Discussion intro to a bridge to others out there

[hans0solo]

This is my first post. So any feedback is welcome. Hopefully this will not be taken too badly, but I did join because of the recent NYT article. My reasons are because I have had experiences with places that deal with mental health in unconventional ways. And found movements that are having similar thoughts about the topics of mental health/mental illness/psychiatry: that its not 'fit for purpose' and fails people. I saw many posts here that talk about the idea of 'looking for help' and having been failed when they attempt to find help. The groups I am involved with seek to take the voices of people who are not being heard and listen to them and get the system to include them. And to develop their own group to find support. Many of them want to allow people to talk about self harm/self injury/substance use/suicide without having to worry about being sectioned/baker-acted/etc. My first introduction to this was 15 years ago in an IRC chat called 'bodies under siege' which seems to be discord now.(https://thebuschat.org/). After that I joined the Icarus project forums (which lasted till 2013). They had discussion outside of the mainstream like dealing with meth, sex work, self-harm, dealing with extreme states, voice hearing. They moved to Facebook in 2014 and the conversations because less about that and more on meds and labels. and in the next 4 years, they got nearly banned because of topics like suicide or random members reporting on those types of messages even though it was against guidelines. They changed to fireweed collective and I left the group. I am also involved with the consumer/survivor/ex-patient movement, mad right movement, anti-psychiatry, critical psychiatry movement, disability rights movement. They all have different takes on things. A group called 'alternatives to suicide' (alt2su) was created by people looking for support for the topic of suicide for people who experience those thoughts without police involvement. https://www.communitypsychology.com/new-approach-to-suicide/ They found that the best way to support people not dying was to give them a space for connection among similar people IRL spaces. They might have virtual spaces now as well. One other point is that many of these group also see how the mainstream mental health system has only room for those who fit their model and find that support useful. They don't want to hear anyone complain. And access to talk therapy is limited to the few. And people don't want to hear that your last hospital stay was a few thousand dollars that you don't want to pay for it or that you rather keep your apartment and cat fed than go inpatient. any way. hope to talk more later.

 

[noaccount]

Hi there @hans0solo .

The non-fbook old-school Icarus Project forums actually did persist past 2013, but I think maybe the front page stopped linking to them, I'm sorry if you got cut off from them and couldn't find non-fbook support after that, I've never really used Fbook myself. I still kept using their non-fbook discussion forums into 2014, 2015, but then one moderator's close friend was abusing me and I didn't really feel safe there anymore. But the forums still existed.

The people who call themselves the "Fireweed Collective" really fucked over the people running the discussion-forum community (and local in-person support groups that overlapped with it), hijacked the site, stole credit for our work so they could get more grant money, and finally destroyed the forums in like 2018 I believe. The Mayfirst social justice people salvaged and archived some of the forum content on their servers so it's still readable - which I'm really grateful for because god that was years and years of community-building and co-research and outsider art on there - but it's just an archive, not an active site anymore.

Good to meet a fellow refugee in these parts.

 

[hans0solo]

Well yeah, they did move the forums for awhile. people pleaded to save it. But it wasn't worth their trouble because they wanted to removed any trace of the old guard. Fireweed is 'healing justice' and not 'mad pride'. Its not what I signed up for. I have used the internet archive to find a post from there if I am motivated. Sascha made a site for 'mad maps' 2.0 called tmaps because 'icarus' didn't want anyone to use 'mad maps'. I could never learn who the leadership was and they didn't want to talk to me. Sascha and others thought the site was useful at least to the old guard but the new folks (most who didn't know about it) didn't seem to want to spend the money or give up control. welcome to the non-profit industrial complex.

 

[uienringptr]

group called 'alternatives to suicide' (alt2su)

Bro, thank you for bringing this up. I've never heard of this before and I read the article in the link you posted and it was very enlightening. It's comforting too, I think. It was really lonely and stressful to think that the only acceptable treatment for suicidal thoughts was risk assessment and hospitalization. It gives me a bit of hope that maybe some of society will understand how to handle suicide without judgement someday.

 

[hans0solo]

yeah. Us who deal with this crap decided to make a space that didn't involve handcuffs and being locked up. It part of a movement to create alternatives to the current model. Its still a long road. We realized that even if people die at some point, as a result of sui, most of us just want someone to listen and help us deal with our thoughts. and most of the time, that means we live a little longer.

 

[noaccount]

Well yeah, they did move the forums for awhile. people pleaded to save it. But it wasn't worth their trouble because they wanted to removed any trace of the old guard. Fireweed is 'healing justice' and not 'mad pride'. Its not what I signed up for. I have used the internet archive to find a post from there if I am motivated. Sascha made a site for 'mad maps' 2.0 called tmaps because 'icarus' didn't want anyone to use 'mad maps'. I could never learn who the leadership was and they didn't want to talk to me. Sascha and others thought the site was useful at least to the old guard but the new folks (most who didn't know about it) didn't seem to want to spend the money or give up control. welcome to the non-profit industrial complex.

Yeah it was awful. :(
But it didn't happen until like 2018, not 2013.
There's internet archive plus the parts Mayfirst archived. It's a horrible shame so much was lost.
Agustina Vidal was one of the main people who stole all the credit from the rest of the community in the name of the "Fireweed" founding clique, but Sascha worked quite closely with her in doing so. Sascha has also just consistently been really exploitative to women generally and called them delusional whenever they disagree with him.

