each other. With grief, and dreams, and the cracked beauty of real life.

The Mad Movement teaches us how to live in uncertainty. How to make maps for impossible terrain. How to build connection in the middle of disintegration. And how to dream while everything around us collapses.

A Counter-Apocalypse

Klein and Taylor write that we need a better story—not of escape, but of staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.

Madness has always told that story.

It’s the story of people who stayed when everyone else left. Of people who cracked open and saw visions not of escape pods, but of community gardens and grief rituals. Of people who know what it feels like to lose everything, and still choose to live.

It’s time to bring the Mad Movement back into the conversation. Not just as critique, but as compass. We need a movement rooted in the sanctity of “hereness”—of this planet, these bodies, this moment. A movement that dares to believe that healing is possible even when the world feels terminal.

To quote the old Icarus line:

“Sometimes wanting to kill yourself just means you don’t want to live the life you’re living.”

What if that was true not just for individuals—but for civilization itself?

(Icarus Project poster circa 2006)

So let’s say it plainly: we don’t need to be saved by billionaires with bunker keys and Martian fantasies. We need to be saved by each other. By the unruly, ungovernable tenderness of human connection. By the wisdom of those who’ve already walked through fire and kept feeling. By the mad ones who refused the death drive of normalcy and dared to imagine another way. In the face of end times fascism, we need a movement that chooses life—not the sanitized, optimized version sold by Silicon Valley, but the raw, gorgeous, complicated aliveness of being here. Together. Still dreaming. Still fighting. Still alive. Join us.

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Underground Transmissions

This is the Secret Party You've Been Waiting For

We are living through a moment of incredible upheaval. AI, social media, and the flood of digital information are reshaping our world as profoundly as the printing press once did—destabilizing old hierarchies, breaking open long-held narratives, and creating new pathways for resistance and transformation. But alongside this rupture…

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2 years ago · 17 likes · 5 comments · Sascha Altman DuBrul

The Importance of Archives for the Freaks, Weirdos, and Margins of Society

Archives are often thought of as places for preserving the official records of history—the letters of presidents, the meeting minutes of institutions, the artifacts of those deemed important by the dominant culture. But for those of us who have lived at the edges, for the freaks, the weirdos, and the ones who don’t fit into tidy narratives, archives are something else entirely.

For us, archives are survival. They are proof that we were here, that we existed, that we built communities, created meaning, and forged new ways of being when the mainstream world told us we were too much, not enough, or simply invisible. When history tries to erase us, our archives stand as resistance.

The Icarus Project was never just about mental health; it was about reimagining the very idea of what it means to be human in a world that so often pathologizes difference. The stories, zines, flyers, and notes we left behind—like this one from Zach in the 2012 San Francisco Icarus group—are not just artifacts. They are blueprints for the next generation of visionaries, rebels, and seekers trying to find their way.

Building and preserving these archives means creating a lineage, a way for those who come after us to see that they are not alone, that they are part of something bigger. It’s about passing the torch, ensuring that the wisdom, struggles, and brilliance of those on the margins don’t disappear but instead continue to inspire and ignite transformation.

This correspondence got me digging in my inbox and I found some announcements for events at the time:

Hey Bay Area Icarus Peeps -

Come join us for these exciting events:

FRIDAY EVENING:

"Rethinking Madness: Towards a Paradigm Shift in our Understanding and Treatment of Psychosis"
Friday, November 9th, 7:30 -- 9:00 pm
California Institute of Integral Studies
1453 Mission St., SF
Room #304

http://www.rethinkingmadness.com/#/reviews/4558919651

SATURDAY:

Icarus Project Skillshare

12:00pm until 4:30pm

Let's share our knowledge, experiences, and skills! 3 radical mental health workshops facilitated by Bay Area Icarus members, home cooked food (Bring Your Own Bowl!), and Icarus community building! This is the 1st Skills Share in a series...

