About
The Icarus Project envisions a new culture and language that resonates with our actual experiences of ’mental illness’ rather than trying to fit our lives into a conventional framework. We are a network of people living with and/or affected by experiences that are often diagnosed and labeled as psychiatric conditions. We believe these experiences are dangerous gifts needing cultivation and care, rather than diseases or disorders. By joining together as individuals and as a community, the intertwined threads of madness, creativity, and collaboration can inspire hope and transformation in an oppressive and damaged world. Participation in The Icarus Project helps us overcome alienation and tap into the true potential that lies between brilliance and madness.
What is The Icarus Project?
From 2002-2020 The Icarus Project developed a network of peer support groups and a creative media outlet that provided a home for folks who experience mental health struggles and feel alienated by society. It normalized discussion of altered states, intense emotional distress, and suicidality and fostered solidarity among people with experiences that were often diagnosed as “serious mental illness”. While it mostly stayed off the radar of the mainstream, at its height The Icarus Project had tens of thousands of forum community members, many dozens of local support/mutual aid groups, and has left a legacy of ideas and visions with its multiple creative publications that are still compelling in the present day.
The Icarus Project’s original mission/vision statement was a rallying cry to reimagine the way we think about mental differences. The vision opened up a lot of space for thinking about personal and social change. The online discussion boards hosted thousands of creative weirdos and visionary social justice activists. It provided a framework for dozens of mutual aid peer support groups in cities across North America and around the world.
We built this archive website to inspire a new generation of mad people and their allies to be inspired and engaged by these ideas and traditions.
What Happened to The Icarus Project?
While The Icarus Project officially existed until 2020, there were major changes beginning in 2015 that shifted the priorities of the organization. As a project that grew out of radical leftist/anarchist counter culture, one of the critiques of the Icarus Project was that its leadership were majority white and middle class. There were critiques that the mental health issues of the global majority: Black, indigenous and people of color were being ignored because of privilege. The original founders, Jacks and Sascha, both envisioned Icarus growing to have a leadership that could outgrow their leadership. The idea that Icarus should recenter the most economically and socially marginalized led to what was called a “Decolonization” process of Icarus. The history of the organization is well documented in Erica Fletcher’s dissertation Mad Together in Technogenic Times.
The new group of Icaristas prioritized content for the QTBIPOC community and embraced the vision of Healing Justice.
There’s also good documentation of the project from the 10th anniversary in 2012.
What's This Website?
In 2015 the old Icarus website was taken offline and much of the old content disappeared publicly from the internet. Last year Nick Bosman found an old hard drive with a version of the website from 2012. Then David Nishizaki found a copy on the old Mayfirst hosting site along with an old copy of the phpbb forums.
Both of them are pretty messy with lots of dead links, but they’re also filled with really powerful writing and art, documenting an online and in-person community that touched many, many lives. We decided to take some of our favorite content and make it more accessible
What's the Future of Icarus?
We decided to make this archive website in the hopes that it will lay the foundation for a new peer support community.
