Happy new year from the Las Vegas Radical Mental Health. Here are some ways to help us thrive. We’re a mutual aid collective. Many of us have mental health challenges, hear voices, see visions, experience extreme states, feel big feelings, or engage reality in ways that others don’t.
Some of us have diagnoses, and some of us identify as psychiatric survivors or crazy. Others of us might identify as neurodivergent, and we might enjoy doing support and disabled inter-dependence.
Las Vegas Radical Mental Health Collective has been going since 2017. Wow, this May will be our seven year anniversary. Is that right?
love and options
We’re working toward a world where love is more important than money. We need options. Radical mental health as a powerful way of caring for ourselves and one another. Paid professionals are part of a system that helps many people and hurts many people. Some of us want to engage doctors, while others of us choose to avoid psychiatry. There are many ways that you and I can help one another in a non-hierarchical way., with shared power.
Radical mental health changes the world with kindness and healing culture. There’s nothing wrong with being different in how we think and feel. Many of our qualities that are pathologized by mainstream medicine are also strengths. Being sensitive and feeling a lot is ok. By supporting one another, we can have good lives outside the usual narratives. We can define success on our own terms.
Through radical mental health, we can encourage diversity, strengthen one another for survival, and bring more people to the table of humanity. Too many of us are isolated and shamed for what we’ve lived through. Radical mental health is a way to encourage truth and being who we really are.
more than support
Some say it’s a support group, but there are agendas besides talking in a format. Over the years we’ve done ecstatic dance, deescalation trainings in collaboration with other orgs, garden days, art workshops. We dream of starting a soteria house as a place of refuge for people who are in crisis–a place that’s safer than a psych hospital. In psych hospitals, many patients lose our freedom and suffer abuse because of the power imbalance.
You could say Food Not Bombs feeds the poor, but it’s also about reclaiming material resources that would otherwise be wasted, respecting houseless and poor people, and making peace through connection and love in action. There’s a physical act of sharing food, but there are greater goals at the same time.
Likewise, radical mental health is support group style relating, but there’s a vision behind it. Through free, non-hierarchical care, we’re taking mental health into our own hands and creating a better world. There’s so much we can do for one another.
It’s a lie that we all need professionals when we have mental health challenges. Love helps us. Friends make the best medicine, and I will be there for my comrades as well as I can.
ways to help
LVRMHC is no longer based in Las Vegas. Yet we keep the name as a gesture toward our roots. Several of us are west coast, but anyone can be part of what we do.
Here are some ways to help, if you ever want to contribute to the work.
- table at events
- create new materials like postcards, fliers, stickers
- print materials
- distribute materials
- make event postings
- invite radical mental healthers to events
- write emails
- remind people to come–txt, msg, call
- create content for website and instagram
- post links, memes, art on facebook group
- work on deescalation training materials
- organize a hike, potluck, garden day
- facilitate or co-facilitate a meeting
- create a facilitation skills training
- help schedule meetings – pick dates
- donate for web hosting etc
- fundraise
- plan workshops / events
- analyze alliances with other orgs and strengthen
- vision collective’s future
- work toward Soteria house–research, plan, network
- organize a radical mental health movie screening
Radical mental health is an option besides what mainstream culture offers us. The option most of us experience of “suck it up as long as you can, then lose your shit and go to a psychiatrist when you have no other choice” is not a workable plan. There are so many ways to care for ourselves and one another that don’t involve health insurance hell, being institutionalized, rock bottom arrest, medication with horrible side effects, or otherwise handing over our power.
Thank you for caring for yourself and others in all the ways you do.