Workshops include:

1)"Intro to Somatics & Mutual Aid: Connecting With Ourselves and Connecting With Others" (Jacks McNamara)

Somatics offers us ways to come back into our bodies after trauma or oppression and develop new skills in how we interact with the world. In this short introductory workshop, we will explore some exercises that help us inhabit our own bodies and be more present and connected with other people. The skills offered will be useful both for people who experience extreme emotional distress and for those who are in support roles, whether family, friends, or practitioners.

2) "Transformative Mutual Aid Practices, Part 1" (Kathy Rose)
After actively thinking about and practicing wellness and mutual aid, you will leave this workshop with a wellness toolbox and a raised level of individual and group wellness. The goal is for you to have more confidence in handling your own mental health issues as well as the issues of others in your community. The workshop will include a restorative justice healing processes, free writing exercises, partner/group exercises, and physical movement. This is part 1 of a series of TMAP workshops.

3) "Spoken Word Poetry: Dance Your Mind Out Loud" (Liz Green)
We will read and listen to some spoken word poetry, get our creative juices flowing with some writing prompts, share and share alike, and finally go over some pointers for performance.

Where: 165 8th Street, at Natoma between Mission and Howard. Bottom floor (Skills Center classroom 1). Orange door.

We are creating a language of radical diversity that spits out the old language and reconfigures it into something beautiful and visionary and destined to explode in brilliant colors onto the cultural landscape. http://theicarusproject.net/blog/scatter

Keep the writing and art coming, it’s great to be in touch!

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And now a message from 2025:

Upcoming Workshop:

Building Strong Connections with T-MAPs

Facilitated by Sascha DuBrul, community activist and co-founder of The Icarus Project.

Sunday, March 30, 2025

10am - 12pm PST / 1pm-3pm EST

T-MAPs (Transformative Mutual Aid Practices) is a set of tools that grew directly out of the The Icarus Project.

The T-MAPs workshop is for anyone who wants to:

• Gain clarity on their mental health and emotional support needs

• Learn how to create a personal guide for themselves and their community

• Explore collective care beyond the conventional mental health system

Expect awareness exercises, journaling, small group discussions, and practical tools utilizing Internal Family Systems and transformative peer support models.

This is a free/sliding scale ($0-$40) workshop:

📅 Sunday, March 30th
⏰ 10am-12pm PST | 1pm-3pm EST
💻 Online via Zoom
💰 Sliding Scale: $0 - $40

Register for T-MAPs Here

Hey!

You’re seeing this because at some point in the last 20 years you and I have connected over radical mental health advocacy, movement building, mutual aid, or surviving in a world that doesn’t make space for the mad ones. Whatever brought you here, welcome! It’s time to reignite the conversation.

The Icarus Project Archive: Living History & New Beginnings

The Icarus Project was a movement, a language, and a network of people pushing the limits of the mental health system. It was a space to tell our stories, define who we are, and create something outside the pathologizing medical model. It recognized our struggles, visions, and extremes as wisdom. If you want to learn more, check out this Retrospective of the Icarus Project video.

The Icarus Project Archive is preserving the zines, writings, and history of the movement. We’re also prompting new conversations about what radical mental health means now, to learn from the past and start something new.

Visit The Icarus Project Archive

Subscribe to the Icarus Archive Substack

📢 What’s Inside?

This Substack as a place to reflect, document, and dream. You will find:

✅ Essays on the legacy of radical mental health and how we’ll build something meaningful now.
✅ Guest columns from those thinking critically about madness, peer support, and collective care. (you’re invited—more on that below!)
✅ Archival materials—bringing Icarus history to life in new ways.

Recent substack posts:

📺 Mental Health at a Crossroads: The Icarus Project and a New Vision for a Fractured World
🎥 Video Retrospective of the Icarus Project: Lessons for Contemporary Mental Health Movements
📝 Loneliness and the Mirage of Peer Support: A Call for Collective Re-Vision

If you want to get the most out of the Icarus Project archive join us on Substack where you can connect with others, comment and be a part of the growing community.

Join us on Substack

Upcoming Workshop:

Building Strong Connections with T-MAPs

Facilitated by Sascha DuBrul, community activist and co-founder of The Icarus Project.

