An Evening with The Icarus Project

Walking the Edge of Insanity:
Navigating the World of Mental Health with Open Eyes and Important Questions.
An Evening with The Icarus Project
Thursday April 8th 8PM
 
As folks who generally feel alienated by mainstream culture and question conventional ideas of sanity, what does it mean to be struggling with traditional labels such as ?clinical depression,? ?bipolar disorder,? or ?schizophrenia?? How helpful is the modern medical view of mental disorders that revolves around drugs and psychiatry and how much of it is influenced by powerful pharmaceutical corporations, public funding cuts, and a society that equates economic productivity with health?
 
Come join an exciting discussion that is starting all over the country and is being orchestrated by Sascha Scatter and Ashley McNamara, the directors of The Icarus Project ? a group of people diagnosed with bipolar disorder who are finding new language for all the different experiences that get labeled ?mental illness.?
Come celebrate the release of our little book, Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness: a Reader and Roadmap of Bipolar Worlds, which is a compilation of stories and lessons from brave and misunderstood folks who rarely have the chance to speak and whose insights are going to end up changing the world.
 
Ashley McNamara is an artist, writer, farmer, dreamer, traveler, teacher and mental health activist diagnosed with bipolar disorder who has been roaming around the country putting together zines and editing a book for The Icarus Project. These days her most accurate address is the license plate of her truck, but before taking off for the great wide open with a horde of art supplies and lots of good food she was known to live in the San Francisco Bay Area and grow exceptional lettuce.
 
Sascha Altman DuBrul (aka Sascha Scatter) is a writer and activist who grew up in the New York City squatter subculture and spent years playing in punk bands, riding freight trains, working on farms, and writing political adventure stories about his travels from the forests blockades of the Pacific Northwest to the jungles of Southern Mexico. Sascha has been locked up in psych wards involuntarily three times for losing his mind and is diagnosed classic ?Bipolar I with psychotic tendencies,? which in his mind doesn?t quite capture the essence of the dilemma, but he?s working on creating new and better language to talk about it.
 
for more info check out www.theicarusproject.net