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Community building BEFORE: What procedures could you have in place with participants to normalize and set up helpful expectations in case of a heightened state or crisis?

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Community building BEFORE: What procedures could you have in place with participants to normalize and set up helpful expectations in case of a heightened state or crisis?

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-Time and space - let it ride!
-"We're going to be outside our normal environments and you might be surprised by what comes up. Sometimes big feelings come up. We'll work through it if it happens."
-"What's one thing you're feeling nervous about? Excited about?"
-Ask what folks need to feel supported
-If you don't feel comfortable sharing, you can message us, email us, talk to us - we are your guides, we are here to support you
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-what is my offering and why is this my offering? not control or solve
-listening first, see if another guide begins first
-addressing the crowd with transparency: "hey we're seeing what we can do with this situations"
-"i'm noticing some big voices over here, checking in!"
-options: do you want to stay or go? take a walk? move tables?
-offering options to all the participants at the table

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-"I'll be paddling near you, you don't have to talk"
-Smaller check-in before "what do you need" - "is ___ ok?" options for water, food, snack, company, walk next to you, etc?
-It won't hurt my feelings if you say no
-Walking with them and not talking about it...
-Grounding principles - anxiety/panic attack - square breathing, 1-2-3-4-5 grounding (one thing you can see?"

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Crisis as an Opportunity for Growth and Change

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We're so glad you found us. When you or someone close to you goes into crisis, it can be the scariest thing to ever happen. You don't know what to do, but it seems like someone's life might be at stake or they might get locked up, and everyone around is getting stressed and panicked. Most people have either been there themselves or know a friend who has been there. Someone's personality starts to make strange changes, they're not sleeping or sleeping all day, they lose touch with the people around them, they disappear into their room for days, they have wild energy and outlandish plans, they start to dwell on suicide and hopelessness, they stop eating or taking care of themselves, or they start taking risks and being reckless. They become a different person. They're in crisis.

This page offers an assortment of resources that may provide perspective, comfort, and/or tools that could be of assistance to people experiencing various sorts of tough times.

Here is a really useful set of ideas and strategies that's written for folks who are dealing with a mental health crisis Navigating Crisis:

Navigating Crisis (as a printable PDF in English)

Online Peer Support (Fireweed Facebook group and Drop-in Support Circles - These online spaces are meant to offer each other support within an anti-oppressive and social justice framework. It also comes with its own set of problems including issues of privacy and risk of being reported. Please respect that this space is closed to providers and family members and is designed for those with lived experience only.)

NAVIGATING CRISIS

SUICIDES

HOTLINES AND WARMLINES

PSYCHOSIS/ HEARING VOICES

PSYCHIATRIC DRUGS

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We're so glad you found us. When you or someone close to you goes into crisis, it can be the scariest thing to ever happen. You don't know what to do, but it seems like someone's life might be at stake or they might get locked up, and everyone around is getting stressed and panicked.

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Temporarily Able-Bodied: Useful, but not always true

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Temporarily Able-Bodied: Useful, but not always true

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by Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie Notkin
Body Impolitic

Following up our post here late last year about "disability and aging," we've been thinking about the phrase "temporarily able-bodied," a mainstay of disability community language which we've both been using for 30 years or so.

In Annaham's Disability 101 post on this blog, she says:
"AB" is an abbreviation for able-bodied; "TAB" is a slightly more to-the-point abbreviation meaning "Temporarily Able-Bodied." TAB refers to the inevitable-namely, that most of us will face disability at some point in our lives; whether it comes sooner or later varies depending upon one's circumstances.
We have the highest respect for the use of TAB and "temporarily able-bodied." Using it is a way for a disability activist (or anyone discussing disability) to quickly and effectively bring all of her/his listeners into one group: some of us are disabled now and many of us will be sooner or later. It's a phrase that builds community, that reminds people that the needs of some are really the needs of everyone. It's akin to "universal design" as a phrase reminding us of what brings us together, rather than what separates us.

At the same time, like any catchphrase, it's oversimplified. Disability is not inevitable. Only two things are always temporary: life, and youth. Everything else is conditional, contextual, and/or statistical. Definitions of ability/disability are exceedingly complex; even definitions of "aging" are less obvious than they might immediately appear.

Ability is not always temporary. Two large groups of people are able-bodied until they die: first, those who age able-bodied (not just 90-year-old hikers but also people over 80 who walk to the grocery store every day and clean their own homes). Second, and harder to see, are the people who die able-bodied at any age. In a culture that tries not to admit that people die at all and is especially resistant to admitting that young people ever die, it's important to remember that death and old age are not synonymous. And, of course, disability is not always permanent either: the world is full of people who are temporarily disabled.

To return to our catch-phrase, "temporarily able-bodied" is often used as a reminder that disability can come to any person at any time, that you can wake up able-bodied and go to sleep disabled, just as you can wake up alive and never go to bed again. In this meaning, it's both true and useful. But it's also used, somewhat more sloppily, as a prediction: you, the individual I'm talking to, will not always be able-bodied. And among the things that are disturbing about that usage is that it encourages the cultural conflation of "disabled" and "old," so that people in their 30s or 40s who are in some kind of body pain say they "feel old," when what they feel is pain.

We'll both keep using "temporarily able-bodied" in conversations about disability. And in those conversations, when we have the time and space to elaborate, we'll explain how we're not using it.

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Guest Post: Temporarily Able-Bodied: Useful, but not always true

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by Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie Notkin Body Impolitic Following up our post here late last year about "disability and aging," we've been thinking about the phrase "temporarily able-bodied," a mainstay of disability community language which we've both been using for 30 years or so.

