sascha dubrul
intro’d to Sascha while reading Will Hall‘s outside mental health
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Sascha Altman DuBrul (@mps2thotherside)(Sascha) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sascha_Altman_DuBrul) – the icarus project.. maps to other side.. the 80s were a wild time, lots of homeless people out on streets, lots of underground econ and culture. reagan had let out all these folks locked up in mental hospitals, and promised them community support. but that didn’t manifest, and folks were really struggling.. so at 14 i found myself in a park w a bunch of crazy homeless people and runaway teenagers, and lo and behold, i felt like i fit in somewhere.
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permaculture movement and radical farming scene.. what helped heal .. creating community seed library – take back from ie: monsanto.. protect diversity
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at end of 90s people came to seattle to protest world trade org takeover.. when 9 11 happened.. a lot of us were working on radical projects.. and it looked like a lot of change was going to happen really fast.. then the big boot came down and stepped on us.. we had to go back underground…
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i want us to talk about how oppression makes us crazy.. i want us to cultivate skills to take better care of one another..t.. i want us all to make maps to break out of the biopsychiatry labyrinth and build a new world from all of our beauty and brilliance…
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from 2013
Navigating brilliance and madness: Sascha Altman DuBrul at TEDxHunterCCS
3 min – 1980 – dsm3 – most important way to understand what’s wrong is bio.. chemicals in brain
5 min – one person goes outside cave and realizes spent whole life looking at shadow.. i experienced that 18.. then woke up in psych hospital.. political/historical context of how we treat this.. ie: reagan
7 min – dsm rising same time pharma started making money off drugs that would keep us able to function
8 min – i’m looking for other people like me..
9 min – start the icarus project.. boy who has wings but doesn’t know how to use them.. what if .. instead of seeing ourselves as diseased/disordered.. we saw ourselves as having dangerous gifts.. like wings..t
13 min – we have so much pressure on us to be normal..t
15 min – book – friends make the best medicine
16 min – a lot of people that really want to change the world end up burning themselves out..
1 in 5 americans are taking a psychiatric drug
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find/follow Sascha:
My interests lie at the intersection of the public mental health system and the Mad Underground
manhattan
http://www.mapstotheotherside.net/author/
The Icarus Project, a support network and media project by and for people who experience the world in ways that are often diagnosed as mental illness. I am one of the co-founders, and although I don’t work with the national organization anymore, we’ve all had a big influence on one another for many years.
Check out my book, Maps to the Other Side, it’s a bunch of woven together stories of my odyssey navigating the psychiatric system by building community in the face of adversity; a set of maps for how rebels and dreamers can survive and thrive in a crazy world. I’m happy with how it turned out and I’d love to hear your reflections of it.
At the moment I live in Brooklyn, I’m getting a clinical social work degree at night, and I’m working really hard with a growing movement of dedicated people to build an alternative mental health infrastructure that is useful and accessible to a whole lot of different kinds of people. We are doing our best to come up from the underground and slowly but surely spread messages into the mainstream that are going to change the culture and society. I
Sascha Altman DuBrul, a.k.a.Sascha DuBrul or Sascha Scatter, (born 1974) is an American activist, writer, farmer and punk rock musician known as the bass player of the classic 90s ska-punk band Choking Victim.
He is the co-founder of The Icarus Project, an international radical community support network and media project, which is attempting to redefine the language and culture of mental health and illness. He founded the Bay Area Seed Interchange Library (BASIL). He divides his time between the Bay Area and New York City.
In an interview with the Village Voice, DuBrul described his childhood: “I was raised by democratic socialists who believed in electoral politics…but my political education happened amidst the Tompkins Square riots of the late ’80s.” In his teens, DuBrul found community among punks and anarchist squatters on the Lower East Side.
After graduating from Hunter College High School, he attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon for a year but dropped out after having a psychotic break. In a 2002 article for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, DuBrul wrote: “I was 18 years old the first time they locked me up in a psych ward. The police found me walking on the subway tracks in New York City, and I was convinced the world was about to end and I was being broadcast live on prime-time TV on all the channels.”[8] He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
In his early twenties, DuBrul traveled to Mexico and Central America and worked with the Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas. Awakened by his experiences in Mexico, he went on to participate in a diverse number of activist projects: from the Earth First! road blockades of the Pacific Northwest, to the fight to save the community gardens in New York City, to the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in November 1999. Often DuBrul would travel between activist projects on freight trains. The details of his wanderings across the country and through Mexico often ended up in zines which, according to the Village Voice, “combine[d] adventure-travel tales with thoughtful observations about the global economy.” DuBrul was the inspiration for singer Jolie Holland’s song Sascha.
DuBrul became fascinated by permaculture and the genetic relationships that arose when domestic crops intermingled with their wild relatives. Having been raised in Manhattan, his urban sensibilities gave him a unique way of thinking about agriculture and the need to revitalize older methods of community seed production. In 2000, he founded the first urban seed lending library: the Bay Area Seed Interchange Library, or BASIL.
..Dubrul worked with McNamara and other Icarus members to create a guide for creating community support around madness and mental health. This was published under the title “Friends Make the Best Medicine.”
In 2007, DuBrul and a group of fellow Icarus Project members organized the “Mad Gifts Tour.” As part of this tour, the group visited Virginia Tech soon after the April 16th massacre of 32 students, which stirred controversy about mental health on college campuses.
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crazywise (doc) – (Gabor Maté –maté basic needs law, Will Hall, Phil Borges et al)
hari rat park law via ..
a nother way
ie: hlb via 2 convos that io dance.. as the day..[aka: not part\ial.. for (blank)’s sake…]
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be you. 