Sunday, March 30, 2025

10am - 12pm PST / 1pm-3pm EST

T-MAPs (Transformative Mutual Aid Practices) is a set of tools that grew directly out of the The Icarus Project.

The T-MAPs workshop is for anyone who wants to:

• Gain clarity on their mental health and emotional support needs

• Learn how to create a personal guide for themselves and their community

• Explore collective care beyond the conventional mental health system

Expect awareness exercises, journaling, small group discussions, and practical tools utilizing Internal Family Systems and transformative peer support models.

This is a free/sliding scale ($0-$40) workshop:

📅 Sunday, March 30th
⏰ 10am-12pm PST | 1pm-3pm EST
💻 Online via Zoom
💰 Sliding Scale: $0 - $40

Register for T-MAPs Here

✍️ Want to Write a Guest Column or Share Your Story?

We’re designing this space to learn from each other. If you have a reflection on the intersections of mental health and political struggle, or a powerful mental health experience you’d like to share, get in touch and tell us more! We’re also starting a related podcast about the intersection between mental health, politics and the arts. Learn more about it here.

📩 To be in touch about contributing reply to this email or reach out here:

🖤 Support the Work (and Get a T-Shirt!)

This project is a labor of love, and if you want to support the archive, there are a few ways to do that:

Make Your Tax-Deductible Donation Here

The Icarus Project Archive is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions for the charitable purposes of The Icarus Project Archive must be made payable to “Fractured Atlas” only and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.

👕 Buy an Icarus Project T-Shirt and Check out the Icarus Archive Shop

Rock the history, support the future.

Check Out The Icarus Archive Shop!

Buy an Icarus Project T-Shirt

Buy a Mad Love Hat

Let’s Keep the Conversation Going

Everything is shifting right now. As authoritarian governance rises, public services collapse, and digital technologies redefine the way we interact with the world, we are being forced to rethink mental health from the ground up. Some see this moment as a crisis. We also see it as an opportunity.

The Icarus Project Archive is about creating new pathways forward. Mental health movements are at a crossroads—institutions are failing, institutional peer support has been co-opted, and the need for creative alternatives has never been greater.

Icarus was just the beginning. Let’s go further now.

So hit subscribe, and if there’s someone in your life who should be here, please share the message.

With gratitude & solidarity,
Sascha Altman DuBrul, co-founder of The Icarus Project

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• Thanks to the Ittleson Foundation for the 2025-6 funding.

• Thanks to the Institute for the Development of Human Arts for constant inspiration and camaraderie since 2017.

• Thanks to ISPS-US for the strategic partnerships.

• Thanks to Brooke West from Mad Yoga Network for admin support

• Thanks to David Nishizaki and Chad Nelson for holding down the tech end in this dystopic cyberpunk clusterfuck of a time to be organizing in the mad movement.

• Thanks to all the past Icarus Project members and staff from the discussion boards to the old Drupal site to the local groups all over the world. Let’s reconnect and keep building. The world needs us right now. Be in touch!
  

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“The Icarus Project envisions a new culture and language that resonates with our actual experiences of ’mental illness’ rather than trying to fit our lives into a conventional framework. We are a network of people living with and/or affected by experiences that are often diagnosed and labeled as psychiatric conditions. We believe these experiences are dangerous gifts needing cultivation and care, rather than diseases or disorders. By joining together as individuals and as a community, the intertwined threads of madness, creativity, and collaboration can inspire hope and transformation in an oppressive and damaged world. Participation in The Icarus Project helps us overcome alienation and tap into the true potential that lies between brilliance and madness.”

—The Icarus Project Vision Statement, 2005

For over two decades, The Icarus Project called for a radical rethinking of mental health—one that moved beyond both the rigid medical model and the dangerous pull of reactionary dismissal. We framed madness as a Dangerous Gift, something that could be cultivated and navigated, rather than simply managed or medicated. We built a movement around the idea that distress isn’t just a personal failing or a brain disorder, but something deeply intertwined with history, power, and oppression. And yet, in the years since, the landscape has shifted, and the crisis of meaning in mental health has only deepened.

