I’m so excited for our Reading Circle today! I refreshed our list of potential books we’ll be choosing from over the coming months. I kept some favorites from our previous Reading Circle, added a bunch of new ones, and included several wonderful suggestions from members of our community. 💙 Today’s meeting will be a little different—we’ll spend our time reading brief summaries of these books together so we can narrow down which one we’d like to read next as a group. 📖 Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen – A literary memoir exploring psychiatric hospitalization, identity, and recovery through a feminist lens. 📖 Mad in America – A landmark examination of the history of psychiatric treatment and long-term medication outcomes. 📖 Living with Voices – Introduces the Hearing Voices approach, encouraging people to understand and relate to their voices rather than simply suppress them. 📖 Agnes’s Jacket – Explores stories of madness and recovery from psychiatric survivors around the world, highlighting diverse paths to healing outside conventional systems. 📖 The Book of Woe – An engaging behind-the-scenes look at how psychiatric diagnoses are created and the debates that shape the DSM. 📖 Outside Mental Health – Offers practical ideas and survivor perspectives for navigating emotional distress beyond the traditional mental health system. 📖 Beyond Survival – Explores disability justice, transformative justice, and community-based alternatives to policing, punishment, and institutional responses to crisis. 📖 Care Work – A collection of essays on disability justice, mutual aid, interdependence, and building communities where everyone belongs. 📖 Models of Madness – Presents evidence-based psychological, social, and trauma-informed alternatives to the biomedical model of mental illness. 📖 Emergent Strategy – Invites readers to imagine social change through relationships, adaptation, and collective care, with lessons that translate beautifully to peer support communities.

I met Cristine through her HeyPeers group, Unlock the Psych Ward Doors — Peer Support for Psychiatric Harm, Psychiatric Incarceration, Societal Constructs, and Oppressive Mental Health Systems. I had a singular experience as a voluntary psychiatric hospital patient. My experience there was a bad one due to another patient who was very intimidating. I was fearful the entire time I was there, and my anxiety ended up being worse than it was before I went there. I came to Cristine’s group to hear the experiences of others and was quite startled by the horrific treatment that many people have received in psychiatric hospitals. Cristine is a most compassionate person and truly understands the trauma that people have experienced. She listens, gives excellent feedback, and is a true advocate for people with mental illness. I have learned a great deal from her about things I never imagined were going on. Cristine gives of herself in a remarkable way by sharing her life experiences and providing us with a safe place to discuss these things. I feel that anyone can benefit from this group, even those who have not experienced mental illness or psychiatric incarceration. There is much to be learned and understood in this area by the general public. There are things going on that people simply do not know about. There are also people working in the mental healthcare field who should not be there. I am grateful that I found this group. Otherwise, I would not know how awful involuntary psychiatric incarceration can be. This has given me a burden for such people, and I pray daily for them to be set free—free from sin and condemnation through Jesus Christ, free and healed from mental illness, and free from mental incarceration so that they may live a free life in the world.

Hi. Has the book been chosen for tonight? Thanks.

Is there a mtg on HeyPeers today?

Hi everyone! 💙 Our Unlock Psych Reading Circle meets this Thursday at 5:30 PM Pacific, and I’d love your input before we gather. We’ve been reading Mad in America by Robert Whitaker, but since we haven’t gotten very far into it, I wanted to check in with everyone. Would you like to continue with Mad in America, or would you rather start fresh with a new book? When we first started the Reading Circle, this was our original list of books we were considering: 📖 Unlock Psych Reading Circle Books - Mad in America — Robert Whitaker - Committed — Dinah Miller & Annette Hanson - Desperate Remedies — Andrew Scull - Experiences of Mental Health In-Patient Care — Mark Hardcastle, David Kennard, Sheila Gradison, & Leonard Fagin - Healthy Minds in the Twentieth Century: In and Beyond the Asylum — Steven J. Taylor & Alice Brumby - Narratives of Recovery from Serious Mental Illness — William Tucker - Speaking Our Minds: An Anthology — Jim Read & Jill Reynolds - The First Resort — Mathew Smith - The Source & Development of Social & Community Psychiatry — David G. Satin You’re also welcome to suggest any other book you’d love for us to read together! I’m very resourceful when it comes to finding free, legal digital copies or library access, so don’t hesitate to recommend something that’s meaningful to you. There will be no need to purchase the book unless you want a physical copy for yourself as I will likely be able to get a digital copy of the book for us. I also have a quite a large personal collection of digital mental health books such as books on philosophy, recovery, therapy workbooks, psychology, somatic healing, therapeutic modalities, self-help, fiction, autobiographies etc. if you would like any ebooks. Please message me if you would like any access to it. Please leave your thoughts in the comments preferable before the Reading Circle on Thursday. Since we likely won't have a definite book from many answers by Thursday since today is Wednesday, I'll plan on just continuing to read Mad in America or perhaps some poetry tomorrow until we gather more responses for the final decision later on. Or perhaps we can sample some of the books tomorrow and explore what we might want to decide on. That might be a good way to decide what to choose! 🤗