Community

Will Hall greets community FM station Valley Free Radio for its 20 years anniversary celebration! Founders Will and Ed Russell sparked the volunteer-run station in Northampton, Massachusetts, dedicated to peace, ecology, and social justice — and home to Madness Radio. Congrats on 20 years of amazing volunteer run community programming and an antidote to our corporate drive media! Video here: https://youtu.be/yz2ZI2LXQMo
https://valleyfreeradio.org/
https://www.northamptonchamber.com/blog/investor-spotlight-valley-free-radio
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNDnCWBx0Nb/
https://valleyadvocate.com/…/20-hours-to-celebrate-20…/
Low Power To The People | Valley Advocate

Mad Camp is an annual summer camp for mad people in Northern California – with people joining from all over the world! What’s it all about? Madness Radio producer and co-host Jessica Gallinger attended Mad Camp 2024 and interviewed Mad Campers about their experience, she’s joined by Mad Camp co-founders Dina Tyler and Will Hall to talk about the crazy wild vision they are unfolding to shift the timeline. Original music – Sarah Harper – Soundcloud & Instagram: @SarahHarperRock. https://www.madinamerica.com/2023/02/mad-camp/ www.madcamp.net www.madcampeurope.net

Legendary psychiatric survivor activist Irit Shimrat escaped psychiatric incarceration to become a leading anti-psychiatry organizer. Co-founder of the Ontario Psychiatric Survivors’ Alliance, Irit edited the Canadian magazine Phoenix Rising: The Voice of the Psychiatrized and wrote Call Me Crazy: Stories from the Mad Movement, bringing together the stories of many leading activists. Irit shares her experiences from the inside of locked wards, and from the outside – organizing to abolish them. (Transcript) 58 min version

Call me Crazy: Stories from the Mad Movement by Irit Shimrat
Spotlight on Institutional Psychiatry Edited by Irit Shimrat
Phoenix Rising: The Voice of the Psychiatrized
Don Weitz Legacy Project
Lunatics Liberation Front web archive
Go Nuts!

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Can teens lead their own mental health education? Are suicidal feelings and self harm “contagions” that young people shouldn’t talk about? How can mutual aid and peer support solve our youth mental health crisis? Felicity Krueger emerged out of trauma, anxiety, and the challenges of multi-racial adoption to become a leading teen advocate in Kentucky and nationwide. Felicity joins Oryx Cohen and co-hoist Will Hall to discuss her work today, including training youth in Emotional CPR – a peer support response to distress and an alternative to police and pharma. (Transcript here.)

https://www.amazon.com/Healing-Voices-PJ-Moynihan/dp/B0821RFTJY
https://youthmovenational.org
https://kypartnership.org/ky-youth-m-o-v-e
www.power2u.org
www.emotional-cpr.org

Should we reform – or abolish – psychiatry? Can capitalism provide mental health, or do we need some kind of socialism or anti-capitalism? Vesper Moore is a leader in the youngest wave of the psychiatric survivor movement; he was radicalized against psychiatry as a teen when his mother sought help and met medical violence instead. Vesper joins co-hosts Jacks McNamara and Will Hall, two veterans of 15 years of movement organizing, to envision ending psychiatric harm and achieving real care for people in emotional distress. (Alternate 58 minute version here. Transcript.)

https://linktr.ee/vespermoore
https://www.vespermoore.com/
https://madnessnetworknews.com/

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Mad Camp is coming! July 20-24 2023 – and annually – mad people are gathering for summer camp in the forested mountains two hours north of San Francisco. You heard that right! Swimming, hiking, campfires, hanging out, napping, dancing, music, art, dancing, the stars… Mad Camp is all about community friendship and connection. And there are also stirrings of mad camps on the east coast in Europe! The all-volunteer Mad Camp organizers are now raising funds for scholarships — and we need your help and more volunteers!

Check out the Mad Camp website: www.madcamp.net!

Make a donation on our Donation page! www.madcamp.net

Mad Camp Email List Join Here: https://madcamp.substack.com/

What if we just started having conversations about how to help each other through hard times? And took the time needed to really have discussions and hear the experiences of mad people? Erick Fabris is a psychiatric survivor activist and organizer based in Toronto Canada, and was part of the West End Survivors in Toronto that set up the first Mad Pride event in Canada, For ten years he worked with a patient’s council advising one of the country’s biggest hospitals, the Center for Addiction and Mental Health Care CAMH. Erick is the author of Tranquil Prisons: Chemical Incarceration Under Community Treatment Orders, a searing indictment of forced psychiatric drugging in the community. He is the founder of Crazy Talks and Mad Stories, a creative community event in Toronto, and is researching with the Mad Canada Shadow Report Group. (Alternate 58 minute version here.)

https://www.erickfabris.com/crazytalks/  https://madcanada.wixsite.com/shadowreport

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What does a life dedicated to love and freedom look like? Laura-Marie River Victor Peace Nopales joins co-hosts Jacks McNamara and Will Hall to explore the most important questions of all — by way of dreams, peace activism, and living in community. Laura-Marie is a queer traveler, maker of zines, radical mental health-er, fat liberation-er, queer liberation-er, and autistic liberation-er, and co-creator of Disabled Resilience Permaculture. (Alternate 58 min version here.)

