We've Been Too Patient by L. D. Green & Kelechi Ubozoh

Author:L. D. Green & Kelechi Ubozoh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781623173623
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2019-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

On Becoming a Politicized Healer

Jacks McNamara

Jacks McNamara is a genderqueer healer, teacher, artist, and writer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Jacks offers somatic coaching, intuitive counseling, and wellness mentoring to clients locally and across the world via Skype. In 2002 they co-founded The Icarus Project, an international support network and participatory adventure in mutual aid and radical mental health. Jacks is the author of Inbetweenland, a collection of poetry, and co-author of Navigating the Space between Brilliance and Madness, and their life and work is the subject of the poetic documentary film Crooked Beauty. Jacks loves to help all kinds of amazing people heal from trauma and transform their lives. Find out more at https://jacksmcnamara.net.

My original background is in peer-based radical mental health, which opened up my world and created my first ever network of support, but peers did not save my life. A deeply compassionate trauma therapist and a few somatically trained trauma healing coaches saved my life. Working with them gave me deep respect for those rare professionals who have cultivated both great skill and a nuanced political analysis, and set me on a path of becoming a practitioner myself. I endeavor to hold the kind of space for my clients that was held for me, in my times of greatest need, and to be one more politicized healer in a world that has far too few of us.

My official journey with mental health began at nineteen with two hospitalizations and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, which was supposed to be the primary cause of all of my wild emotional struggles. Medications with sketchy side effects were sold as the only solution. In the following years, I visited a host of psychiatrists who treated me primarily as a chemistry experiment and an insurance liability if I ever questioned or reduced my meds. These encounters left me with a profound mistrust of the Western disease model of mental illness and deep resentments toward practitioners operating within the parameters of the medical-industrial complex. I sought out homeopaths, acupuncturists, psychics, Buddhist priests, and self-proclaimed shamans in my quest for relief and balance. I found community through organizing with folks like The Icarus Project and the (now defunct) Bay Area Radical Mental Health Collective. The Icarus Project is a grassroots network at the intersection of mental health and social justice that provides support, education, and mutual aid to folks living with the experiences that are commonly labeled as “mental illness.” I co-founded the project with Sascha DuBrul in 2002. The Bay Area Radical Mental Health Collective was a project founded in 2005 by a group of activists in Berkeley and Oakland who hosted community dialogues, skillshares, and other educational gatherings around radical mental health. In these intrepid, DIY spaces, I met others who were self-educating, trying to figure out the world of mental health, and placing our struggles within social and political contexts that understood oppression itself as one of the primary triggers for extreme states and emotional distress. We swapped

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