As you move through your week, I’d love to invite you to notice one moment when things felt difficult—and something you did that helped you through it. Maybe you went for a walk instead of isolating. Maybe you reached out to a friend. Maybe you rested without guilt. Maybe you made yourself a cup of tea, listened to music, cried, journaled, took a shower, cuddled your pet, practiced self-compassion, or simply made it through the day. It doesn’t have to be a huge victory. Sometimes the smallest acts of caring for ourselves are the most meaningful. When we gather to our weekly meetings moving forward, I’d love for everyone to share: 🌿 A moment you struggled. 🌿 What you did to support yourself. 🌿 How it felt afterward—or what you learned from it. One of the beautiful things about peer support is discovering that we all carry different tools, perspectives, and ways of getting through hard moments. By sharing them, we help expand each other’s toolbox and remind one another that healing doesn’t have to happen alone. I’m looking forward to hearing your stories and celebrating the ways you’ve cared for yourselves next week. ❤️ P.S. This wonderful idea came from one of our community members, @Morgan Taliaferro. Thank you, Morgan, for inspiring our new weekly reflection!

In July 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14321, encouraging states to expand the use of involuntary psychiatric treatment and civil commitment. While many headlines describe this as “bringing back asylums,” the proposal is less about reopening the massive institutions of the past and more about increasing the use of psychiatric hospitals, long-term treatment facilities, and other locked institutional settings. For many psychiatric survivors, disabled people, and abolitionists, this raises profound concerns. History has repeatedly shown that when societies respond to distress through coercion, confinement, and forced treatment, the people most impacted are often those already marginalized—people experiencing poverty, homelessness, trauma, disability, racism, transphobia, and social exclusion. Institutionalization has long been justified as “care,” yet too often it has resulted in the loss of autonomy, family separation, trauma, abuse, neglect, and indefinite confinement. This executive order shifts the conversation away from addressing the root causes of suffering—such as housing insecurity, poverty, trauma, isolation, lack of voluntary support, and systemic injustice—and toward expanding the state’s power to confine people deemed mentally ill or unable to care for themselves. An abolitionist perspective asks a different question: What if people don’t need more coercion—they need more choice, more community, more housing, more peer support, more economic security, and more opportunities to heal outside of institutions? Rather than investing billions into expanding psychiatric confinement, what could become possible if those resources were directed toward voluntary, peer-led, trauma-informed, community-based supports that honor dignity, autonomy, and self-determination? Discussion Questions - What feelings come up for you when you hear about expanded involuntary treatment? - How has institutionalization or coercive treatment impacted you or your community? - What would meaningful alternatives to psychiatric incarceration look like? - If we truly wanted people to thrive, what would we invest in instead?

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

I recently circled back to the Psych Ward I was incarcerated in to get all of my records. My first request garnered me 17 pages of mostly meds they discontinued or "deleted" or prescribed (not administered meds, mind you) and my labs . . . so no real information about my treatment. So, I put together another request for them to respond too. And I got great results. I now have 380 pages of my record that I need to review. In the meantime, I wanted to share my email to the "medical center". I added some options based on your situation i.e. first request or another request and the examples you want to include. If you have any questions or need any help, let me know. And if it works for anyone else, I would love to hear about it. Good luck!

Sexy But Psycho: How the Patriarchy Uses Women’s Trauma Against Them (2022) by Dr. Jessica Taylor is a fierce critique of the psychiatric and mental health systems. Taylor argues that society pathologizes women’s natural responses to trauma, poverty, and abuse, using clinical diagnoses to discredit and control them. [1, 2] Key Themes and Arguments: - Pathologization of Survival: The book asserts that labels like "Borderline Personality Disorder" are weaponized to dismiss women as "crazy" or "difficult" when they react to patriarchal oppression. - Historical Control: Taylor explores how women have long been medicated and locked up for defying traditional gender roles and societal expectations. - De-medicalizing Trauma: She advocates for removing the clinical labels from women's trauma, arguing that their psychological distress is a symptom of a sick society, not a brain defect.