Recovery Project community

Welcome!

Whatever your reason for approaching this manual, on behalf of the RECOVER Project community—past, present, and future—I welcome you. This is an exciting time to be a part of the peer recovery movement. Since beginning my work as the Director of the RECOVER Project, I have witnessed tremendous expansion in this grass-roots movement growing up around us. As you approach this manual, please know that this work of peer recovery is at once radical and revolutionary. We are all pioneers, building this movement as we go. Imagine, a resource center developed and designed by people in recovery for people in recovery, a storefront space on a main street, easily accessible and open to all. Ten years ago, when we started this work, we began to imagine the possibilities. We have come to appreciate the messiness, inefficiency, and mystery of this process. Our community has learned to live in the questions, knowing that each time we believe we’ve reached an answer, more questions are revealed. At the end of the day, we have leaned to value the process over the product, as the process itself is where we grow.

This manual is based on the experiences the RECOVER Project has collected over the past ten years. Inside, you will find some theoretical underpinnings, lots of practical applications, and the voices of those actively engaged in recovery. “From the Ground Up: How to Build your own Peer-to-Peer Recovery Center,” is designed to be an organic, living document. There are opportunities within the manual for sharing your community’s voices and experiences. Through this platform, we will learn from and support one another. We urge you to share your successes and challenges with us as you cultivate your recovery center from the ground up, and look forward to supporting and sharing with you as we grow together.

With gratitude,P

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How Can We Talk About Difficult Experiences Non-Violently?

I really valued the massive Melbourne Hearing Voices conference last week. There were many highlights, but for me the theme of reconciliation between voice hearers and mental health workers was a powerful one. How can we talk about difficult experiences and be as non-violent as possible? I like this idea. As Russel Brand says (in his recent Huffington Post interview) if you stay non-violent in your protest for a more compassionate equal society, you create a paradigm shift.

This emphasis on creating understanding conversations at the conference was encouraged with dialogues between people on specific subjects  – medication, spirituality, psychological approaches to voices etc. – rather than keynotes.  It seemed a move away from presentations of competing knowledges, toward a more dialogical conference; a respectful exchange of different viewpoints, feelings and values. When you have a range of views in a presentation it’s less easy to adopt a “good guys vs. bad guys” mentality; you start to see the complexities in more relief.

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U.S. Renegade History, Psychiatric Survivors, & the Price of Acceptance

The historic divide between the “respectable” vs. the “renegades” is the subject of historian Thaddeus Russell’s 2011 book A Renegade History of the United States, which argues that when renegade groups gain civil rights and social acceptability, they lose their renegade culture. At least one group of American outsiders, not discussed by Russell, continues to be socially unacceptable, making it easier for them to retain a renegade culture.

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Living In Between: Interview with Icarus Co-Founder Jacks

Icarista Nina Packebush Interviews Poet and Icarus Co-founder Jacks Ashley McNam, originally posted on The Literary Kitchen

I recently had the great pleasure of speaking with Jacks Ashley McNamara about writing and creativity, madness and identity, activism and survival. Jacks is a genderqueer writer, artist, activist, and Somatic healer. Jacks is the co-founder, along with Sascha Altman DuBrul, of the Icarus Project, an alternative, peer-run, mutual-aid mental health support network with over 12,000 members worldwide. The Icarus Project recently celebrated its tenth anniversary which happened to coincide with the release of Jacks’ new book of poetry, Inbetweenland, published by Deviant Type Press. Jacks was also the subject of the Ken Paul Rosenthal documentary Crooked Beauty. You may have even read about Jacks in the August 2013 issue of O Magazine as they talked about the history and future of the Radical Mental Health and Recovery Movement.

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Moving ‘Beyond the Medical Model’: HELP WANTED

In February, the blog entitled, ‘A New Film Called ‘Beyond the Medical Model’ announced the impending release of the Western Mass Recovery Learning Community’s first full-length film.

The 67-minute film promises to examine the impact of a blindly ‘one-modeled’ system that “has been written so inextricably into our law and language that it has become difficult for many to even hear the evidence supporting a much broader take on what we so often call ‘mental illness.’”

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