PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

Mental Health Collective
by Tait Johnson Friday, Jun. 20, 2003 at 11:46 AM
neotrope0@yahoo.com (email address validated) (412)683-1224

for Pittsburgh Indymedia: We are starting a new mental health collective to better help the community support itsef and deal with mental and emotional problems without the aid of institutions.

Hey everyone, as you might know Elina and I have been talking about forming a sort of mental health collective to allow the community to support and help each other both mentally and emotionaly. Well, a few people got together last night and threw some ideas around as to what we want to accomplish and how we can get there.

It appears that the main goal of this project is to promote open communication about how we each are feeling mentally and emotionaly. As much as we try to support each other as friends there are still a lot of individual problems that people are not getting support to deal with. What we would like to see is some amount of comfortablity that allows those with problems to be able to talk to others about them, and for those of us who notice others having obvious problems to be able to approach them and offer our help and support.

Now it seems that this is a fairly idealistic goal, and it will definitly require some work to get there. The main thing at this point that we need is research done into alternative/ radical mental and emotional health. Whether this is information on herbal remedies, physical excersize, the evils of mental health institutions, substance abuse, historical background, etc.., we are going to need to know how to help ourselves to each other. It would seem futile to address each others problems by handing out referalls to Western Psyche.

As we pull up more information we will likely have group meetings to share the research and eventually compile it into a DIY mental health zine. Other long term projects/ goals could include group discussion (therapy) nights, social activities (especially to keep us sane in the winter), and... As I said above we really just want to make this community stronger by strengthening our bonds to each other and our ability to deal with internal problems.

For next week's meeting we would like to come up with a list of topics to research and hopefully enough people to divide them up among. We have yet to set a meeting date and time as it seemed not many could make this weeks 8:30 at the QS, so if people who want to come could get back to Elina or I with when and where we will set a time.

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