By Mindful Occupation
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
In September 2011, the Occupy Wall Street protests erupted in response to the growing social and economic injustice that becomes more visible each day. Many of us with backgrounds in mental health and disability organizing have been closely involved with our local Occupy movements and have been actively engaged in a range of working groups and actions. We are all passionate folks who care about the people in our movement, and we know that involvement in activism can make many of us especially prone to highs and lows. Sometimes we feel incredible, knowing we are part of shaping history in the streets with our friends, and other times we may find ourselves desperate and burned out, feeling the entire world suffering under our solitary skin.
Many of us have found strong allies among the Safety Clusters, focusing on offering social and emotional support to help sustain the community from within. This work is both rewarding and strategic, as it is incredibly powerful to apply the language and values of radical mental health in context. We have been starkly reminded of how much work remains ahead of us, as most occupiers are trapped within the confines of mainstream diagnoses when describing and judging their and others’ behavior. We desperately need to develop and spread languages of compassion.
There is an urgent need to talk publicly about the relationship between social and economic injustice and our mental health. We need to start redefining what it actually means to be mentally healthy, not just on an individual level, but on collective, communal, and global levels.
In response to these needs, a group of Mad Pride activists and occupiers from around the country remotely collaborated on a booklet that is meant as both a resource and an intervention. Many of us have been working on issues of radical mental health and activism for quite some time, involved with groups such as the Icarus Project, Mind-Freedom International, and the Freedom Center. Others are mental health professionals and street medics who have been involved in supporting the Occupy protesters on the ground. The booklet is called Mindful Occupation: Rising Up Without Burning Out, and it includes curated content from across the web as well as a trove of original material.
The booklet begins with a chapter that asks, “What is Radical Mental Health?” followed by chapters that explicitly connect the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatric establishment with the larger message of Occupy. We discuss the importance of self-care, mutual aid, and coping skills in times of stress and include material about first aid for emotional trauma, navigating crisis, and healing from and preventing sexual assault. We hope that this material will be used to help facilitate teach-ins, skill-shares, and peer-support groups to help sustain the movement over the long term.
We envision a vibrant movement made up of locally based community groups and professionals in the field—a movement that understands the importance of language and telling stories and knowing our history, a movement that has reverence for the human spirit and understands the intertwined complexity of these things we call mental health and wellness. We understand the importance of economic justice and global solidarity. We see the critical need for accepting mental diversity and not contorting to fit in a monoculture society. We recognize an urgency: If we are going to shift the current paradigm, we need a movement that has both the political savvy to understand how to fight the system and the tools to take care of each other as the world gets even harder to live in.
theicarusproject.net
mindfuloccupation.org
mindfulliberation.wordpress.com
