Hey everyone, HeyPeers is glitching today. We couldn't meet for our meeting there, some people can't see the meeting and for others, the meeting can't be heard if they made it in. We can meet on Skool instead. You can find the meeting in the Calendar or here: https://www.skool.com/live/zscqHdqJNjk

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 really meant to go to the meeting last Monday, but I ended up falling asleep. I have had a migraine every single day for the past three weeks. The only time I don't have a migraine is either really late at night at like two or three in the morning, or very early when I first wake up, around five or 6 AM. And I have a freelance job I have to do if I want to be able to pay for my pain doctor and get pain medicine. So I've had to use the little time I don't have a headache to work, and because of that, I've barely been sleeping. The rheumatoid arthritis is also causing me a lot of pain. A lot of the time, I can't sleep because of the pain in my knees. I'm trying to do the best I can to cope. I think about suicide a lot. I even planned it out. But today, I resolved not to do it. I have wonderful friends – really, really wonderful friends, and I know they love me deeply. They would be devastated if I killed myself. I want to be brave. I want to be able to endure the pain so they don't have to endure it. I don't want to be in pain, but I don't want to give my pain to my loved ones either. Anyway, I haven't been to many meetings lately because I always either have a headache or am too tired to function. I'm going to try to make it this Monday if I can. The last time I joined a meeting on Skool, I couldn't get the audio to work so I left. Maybe I'll have better luck on Monday. If I can manage to go.

I want to thank this community—everyone who has been here, and everyone just finding their way in. Unlock Psych started from my anger at psych hospitals and everything they put me through. But over time, something shifted. I realized the doors I needed to unlock weren’t just the ones inside broken systems—they were the ones that led me back to myself, and to others who had been hurt in similar ways. This became about showing up—for myself, and for each other—and finding strength in our shared humanity. This Monday, we had 18 people join our Unlock the Psych Ward Doors meeting. More registered, fewer stayed until the end—but what mattered is that we showed up. We were 18 people who never should have had to carry this kind of trauma. And at the same time, 18 people who chose to sit together anyway—to listen deeply, to laugh, to cry, to feel anger for each other’s injustices, and to hold that with real compassion. That matters. Because this space is powerful. It’s ours. Psych hospitals can keep their seclusion rooms, their restraints, their conformity. Here, we’re building something different:the inclusion room,the compassion station,the acceptance corner. We made the space we needed—and we’re still making it, together. Thank you all for being part of this.(Ward Wreckers and all ❤️)

Did we have a meeting tonight? My aide just left and I tried to join but no one was there