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"Forced Intimacy" is a term I have been using for years to refer to the common, daily experience of disabled people being expected to share personal parts of ourselves to survive in an ableist world. This often takes the form of being expected to share (very) personal information with able bodied people to get basic access, but it also includes forced physical intimacy, especially for those of us who need physical help that often requires touching of our bodies. Forced intimacy can also include the ways that disabled people have to build and sustain emotional intimacy and relationships with someone in order to get access-to get safe, appropriate and good access.

I have experienced forced intimacy my entire life as a disabled child, youth and adult. I am always expected to do the work of opening myself up for others' benefit, education, curiosity or benevolent oppression.

Forced intimacy is a cornerstone of how ableism functions in an able bodied supremacist world. Disabled people are expected to "strip down" and "show all our cards" metaphorically in order to get the basic access we need in order to survive. We are the ones who must be vulnerable-whether we want to or not-about ourselves, our bodyminds and our abilities. Forced intimacy was one of the many ways I learned that consent does not exist for my disabled asian girl bodymind. People are allowed to ask me intrusive questions about my body, make me "prove" my disability or expect me to share with them every aspect of my accessibility needs. I learned how to simultaneously shrink myself and nonconsensually open myself up as a disabled girl of color every damn day.

Forced intimacy is the opposite of access intimacy . It feels exploitative, exhausting and at times violating. Because I am physically disabled and use a manual wheelchair, I often experience forced intimacy when able bodied people push my wheelchair without my consent or when I am in situations where I have to be pushed by people I do not feel safe with, know or who are actively harassing me while pushing me. This often happens when I am traveling and have to rely on strangers for my access needs. I cannot count the number of times a strange man has pushed my wheelchair in the airport, while saying offensive and gross comments to me. These are the moments where disability, race, gender, immigration, class, age and sexuality collide together at once, indistinguishable from one another.

Another example of forced intimacy is when I am somewhere and need an arm to lean on while walking, as I often do, and I have to be physically close to and touch someone I do not want to. This happened much more when I was growing up as a disabled child and youth, before I had more say over my life and the people in it. Forced intimacy is also my entire experience in the medical industrial complex with doctors, nurses, brace makers, physical therapists and practitioners, none of which I ever consented to. It is also the many moments in my daily adult life when I have to share more information than needed to get access for events I would like to attend from folks, including "comrades," who do not post any accessibility information on their event pages or flyers, but have an "accessibility needs" section on their Google forms. Tip: if you don't provide any accessibility information about your event, then I cannot assess what my access needs will be. Am I supposed to list out every single access need I might ever possibly have, simply because of your ignorance?

Even in writing this essay, I am pushing back against the ableist notion that disabled people should just be grateful for whatever we get-whatever crumbs are thrown our way. Well, at least they even had an "accessibility needs" section on their form. And most importantly, I am pushing back against the forced intimacy and emotional labor I am supposed to constantly be engaged in so people won't be "mad" at me, because as disabled people know all too well, able bodied people will not help you with your access unless they "like" you. This is a very real and dangerous caged reality that I and many other disabled people live in and it is one of the main reasons why forced intimacy exists.

Able bodied people treat access as a logistical interaction, rather than a human interaction. People I don't know or who have never even had a conversation with me about disability casually expect to be my "access person," without realizing that there is significant trust and competency that must be built. People assume that I will accept any access-again, any crumbs-thrown my way and of course that I should be ever-grateful for it. They don't realize that consent exists on both ends. Sure, I know how to survive and get by with ableist access, that is a skill I will never lose as long as I am living in an ableist world; but I am also working for a world where disabled people get to be human and have consent over our bodies, minds and intimacy.

The contradiction of having to survive in the oppressive world you are trying to change is always complicated and dehumanizing.

One of the reasons that forced intimacy has been so prominent in my life is because there is an inherent intimacy to access-or at least, in my experience, to my access. When someone is helping me with access, I am vulnerable; I am interdependent with them, even if they don't realize it. There is a vulnerability to access and to disability that is powerful and potentially transformative, if we would only tap into it. Sadly, in an ableist world, access and disability get stripped of their transformative powers and instead get distorted into "dependent," "burden" and "tragic." Forced intimacy is a byproduct of this and functions as a constant oppressive reminder of domination and control.

Though I have written here about forced intimacy as it relates to disability and access, it is in no way relegated only to ableism. I have experienced forced intimacy as it relates to other forms of oppression as well, and it manifests itself in all kinds of different ways. It has been a constant part of my life and my experience as a queer disabled korean transracial and transnational adoptee woman survivor. The forced intimacy of transracial and transnational adoption, for example, is a never-ending black hole for so many of us.

I cannot account here all of the many ways that forced intimacy has so fundamentally impacted and shaped me, that is for another piece of writing. I ache for the day when that will no longer be the case, especially for future generations of disabled children.

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"Forced Intimacy" is a term I have been using for years to refer to the common, daily experience of disabled people being expected to share personal parts of ourselves to survive in an ableist world. This often takes the form of being expected to share (very) personal information with able bodied people to get basic...

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Collaborating on Togetherness and Futurity in Disability Arts 

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Collaborating on Togetherness and Futurity in Disability Arts 

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Some great teachers in the so-called radical mental health first aid arena...

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Some great teachers in the so-called radical mental health first aid arena...

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-Project LETS
-The Icarus Project
-Fireweed Collective
-Radical Mental Health First Aid from Oumou Sylla
-the Mindful Occupation Handbook