The debate today feels like a dead end. On one side, the mainstream medical model continues its relentless march, pathologizing every form of human difference, offering diagnosis as identity, and fueling an industry that profits from keeping people in cycles of treatment. On the other, a growing reactionary backlash seeks to dismantle the entire conversation—dismissing mental illness as weakness, blaming individuals for their struggles, and weaponizing the language of self-reliance to justify cruelty. Neither of these paths will lead us to where we need to go.

What we need is a new way forward—one that does not simply manage distress, but transforms the conditions that create it. A vision of mental health that is neither about reducing people to their diagnoses nor forcing them to endure suffering in silence. A framework that understands madness and distress as inherently political, relational, and deeply human—not just problems to be fixed, but signals that something is deeply wrong in the world around us.

A Crossroads: The Fight for Meaning in Mental Health

The rise of diagnosis as identity—something we saw growing even in the early Icarus days—has now fully taken hold in popular culture. For many, labels like ADHD, autism, complex PTSD, and gender dysphoria have become more than medical terms; they have become the primary way people make sense of themselves. This is not an accident. In a world that is increasingly unstable—where old structures of meaning like religion, community, and economic security have collapsed—diagnosis offers something solid. It gives people a name for their suffering, a community, and, in some cases, legal and institutional protections. But there is a fine line between a diagnosis that liberates and one that traps.

As we wrote in Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness:

“We see ourselves as part of a long legacy of rebellious thinkers and artists who have struggled with their mental health, and we refuse to let our visions and our pain be dismissed as mere symptoms of illness.”

But in the years since we first wrote those words, something has shifted. The liberatory potential of naming our struggles has become, in many spaces, a kind of cage. Some people feel locked into their diagnoses, unable to imagine themselves outside of them. Others feel pressured to adopt new labels just to have their suffering recognized at all. And in response, critics like Dr. Holger Richter—who represent a growing movement of reactionary thinkers akin to Jordan Peterson—are seizing the moment to attack the entire foundation of mental health as a legitimate concern.

Their critique is flawed, but it resonates. They argue that therapy culture has become an engine of self-obsession, that mental illness is being overdiagnosed, and that the left has embraced victimhood in place of resilience. And while much of their rhetoric is dangerous—often laced with misogyny, ableism, and a deep hostility toward anything that challenges traditional hierarchies—they are tapping into a real frustration. The mainstream mental health system is not working. The question is: Who will shape the alternative?

Reclaiming the Vision: A Third Way Forward

The Icarus Project was always about finding another way—a path that rejected both the cold logic of psychiatric labels and the gaslighting of people told they just need to “toughen up.” We insisted that madness exists within a social and political context, and that mental health is not just about individual survival but about collective transformation. That vision is more urgent now than ever.

So what does a truly radical approach to mental health look like in this moment?

1. Mental distress is real, but it is not just a personal issue. It is shaped by capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, climate crisis, and systemic abandonment. Any vision of mental health that does not engage with these forces is incomplete.

2. Diagnosis is a tool, not an identity. It can help us understand ourselves, but it should never replace the deeper work of transformation and connection.

3. Mental health is relational. We are not isolated brains with chemical imbalances; we are part of systems—families, communities, movements. Healing happens between us, not just inside us.

4. We must resist both medicalization and reactionary backlash. We refuse to be reduced to brain chemistry, but we also refuse to accept the right-wing narrative that suffering is weakness. We need models of care that go beyond both psychiatric bureaucracy and self-help individualism.

5. Liberation is the goal. Mental health is not just about symptom management—it is about creating the conditions for human flourishing. This means fighting for housing, for healthcare, for economic justice, for spaces where people can be fully themselves.

The Icarus Project was never just about survival—it was about transformation. About seeing madness not as an obstacle, but as a portal to deeper understanding, deeper resistance, and deeper connection. That vision is still alive. It is alive in Underground Transmissions, in radical peer support spaces, in abolitionist mental health movements, in every person who refuses to accept the false choices we are being handed.

