Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness: A Reader and Roadmap of Bipolar Worlds

This book emerged out of our website, the Icarus Project, which has been helping a brilliant and disparate group of folks find ways to talk about manic depression that make sense to us, the people living with it, and helps us to live better lives rather than backing us into corners. This book began as a way of bringing these conversations onto the written page and into the hands of people who might not spend time on the internet. It has evolved to be a set of alternative roadmaps for people like us who are trying to take care of ourselves and live out our dreams.

The Icarus Project envisions a new culture and language that resonates with our actual experiences of 'mental illness' rather than trying to fit our lives into a conventional framework. We are a network of people living with experiences that are commonly labeled as bipolar or related madness. We believe we have a dangerous gift to be cultivated and taken care of, rather than a disease or disorder to be suppressed or eliminated. By joining together as individuals and as a community, the intertwined threads of madness and creativity can inspire hope and transformation in a repressed and damaged world. Our participation in The Icarus Project helps us overcome alienation and tap into the true potential that lies between brilliance and madness.

Together, we call for new space and freedom for extreme states of consciousness, and alternatives to the medical model and the traumatic legacy of psychiatric abuse. We recognize that we live in a crazy world, and insist that our sensitivities, visions, and inspirations are not necessarily symptoms of illness. Sometimes breakdown can be the entrance to breakthrough. We call for more options in understanding and treating emotional distress, and we believe that everyone, regardless of income, should have access to these choices. Consistent with the Icarus vision, we respect diversity and embrace harm reduction and self-determination around treatment decisions: everyone is welcome, whether you take psychiatric drugs or not and whether you describe yourself with diagnostic categories or not.