About the Archive
The Psych Survivor Archive is an abolitionist organization deeply invested in mad liberation and cross-movement organizing.
We host two projects: the Psych Survivor Zine and the Digital Story Archive. The Psych Survivor Zine celebrates Mad art in volumes released twice a year, with thematic prompts for each edition. The Digital Story Archive is a more informal forum for psych survivors to write about our lives and share as much as we want, when we want, how we want.
Through this archive, I hope to create a platform where psych survivors are believed and the psych system is held accountable for the ways it has harmed us. Our pain, resistance, knowledge, and grief are worth listening to, and I offer up this archive as a communal method of bearing witness.
This space is for the imperfect crazy person, the noncompliant patient, those of us who trash our rooms in the psych ward and yell to ourselves on the street. This space is for our comrades still incarcerated in all kinds of institutions and prisons. This space is for anyone who has been harmed by the psychiatric system and wants to rage about it–and this space is for anyone who doesn’t have the words to talk about it.
This space is for you.
Values
Autonomy:
As Mad people, we deserve to have complete autonomy over our bodies and choices, including choices that get labeled as “dangerous to ourself.” We recognize the ways in which we are experts on our own bodyminds, affirm our right to access multiple explanatory models for our Madness/Neurodivergence/Disability/Mental illness, and reject forced diagnosis. We affirm the right to be free from confinement, to refuse or to take psychiatric medications, and to access supports on our terms, instead of coercive “treatment.”
Mad Liberation
We are fighting for the right to exist freely as Mad people, and reject concepts of “normality.” We celebrate the complexities of our Madness and build Mad Pride in our communities. We refuse pathologization while acknowledging our very real experiences of pain and distress. We affirm the different ways we engage with reality, embrace craziness, and make room in our communities for everyone to show up fully.
Abolition
We are not interested in mending the psychiatric system, we are interested in ending it! We honor the activism of prison abolitionists such as Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, and more, and understand that psych abolition and prison abolition are intimately connected. We work to end all forms of confinement and are passionate about anticarceral alternatives to psychiatry.
Cross Movement Organizing
When fighting against sanism, it is vital to recognize the context of a psychiatric system founded on antiblack racism and colonialism, and prioritize the most impacted by carceral violence. We work to build active solidarity with movements in the wider struggle, understanding that there is no mad liberation without Black liberation, trans liberation, disability justice, sex work decriminalization, land back, prison abolition and liberation for all.