So if you, too, feel trapped between the diagnosis wars—if you are searching for something beyond the tired debates—know this: another world is possible. Another way of understanding what it means to be human is possible. And it is up to us to build it.

Revisit the Icarus Project Archive and explore our past work: Icarus Project Archive

Follow the conversation and be part of the next chapter: Underground Transmissions

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Nearly twenty years ago, we wrote the introduction to Friends Make the Best Medicine, a publication from The Icarus Project. The piece, titled Underground Roots, was a rallying cry—a manifesto for resisting monoculture, for building communities outside the rigid structures of psychiatry and capitalist society. It felt powerful then. It still feels powerful now. But rereading it in 2025, I find myself grappling with the ways the world has changed—and the ways it has stayed the same.

The metaphors we used back then—the wild forest, the underground roots, the resistance to monoculture—still resonate deeply with me. But I also recognize that the language of “monoculture” has been co-opted in ways I never could have predicted. Today, the term is often wielded by right-wing populists to attack globalization and diversity, turning a critique of corporate sameness into a weapon against cultural exchange and progressive values. When I wrote about monoculture, I was thinking about corporate hegemony, about the way capitalism flattens difference, about the way mental health systems impose narrow definitions of what it means to be sane and functional. But in 2025, I have to ask: is there a better metaphor? One that captures not just uniformity, but extraction, exploitation, and the way our inner lives have been turned into commodities?

Back then, we were fighting against a psychiatric system that pathologized difference, that saw emotional intensity as disorder, that framed suffering as a personal defect rather than a social and political issue. That fight is still ongoing. But in the years since, the conversation around mental health has exploded into the mainstream. And while some of that shift has been positive, much of it has been absorbed by the very forces we were resisting. Therapy apps, influencer-driven self-help, the commercialization of “mental wellness” have turned radical critique into another marketable product. What happens when the language of healing gets flattened into the language of branding? When “self-care” becomes just another way to optimize productivity?

And then there’s the political landscape. In 2006, the dominant forces we were fighting were neoliberalism, corporate psychiatry, and the commodification of madness. Today, the threat isn’t just coming from those forces—it’s also coming from reactionary movements that reject science altogether, that weaponize mental health discourse in the service of conspiracy theories and authoritarian control. I never could have imagined that critiques of psychiatry would be co-opted by the same anti-science populists who deny climate change and push medical misinformation. How do we resist psychiatry’s harms while still defending the legitimacy of science, of medicine, of care? How do we hold institutions accountable without feeding into reactionary narratives that ultimately harm the most vulnerable among us?

And yet, so much of what I wrote back then still holds up. The vision of human minds as wild, tangled forests instead of neatly contained boxes. The insistence that there is no single model for a mind, no universal standard for sanity. The recognition that those of us who have been called crazy, broken, or too much are often the ones who see the cracks in the world most clearly. That we need each other. That we need new languages, new metaphors, new ways of holding our experiences.

So I’m sharing the original piece here, unedited, as a document of where we were—and as a jumping-off point for where we go next. I invite you to read it with me, to reflect on what still resonates, and to think about what needs reimagining for the world we live in now.

Because if there’s one thing I know, it’s that the work isn’t finished. It never is.

Underground Roots: Visions for Resisting Monoculture and Building Community

You can see it all from the highway: enormous monocrops of identical corn plants that reach for miles bordered by an endless sea of strip malls, parking lots, and tract housing. You can see it on our kitchen counters and in our classrooms: the same can of soda on the table in Cairo and Kentucky, the same definitions of ‘progress’ and ‘freedom’ in textbooks around the world. Monoculture — the practice of replicating a single plant, product or idea over a huge area — is about the most unstable, unsustainable, unimaginative form of organization that exists, but in the short term it keeps the system running smoothly and keeps the power in the hands of a small number of people.