Laura-Marie’s sites:
www.listeningtothenoiseuntilitmakessense.com
www.ilikeyourstims.com
www.instagram.com/xtrikeslutsx
https://www.facebook.com/listeningtothenoiseuntilitmakessense
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3gDcxFhXldzUWozp26ykGg
https://soundcloud.com/robotmad

Las Vegas Radical Mental Health Collective:
https://lvrmhc.org

Jacks’ website: https://jacksmcnamara.net

And check out Jacks’ awesome podcast So Many Wings! https://somanywings.org

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Nedra Deadwyler of Atlanta Georgia’s Civil Bikes interviews Madness Radio’s Will Hall about bicycles, mental health, and human liberation, for the KBOO FM Bicycle Show.

https://www.nedradeadwylerconsulting.com/

http://www.civilbikes.com/

Jay Mahler was one of the originators of the psychiatric survivors movement in the 1960s, joining protests with the Free Speech Movement at the University of California Berkeley- the beginnings of protest against the US war in Vietnam – and then dedicating his life to ending forced treatment and protecting psychiatric patient rights. He was a much loved leader in the movement with extensive impact on the lives of everyone involved in survivor / peer / consumer mental health advocacy, in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Jay passed away this May and will be dearly missed, he was a really genuine kindhearted man who touched everyone who knew him. Thanks to Dina Tyler for co-hosting this recent interview with Jay.

Pool of Consumer Champions https://www.pocc.org

Peers.net-Jay Mahler

Remembering Jay Mahler | Michael Cornwall

www.nyaprs.org/

nyaprs.org part 2

Survivingantidepressants.org is one of the leading and longest running communities of mutual and and peer self-help around psychiatric drug withdrawal. Adele Framer – alto strata – founded the site in 2011 and shares her experience and learning on supporting people coming off antidepressants, mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, benzodiazepines and other medications, including the emerging field of psychiatric medication withdrawal research. (Special thanks to Oddball Magazine for production assistance.) (Alternate 58 min version here.)

www.survivingantidepressants.org

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At the Madness Radio book launch a few years ago writer and poet Susie Meserve read her creative nonfiction essay “A Little Crazy,” included in the anthology Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living With Mental Illness and featuring an intimate (and not entirely flattering) portrait of her boyfriend at the time in 2004 – “schizophrenic” Will Hall.

https://susiemeserve.com

https://www.creativenonfiction.org/books/show-me-all-your-scars

Madness Radio book launch on YouTube

Outside Mental Health: Voices and Visions of Madness book site

Jyl Ion hears voices, but she refuses to view these non-ordinary experiences as a sign of mental illness. Instead Jyl came off 16 years of multiple toxic medications, talks to her ancestor spirits and has reclaimed access to unsanctioned knowledge. She struggled through the aftermath of sexual violence and was bedridden for two years of illness withdrawing from psychiatric meds – and now emerges as a strong survivor. Today Jyl has turned her voice hearing and her traumatic past into gifts, and works professionally as a forensic medium helping law enforcement solve missing persons cases. Her new book of poetry is called Soft Out Spoken. 58 min version

https://jylanais.com/

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Voice hearers, mystics, visionaries, and mad people are found throughout the scriptures of Judaism. What does Jewish theology have to teach us about madness and psychiatric diagnosis? How can modern Judaism show the way to new responses to extreme and altered states, in our communities and ourselves? Caroline Mazel-Carlton is a survivor of psychiatric crisis diagnosed as psychosis, Director of Training at the Wildflower Alliance – Western Massachusetts Recovery Learning Community, Hearing Voiced and Alternatives to Suicide support group facilitator/trainer, and part of the Jewish Renewal movement studying to be a rabbi.www.westernmassrlc.org/ https://aleph.org/

What’s it like to be a teenager in a psychiatric hospital? What’s it like to be a queer pregnant teenager? And is it true that friends do make the best medicine? Nina Packebush explores these questions and more in her groundbreaking debut young adult novel, Girls Like Me. Girls Like Me is an In the Margins 2018 recommended book and a Lambda Literary Finalist.  Nina is a queer-identified, grown-up teen mom, writer, zine maker, and mental health advocate – as well as Madness Radio Producer. www.ninapackebush.com
www.wehaveraisedpresidents.org