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.

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 excited to share that Unlock Psych is officially on Instagram! You can find us at @UnlockPsych. I also shared our very first post today! I was so nervous making it. 🎥 It’s a video where I talk about: 5 things I wish someone had told me before I went to the psych hospital …and 5 things I wish someone had told me after I got out. These are things I learned through years of lived experience that I wish someone had shared with me from the beginning. My hope is that this series can help people feel a little more prepared, a little less alone, and a little more empowered as they navigate the mental health system. If you’re on Instagram, I’d love for you to give @UnlockPsych a follow! I’ll be sharing educational content, practical tips, reflections, resources, and updates from the Unlock Psych community. If you watch the video, I’d love to hear: What do you wish someone had told you before or after your first psychiatric hospitalization? Your experiences may help someone else who’s just beginning their journey. 💜 :::writing If you’d like, I can also make it a bit shorter and more conversational for a Skool announcement.

Hey Ward Wreckers! I created a new flyer. I needed to make something to use when I email organizations for outreach and share about our community. What do you all think? 😁

Hey Ward Wreckers! I made a document for Psychiatric Harm Supportive Measures about the various ways that the mental health system can harm us and the ways we can fight back against those destructive forces. Also added abolitionist principles to the document if anyone is interested. You can find the file here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14wqehmXjIv4vMbsvjpYcarGPS4DUg7up/view?usp=sharing