In the logic of our modern world, whether it’s in the farmer’s field or in the high school classroom, diversity is inefficient and hard to manage. Powerful people figured out awhile time ago that it’s a lot easier to control things if everyone’s eating the same foods, listening to the same music, reading the same books, watching the same TV shows, and speaking the same language. This is what we call the monocult, and while everyone is supposedly more and more connected by this new “global culture,” we’re more and more isolated from each other. Things feel more and more empty, and so many of us end up lonely and rootless, wondering why everything feels so wrong.

Out in the wild things are very different. In old forests everything is connected, from the moss and lichens to the ferns and brambles to the birds and beetles. In our human minds we separate all the parts of the forest into separate pieces when a lot of the time it can be more helpful to view the forest as one giant organism with separate parts all working together. The trees of a forest intertwine their roots and actually communicate with each other underground. You see it most visibly along ravines and creek beds where a cut-away hillside reveals totally asymmetrical tangle of roots that no scientist could ever have imagined or planned out with all his laws of physics. Something in that tangle explains how those trees can lean out at all kinds of gravity-defying angles and hang their necks into the strongest winds and still survive, bending but not breaking, adapting with unpredictable curves and angles to the way the world breathes and shines and rains and burns. Concrete can’t do that. There are a lot of lessons to be learned from the way life evolves and gets stronger in the wild. Something about the living architecture of chaos and time, multi-tiered forests and microscopic algae, outlasts any of the straight lines and square institutions we’re told to believe in.

We believe that people do not belong in grids and boxes of rootless lonely monocultures. Humans are adaptable creatures, and while a lot of people learn to adapt, some of us can’t handle the modern world no matter how many psych drugs or years of school or behavior modification programs we’ve been put through. Any realistic model of mental health has to begin by accepting that there is no standard model for a mind and that none of us are single units designed for convenience and efficiency. No matter how alienated you are by the world around you, no matter how out of step or depressed and disconnected you might feel: you are not alone. Your life is supported by the lives of countless other beings, from the microbes in your eyelashes to the men who paved your street. The world is so much more complicated and beautiful than it appears on the surface. There are so many of us out here who feel the world with thin skin and heavy hearts, who get called crazy because we’re too full of fire and pain, who know that other worlds exist and aren’t comfortable in this version of reality. We’ve been busting up out of sidewalks and blooming all kind of misfit flowers for as long as people have been walking on this Earth. So many of us have access to secret layers of consciousness — you could think of us like dandelion roots that gather minerals from hidden layers of the soil that other plants don’t reach. If we’re lucky we share them with everyone on the surface – because we feel things stronger than the other people around us, a lot of us have visions about how things could be different, why they need to be different, and it’s painful to keep them silent. Sometimes we get called sick and sometimes we get called sacred, but no matter how they name us we are a vital part of making this planet whole.

It’s time we connect our underground roots and tell our buried stories, grow up strong and scatter our visions all over the patches of scarred and damaged soil in a society that is so desperately in need of change.

Language is a place to begin. Words can be powerful seeds. The medical authorities offer us all kinds of words to talk about ourselves and the troubles we have, words like “depression” and “psychosis.” Sometimes these words help us look back on our lives with a new way of understanding what the hell was going on, but too often these words end up putting us in sad, separate boxes where we feel like there’s something wrong with us and we can’t connect to anyone else. Language is powerful. It can open the world up like sunrise and it can block out the sky like prison walls. Language is Magic.

Back in the days before mass media, techno culture, and fluorescent light - when it got dark at night and people sat around fires and told stories or sat alone and wrote by candlelight – there was a respect for the spoken and written word, for the story, for myths passed down through generations and adapted through time. Whether we realize it or not we cast spells with our words.

These days we’re supposed to believe science has explained away any need for supernatural powers, but spells are being cast around us constantly: spells are in the billboards whose messages eat their way into our minds; they’re in the television’s hypnotic glare making us forget our own dreams and replacing them with infomercials advertising convenience and apocalypse; they’re in the books explaining one side of history at school and in the pop-up windows overtaking our computer screens.

