I’m so excited for our Reading Circle today! I refreshed our list of potential books we’ll be choosing from over the coming months. I kept some favorites from our previous Reading Circle, added a bunch of new ones, and included several wonderful suggestions from members of our community. 💙 Today’s meeting will be a little different—we’ll spend our time reading brief summaries of these books together so we can narrow down which one we’d like to read next as a group. 📖 Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen – A literary memoir exploring psychiatric hospitalization, identity, and recovery through a feminist lens. 📖 Mad in America – A landmark examination of the history of psychiatric treatment and long-term medication outcomes. 📖 Living with Voices – Introduces the Hearing Voices approach, encouraging people to understand and relate to their voices rather than simply suppress them. 📖 Agnes’s Jacket – Explores stories of madness and recovery from psychiatric survivors around the world, highlighting diverse paths to healing outside conventional systems. 📖 The Book of Woe – An engaging behind-the-scenes look at how psychiatric diagnoses are created and the debates that shape the DSM. 📖 Outside Mental Health – Offers practical ideas and survivor perspectives for navigating emotional distress beyond the traditional mental health system. 📖 Beyond Survival – Explores disability justice, transformative justice, and community-based alternatives to policing, punishment, and institutional responses to crisis. 📖 Care Work – A collection of essays on disability justice, mutual aid, interdependence, and building communities where everyone belongs. 📖 Models of Madness – Presents evidence-based psychological, social, and trauma-informed alternatives to the biomedical model of mental illness. 📖 Emergent Strategy – Invites readers to imagine social change through relationships, adaptation, and collective care, with lessons that translate beautifully to peer support communities.

I met Cristine through her HeyPeers group, Unlock the Psych Ward Doors — Peer Support for Psychiatric Harm, Psychiatric Incarceration, Societal Constructs, and Oppressive Mental Health Systems. I had a singular experience as a voluntary psychiatric hospital patient. My experience there was a bad one due to another patient who was very intimidating. I was fearful the entire time I was there, and my anxiety ended up being worse than it was before I went there. I came to Cristine’s group to hear the experiences of others and was quite startled by the horrific treatment that many people have received in psychiatric hospitals. Cristine is a most compassionate person and truly understands the trauma that people have experienced. She listens, gives excellent feedback, and is a true advocate for people with mental illness. I have learned a great deal from her about things I never imagined were going on. Cristine gives of herself in a remarkable way by sharing her life experiences and providing us with a safe place to discuss these things. I feel that anyone can benefit from this group, even those who have not experienced mental illness or psychiatric incarceration. There is much to be learned and understood in this area by the general public. There are things going on that people simply do not know about. There are also people working in the mental healthcare field who should not be there. I am grateful that I found this group. Otherwise, I would not know how awful involuntary psychiatric incarceration can be. This has given me a burden for such people, and I pray daily for them to be set free—free from sin and condemnation through Jesus Christ, free and healed from mental illness, and free from mental incarceration so that they may live a free life in the world.

Howdy Ward Wreckers! @Morgan Taliaferro had a beautiful idea to connect our community and also get in some healthy activity. We are going to start meeting at 12pm Pacific/3pm Eastern to do yoga sessions. We are going to talk about how frequently we want to do these meetings tomorrow during our first one, and you are all welcome to join us. Just bring yourselves, a yoga mat if you have one, and show up and stretch! 💞 We will also be discussing tomorrow during that meeting about a getting into a daily mindfulness practice that we would help one another, and anyone who wants to join us, be accountable to and in turn, create a circle where we encourage each other and prompt passion for health and mindfulness so that none of this feels like work, but a effortless drive towards growth and healing that we are all excited about practicing. 🤗🌻 Here is the link to the mindfulness practice we will be following once we get started in case anyone is curious. So, there will be a new meeting in the "Calendar" page on our Skool, and there will be our meeting for tomorrow at 12pm PST/3pm EST. You're all so invited! 😎

I’m excited to share that Unlock Psych is officially on Instagram! You can find us at @UnlockPsych. I also shared our very first post today! I was so nervous making it. 🎥 It’s a video where I talk about: 5 things I wish someone had told me before I went to the psych hospital …and 5 things I wish someone had told me after I got out. These are things I learned through years of lived experience that I wish someone had shared with me from the beginning. My hope is that this series can help people feel a little more prepared, a little less alone, and a little more empowered as they navigate the mental health system. If you’re on Instagram, I’d love for you to give @UnlockPsych a follow! I’ll be sharing educational content, practical tips, reflections, resources, and updates from the Unlock Psych community. If you watch the video, I’d love to hear: What do you wish someone had told you before or after your first psychiatric hospitalization? Your experiences may help someone else who’s just beginning their journey. 💜 :::writing If you’d like, I can also make it a bit shorter and more conversational for a Skool announcement.

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