Radical (non-extractive) Intimacies have shaped the shared imaginaries of generations of mental health consumers and psychiatric system survivors (some of societies’ most disposable and dispensable, marginalised and brutalised ‘othered’ others). Peer-with-peer relational counter-paradigms, counter- patterns and counter-practices continue to emerge and inform the ongoing generation of ‘outsider’ social movement safe spaces, systemic innovations, structural interventions and epistemic disruptions.
Consumer-survivors-peers are leading a shift from engagement with neoliberal corporate- professional service delivery and the relentless tracking of billable hours and unit costing data to engaging systemically with mulitiplicities of contextualities and relationalities and dentities through Warm Data*; and from the individualisation of pathology and treatment to mutual learning (symmathesy*) and mutual healing (coliberation); and from the entrapment of depreciative diagnoses (diminishing otherings) oriented towards shame and paralysis to the coalescence of invisible intra-actions (aphanipoiesis) oriented towards celebration and vitality. (*after Nora Bateson).
Morgan Cataldo and Daryl Taylor are members of the Applying ‘The Community Development Continuum’ to Emotional Distress and Mental Illness consumer-survivor-peer collective. Morgan and
Daryl hope to one day co-host a MemeFest on post-colonial, post- carceral and post-corporate, commons- oriented co-liberatory (and co-abolishionist) approaches to, and interventions in, human and living
systems vitality and flourishing.