We have other people’s language in our heads and on our tongues. Words like “disorder” and “disease” offer us one set of metaphors for understanding the way it feels to experience our lives through our particularly volatile minds and souls, but it is such a limited view. Metaphors are very powerful. We think in language, constantly filtering all our perceptions through the available structures of words and metaphors in our brain - in many senses the available metaphors create our reality.

Looking around these days it’s pretty clear we are experiencing a serious lack of imagination. It’s like we’re under the spell of the Monocult – a spell of numbed out distraction from the fact that things could be so much better and beautiful. The spell controls how we articulate our dreams and understand our bodies and minds. It controls how we feel about ourselves and whether we connect with other people. It leaves us with strange words in our mouths and on our tongues and horrible catchy commercial jingles and stereotypes about our neighbors implanted in our minds.

Perhaps if we can change the metaphors that shape our minds, we can change the reality around us. We need to start talking and networking – finding common ground and common language with the other people around us. We need to get together in groups and find language for our stories that make sense to us and leave us feeling good about ourselves. Unlearn social conditioning about what it means to be ‘sick’ and ‘healthy’.

We need to reclaim our dreams and scheme up ways to make them happen. We need to share everything we’ve figured out about how to be a human being. We need to love ourselves as we are — crooked and intense, powerful and frightening, unruly and prone to mess around in the dirt — and understand that weeds are simply plants who refuse to be domesticated and displayed. We need to write new maps of the universes we share in common and find ways to heal together. We need to summon up everything we’ve got to create social webs and lasting support networks for ourselves and the people who will follow us.

Think of this manual in your hands as a book of magic spells. It could help you conjure up the world you want to see. We’ve outlined a bunch of ideas gathered from all over the place, pulled up from the underground layers of our culture and consciousness. We hope they spark you to start talking, yelling, screaming, dancing, making art, and collaborating on changing the world around you. We hope you make it a little less gray and lonely and cold. We hope you teach people about all the plants in the garden, not just the ones that are in books. We hope you find words for all the pieces of you, even the jagged ones full of scars, and we hope you can put them together with the community around you and discover that you are not actually alone.

There are so many of us out here and we’re waiting for you to join us in all your crooked beauty and madness.

The Icarus Project 2006

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We are living through a moment of profound crisis when it comes to youth mental health. Suicide rates among young people have surged to unprecedented levels, particularly among marginalized youth. The public mental health system—already strained, underfunded, and inaccessible—has proven itself fundamentally incapable of responding to the scale of this emergency.

The dominant model of intervention is failing. Young people in distress are funneled into a labyrinthine system of referrals, waiting lists, and gatekeeping, where access to care is often a privilege rather than a right. Even when they do have therapists, many youth hesitate to disclose suicidality, fearing loss of autonomy, forced hospitalization, or being treated as a liability rather than a person in pain. The system isn’t built to meet them where they are—it demands that they enter it on its terms, if they can even get through the door.

Against this backdrop, public health educators and organizers are asking: What would it look like to support young people outside of the failing system? How do we meet them where they actually are— in schools, community spaces, peer networks—rather than forcing them to navigate institutions that were never designed for their liberation?

Crisis Planning as a Radical Alternative

One promising intervention comes from Meeting Our Moment: Facilitating Suicide Prevention Workshops for Youth in School and Community Settings, a toolkit developed to train public health workers, educators, and peers in a community-based, non-clinical approach to suicide prevention. Rather than relying solely on referrals to professionals, this model offers crisis planning workshops—collaborative spaces where young people develop their own safety plans, learn coping strategies, and gain tools for navigating distress on their own terms.

The brilliance of this approach is that it de-professionalizes crisis support. It recognizes that mental health care should not be gatekept by a system that so often fails the most vulnerable. Instead, it draws on the lineage of radical mental health movements, including the Icarus Project, Mad Maps workshops, WRAP (Wellness Recovery Action Plans), T-MAPs (Transformative Mutual Aid Practices), and other peer-led efforts to reclaim support from the institutions that have pathologized and criminalized distress.