I have been to some Alt 2 Su groups and they have been a nice lifeline at times. Definitely recommend them and Hearing Voices groups to people who want to talk to each other without clinicians or mandated reporters getting in the way.

 

[hans0solo]

Some like myself eventually realized Vidal was not the person to take over the project. It was suggested she used her position to silence criticism and didn't recognize her white-passing privledge. She was interested in power in the NPIC. It initially seemed hopeful to suggest the project was adding intersectionality based upon its lack in the forums. The project trained a batch of new people to power that effort. But then they disappeared. And other past Icarus project people left. And now instead the project became focused on webinars, fundraising and QTPOC support groups. Not necessarily bad but nothing like the past efforts. As I have talked to people, Mr. DuBrul has had this pattern maybe 30 yrs but I guess his associates didn't speak up or felt they wouldn't be believed. There was some attempt to gain accountability between Vidal and him but it didn't go well. I have found many 'leaders' connected to this universe are not worth listening to. Unless you want to hear white, middle class, mostly cisgender people talk about trauma and self-care. I prefer crip wisdom.
I appreciate alt2su and HVN groups as valuable alternatives.

 

[noaccount]

Some like myself eventually realized Vidal was not the person to take over the project. It was suggested she used her position to silence criticism and didn't recognize her white-passing privledge. She was interested in power in the NPIC. It initially seemed hopeful to suggest the project was adding intersectionality based upon its lack in the forums. The project trained a batch of new people to power that effort. But then they disappeared. And other past Icarus project people left. And now instead the project became focused on webinars, fundraising and QTPOC support groups. Not necessarily bad but nothing like the past efforts. As I have talked to people, Mr. DuBrul has had this pattern maybe 30 yrs but I guess his associates didn't speak up or felt they wouldn't be believed. There was some attempt to gain accountability between Vidal and him but it didn't go well. I have found many 'leaders' connected to this universe are not worth listening to. Unless you want to hear white, middle class, mostly cisgender people talk about trauma and self-care. I prefer crip wisdom.
I appreciate alt2su and HVN groups as valuable alternatives.

What? What do you mean by lack of intersectionality on the forums? There was always a lot of trans and queer and people of color writing there, and analysis of how our struggles intersected with broader anti-capitalism, queer liberation, disability justice, etc... I'm just curious what you're referring to when you say this.

 

[hans0solo]

There was a lot of writing I never saw. I guess I never got a chance to see it. I never got a change to know people. By the time I got there, it was more a graveyard, than an active community. I only heard that there was a lot of harm being done by someone? A lot of sexism? I can't say for sure. But after some kind of confrontation IRL? by women in the collective to the males, it was somehow transferred out to Agustina, Maryse and other people I guess. And off they went to facebook. And then the big 'intersectionality' push and to make it QTPOC lead. When it went to FB, it seemed all the activism left... and it became people talking about diagnosis and pills. I wanted someone to bring back the activism. About every 100 posts, maybe 1 was from a POC person. And the uninformed would do harm and then deal with white fragility and then end up booted off by Agustina. I asked if they could limit membership to people who know something of white supremacy but they didn't want to. If the cool things you mention happened, then that really sucks that that was remove and more reason to dislike the current efforts. There are people like myself who would want an icarus forum 2.0 -- a place off facebook. Not sure how to bring people there. Any place that is not about active rescue. fireweed (the last I was there) was an unsupported project (Agustina never allowed anyone else to moderate the 10,000 people there except her). It is seperate from any other effort and has no say in how things are run.

 

[noaccount]

I only heard that there was a lot of harm being done by someone? A lot of sexism?

Yeah that... was by Sascha.
This history is all wrong.
The women's collective confronted him and others about that... years and YEARS before the coup.
And then the forums had largely a really good absence of founders-syndrome for a long time due to Sascha just fucking off and abandoning it which was the best thing that could have happened and harm-reduction and mutual-aid focused people stepped up as moderators or admins.
Then Sascha and Agustina Vidal came back and worked very closely together doing their "saviorism" schtick claiming they were going to "save" everyone from a NON-EXISTENT "lack of diversity" through... tokenizing non-profitization. There was no dissent by Agustina against Sascha's misogyny.

it was more a graveyard, than an active community.

Did.... did Sascha tell you this? Because he was literally such an egomaniacal narcissist that he pretty much said that in those exact words that the "community without him was a ghost town." The community without him was a fucking diverse and radical and vibrant thing. He said that to erase anything outside of his control.
There was literally a "place off facebook" until 2019, I just checked the archives.

 

[hans0solo]

well you brought back my recollection of that time. I had at some point learned about 'founders syndrome' and my interest in him as part of the group started to sour. and agustina more despised, the more I got a big picture of how she acted and treated people. I'm sorry if I didn't get a chance to meet more of the cool people who were lurking in the background because I was listening to him. He now has a female partner and twins and he uses the same viewpoint of his life as the focus of the universe. He seems to have a millions friends who he regularly taps for advice about soup to nuts. It was reported Agustina got upset when he was paying Maryse in that era. drama lama lama. I tried to reach out to other chapters near the end but they were allowed to disintegrate.