I’m Indigo Daya (she/her), welcome to my blog.
I’m a mad psychiatric survivor, working towards collective liberation from oppressive psychiatric systems, and dreaming of a world where madness has been totally reimagined.
I live, create and work on the stolen lands of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation. The traditional Aboriginal name for this city is Naarm (so-called ‘Melbourne, Australia’). This always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.
I built this website to share my work. To connect with others who want to work, think, create or resist together. And to share reflections and stories about things that matter to me: madness, trauma & oppression, carceral systems like psychiatry, emancipatory practices, resistance and mad art.
Some of my mad dreams
I dream of a world that wants to learn from the wisdom and important messages held in madness
I dream of everyone being free from psychiatric incarceration and state-sponsored abuses
I dream of people honouring the innate creativity, strengths and gifts in mad ways of being
We are so very far from that world. Too many of us have to live in fear of the next incarceration, the next hideous side effect, or the next person who sends cops to our home and calls it ‘help’. If anything, psychiatric power is growing more rapidly than ever before.
And yet, what keeps me going is the knowledge that sometimes, in precious moments and thoughtful encounters, we can create that world right now.
Not everywhere, not all the time, not yet. But in small moments and spaces between people, we can still change the world.
In actions of deep solidarity, in creative arts that transform understanding. In acts of transformative and epistemic justice, in bold acts of resistance. And in the simple but sacred act of turning up for a human being in pain, without any agenda except to believe them, to love them, and to be trustworthy by relentlessly upholding their human rights and choices.
Things to explore on my blog
Independent Supervision and Co-reflection
I have a small supervision practice, working alongside mad / survivor / consumer workers, in co-reflection about practice ethics and experiences.
I am open to working with unmad folks for supervision too (if they are committed to anti-carceral, non-pathologising practices). Read more…
Mad/Survivor (re)Searching & Making Projects
Sometimes I make mad art, and occasionally people offer me space to exhibit it, which is very nice indeed.
I’m also working on a mad PhD about self-injury and silencing, and a peer practice grounded in arts & emancipation.
Mad thinking and writing
Reflections about madness, psychiatry, trauma and oppression, and my own mad meanderings through life…
New blog posts (coming soon)
Old blog posts (before 2019)
Resources
Academic papers
Public speaking, education and training
Sometimes I speak at conferences or events, give guest lectures, or deliver training courses. Every time feels like a sacred duty, and I do my best to honour the collective experiences of psych survivors, recognising how many of us are silenced. I always aim to speak with creativity and courage.
- Public talks
- Training and education (coming soon)
Trigger warning free: this site is unapologetically direct
I’m not a fan of the mental health system, if you haven’t noticed yet. If that’s not your vibe you might find this site challenging.
I’m also not a fan of trigger or content warnings, so you won’t find them on this site. But if you value them, please know I pretty much talk about all The Big Painful Stuff all over this site.
Rebuilding this site
I’m in the middle of doing a major review of this website, so my apologies if it’s a bit confusing. Some of the posts here are more than a decade old, and my views have sometimes shifted slightly, and sometimes entirely. That happens as you get older, and while I think it’s a good sign that I’m still open enought to change my mind when I learn new things, it’s also bloody inconvenient. Over time, I plan to annotate my older blogs to reflect my current thinking, and to add new writing. As you can imagine, this is a big task and will take some time.
In the meantime, feel free to explore what’s here anyway. Even though my opinions have shifted on things, the heart of my story is still what it always was, and I know some folks have found comfort in reading experiences that are rarely spoken publicly – about abuse, hearing voices, suicide and self-injury. About finding meaning in the madness.
Some of my thinking that’s changed—
- I no longer identify with the concept of ‘recovery’ (though I still have respect for its origins and the emancipatory dreams that other survivors had when they fought for it).
- I no longer believe in reform. No powerful, violent system has ever, in all of history, transformed into something beloved. I think the psych system is operating exactly as it’s meant to: as an oppressive arm of the carceral state, feeding capitalism and enacting social control over those of us who veer too far from ‘normal’, or who threaten the status quo. Psychiatry is more powerful than ever.
- I no longer believe in trauma-informed practice and I’m trying to divest from the language of ‘trauma’ too (though that’s hard). Like every concept we survivors and consumers fought for, it’s utterly co-opted and these days it’s mostly gaslighting. I’ll have a lot more to say on this!
- I don’t have the tidy story that I used to think I did. Reality is far messier, and I’m still coming to terms with that.
- I feel uncomfortable about things on this website like the coping skills resource. I know heaps of folks find it helpful (annoyingly it’s by far the most popular thing on my site), but I think it’s really problematic and individualising, and I plan to rework it. For now, I’ve just added a few more explanatory notes on the resources page.
But I still believe absolutely that our mad experiences are deeply meaningful, and that they’re rooted in our experiences in the world. It’s just that, after so many decades of living with them and thinking deeply, I’ve reached a much more politicised position. I don’t expect others to agree with me, most don’t. That’s ok. But this is my little corner to speak anyway.
If you want to get across some of my more recent writing, head over to Instagram, or check out my posts on Twitter (I’m no longer active there, but my posts remain).
As social media keeps moving to the right, blogs are going to matter again
For a while I almost closed this site down. Blogs have largely been replaced by social media in the last decade, and that’s where I’ve been writing online for some years now.
But with the increasing presence of hate on those platforms, and knowing the ultra right-wing positionality of so many social media owners, I feel called back to crafting my own little corner of the web. I am free from censorship here as well, and as I speak more about topics like suicide and self-injury, it’s especially important to have that freedom from paternalistic censorship.
What’s coming as I grow new content here
I plan to reshape this site to have lots of ideas, reflections and resources for our mad/survivor community, including a big rework of my links page for all the fab delicious mad folks I’ve come to know in recent years.
I’ll recreate some of my social media writing so nothing is lost as we all keep moving from platform to platform. As I used to, I’ll come back to blogs that reflect on living with the big mad.
I hope I can offer and share resources to mad-identified/psych survivor folks looking to make change, whether it’s abolitionist work, direct action, growing mad alternatives in our local communities, or even doing reform or peer work inside the system. I’m no longer a fan of working in the system myself, but I respect each of us choosing the battles that work for us. Hey, I did it for 18 years myself. I have many friends who still do that work, and I support others who do it. While I put a lot of energy into finding the path that’s right for me, I don’t want to become someone who dictates the right path for others… there are many battlefronts. I am thinking of Caroline Mazel-Carlton in this moment, and a time she refered to consumer/lived experience work as a ‘tour of duty’ many of us have to go on. I guess none of us know what matters most, maybe it all does.
I’ll share mad art on here, and mad/survivor projects, and info about my peer support and coreflection practice – especially for folks who want to get in touch for support. I have quite limited spaces while I’m doing my PhD, but I’ll always be as flexible as I can.
Gosh, that sounds like a lot. Maybe I won’t do all that, but we’ll see. Thank you for visiting. May we all be free from oppression.
And may Palestine be free.