The author of Meeting Our Moment has spoken about how these radical models, particularly the Icarus Project’s approach to deprofessionalizing care, helped shape their thinking. Inspired by the ways Icarus framed mental health as something that could be held collectively rather than solely within clinical spaces, they see crisis planning as a natural extension of that ethos—giving people tools to support each other without requiring permission from an often inaccessible and alienating system. They emphasize that crisis planning—originally rooted in peer-led and community-based models—has become overly professionalized, despite being something that friends and organizers have done informally for years.

Rather than treating suicidality as a condition only to be handled by specialists, this approach empowers communities to engage in these conversations openly, offering tools without judgment, coercion, or loss of autonomy. This work is about breaking the silence around suicide—not by shuttling people into an inaccessible system, but by creating spaces where they can talk about their experiences honestly, with peers who recognize the complexity of distress and healing.experiences honestly, without fear of coercion, judgment, or loss of autonomy.

A System in Crisis, A Movement in Response

For years, mainstream public health approaches have treated suicide prevention as a matter of directing young people to professionals. But the numbers speak for themselves: this system isn’t working. As Anole points out:

• 1 in 5 high school-aged youth seriously considered suicide in the past year.

• Young people at the highest risk of suicide access mental health care at the same rate as those who die in car accidents—meaning the system isn’t meaningfully intervening.

• Many youth don’t disclose suicidality to their therapists, but they do disclose to peers—who are rarely given the tools to respond effectively.

These numbers don’t just signal a crisis in youth mental health; they expose the structural incompatibility of the existing system with how people actually access care—if they access care at all.

This moment calls for a radical shift. The work happening through projects like Meeting Our Moment represents that shift:

• Instead of treating suicidality as an individual pathology, it recognizes it as a public health issue requiring systemic solutions.

• Instead of reinforcing stigma, it normalizes conversations about deep emotional pain.

• Instead of gatekeeping support, it democratizes access to life-saving tools.

The Future of Radical Mental Health

In many ways, this moment echoes what led to the creation of the Icarus Project two decades ago—a recognition that traditional mental health models were failing, and that the most powerful tools often came from peer networks, community spaces, and grassroots organizing rather than clinical institutions.

And just as Icarus created a new paradigm for talking about madness and distress, this generation of organizers and educators is building on that legacy—expanding the framework, making it more accessible, and embedding it in public health education.

I find myself deeply inspired by this work. It reminds me why I started the Icarus Project in the first place, and why I continue to believe that radical, community-based approaches to mental health are essential. This isn’t just about theory; it’s about survival. And as the youth mental health crisis deepens, it’s clearer than ever that we cannot wait for the system to change itself—we have to build the alternatives ourselves.

To Anole, and to everyone out there doing this work: I see you, I applaud you, and I want to be part of creating more of this in the world. Let’s keep building.

If you want to learn more about the work happening through Meeting Our Moment, you can check out their booklet here.

And if this kind of work resonates with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Let’s talk about how we can expand these models, connect with each other, and create the radical mental health support systems we actually need.

With solidarity and appreciation,

Sascha

https://site.icarusprojectarchive.org/scraps/a-note-about-our-politics

“A Note About Our Politics
This website was created by people who are not only diagnosed with mental health labels such as "bipolar disorder," but who also have a radical view of how this society should be dismantled and recreated. We come out of a long tradition of solidarity among the oppressed of the world, and we are driven to working towards real live justice for all people. We firmly believe that for true healing to be possible we must work both on transforming ourselves and transforming the world around us. We do not ask that any Icarus Project member have any particular political affiliation or lifestyle choice, but we do insist that you respect the sometimes controversial and frequently pretty radical and anti-authoritarian discussions that unfold on this site regularly around topics like race, class, politics, capitalism, gender, the pharmaceutical industry, and much much more. If you want to talk about mental health as if it exists in a socio-political vacuum, this may not be the site for you, or you may find it wise to stay out of politically charged threads that make you uncomfortable. Check out our Mission statement here: https://site.icarusprojectarchive.org/about-us/icarus-project-mission-statement”