Indigo Daya

I live, create and work on the stolen, unceded lands of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation. The traditional Aboriginal name for this city is Naarm (so-called ‘Melbourne, Australia’).

Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land

I’m Indigo Daya, a mad, survivor artist, writer and activist. I work independently as a peer supporter and coreflector/supervisor, where I’m committed to anti-carceral, non-pathologising practices that deeply value the innate wisdom of our mad community. I’m working on a PhD exploring creative, emancipatory approaches to peer support for people with experiences of self-injury, injustice and silencing. In between, I do some public speaking and training, collaborate on mad abolitionist projects, and try to fulfil every wish of my senior rescue cat, Mr Billy Carson.

My positionality

I’m a mad, fat, queer, multiply disabled, cis gendered woman, and a survivor of some horrid things, like child abuse, bullying, madness, and psychiatric violence and oppression. I was incarcerated in psych wards off and on over 11 years, often by force, often via cops. I was given electroshock, forced drugs and depots, strip searched and locked in solitary. All in the name of ‘safety’ and ‘care’.

Actually, psychiatry treated me much more like my childhood abusers, than anything resembling ‘care’.

I continue to live with madness. I try to love it, be in relationship, learn together – but tbh sometimes I just hate it and wish it would piss off, I’m tired. Despite that, I understand that the madness isn’t really in ‘me’ at all—my madness is just the reflection of a world filled with hate, violence, abuse, oppression and exploitation. I wish those things would all piss off even more.

It is an outrage to me that billions of dollars are continually poured into psilly research on psych drugs and brain imaging, when what would make so much more difference is an end to transphobia, colonialism, misogny and capitalist exploitation. More love, less hate. More affordable housing, less billionaires. More land back, less mining.

I used to do hopeful ‘lived experience’ work in the psych system, but I absconded and became an abolitionist

For 18 years, I worked inside the mental health system, trying so hard to influence change. I felt optimism that one day the places that claim to help us could stop hurting so many of us. I ended up in some pretty senior roles with supposed influence.

But it turned out that the freedom, voice and allyship I thought I was working towards was an illusion. In the end, ‘lived experience’ work become one more thing to survive.

Slowly but inevitably, I lost faith in reform, and the writings of abolitionists helped me come to grips with this. First, Stella Akua Mensah writing about psych abolition, then I began reading folks like Mariame Kaba, Debbie Kilroy and Angela Davis.

In 2022, after a series of particularly dreadful work experiences, and the closest brush with suicide I’d had in years, it was enough. I worked it through in a series of self-portrait paintings, and with trustworthy survivor supporters who could hear me.

I finally saw what I needed to see, and I absconded from ‘lived experience’ work to strike out on a new, mad, abolitionist path.

An independent mad path

I no longer work for the mental health system. No more endless committees, submissions and co-option, no more workplace tokenism, gaslighting, sanism and bullying. Still, going back to a low income has been hard. As has trying to work out where, how, or even if, I fit in the world now. Often I’ve felt aloneness so big it felt like it was crushing me into dust. But I’ve been slowly stitching and glueing together myself and a new path in this mad wilderness, finding my comrades and possibility along the way.

Now, I’m doing a mad PhD on self-injury & silencing (check it out!). I didn’t think I could do something like this, but somehow I am. And, I’m doing it at art school, with so much more freedom for mad ethics.

I’ve come back to making art, and I have the joy of offering independent peer support and coreflection/supervision (totally free of the system) to a small group of folks. For 14 months I cofacilitated the only Alt2Su group in Naarm, which was so precious. I continue to think and learn alongside other mad/survivor folks who want to walk abolitionist paths.

I no longer think it’s my mission to try and reform the system that abused me. No, no, no. It’s their job to stop being violent—it’s my job to break free and grow more love and community. These days my mission is to do my part in crafting a different kind of world, where even if just for an hour or two, we can be free from psychiatry and imagine differently, together.

I’m done explaining why and why not to people who are committed to misunderstanding.

Devon Blow (@DevThePineapple)

Sometimes I’m still invited to give public talks, and sometimes I still do education work, if the ethics feel good enough. But largely, I spend a lot of time at home, with my cat Billy, listening to my mad spirit, or making art, or reading, or writing… always pondering the big mad questions. I got too isolated, so I now spend a lot of time launching myself back into the world to experience the great love of good friends, and the absolute beauty of being alongside other mad folks who invite me into support relationships. I zine with mad mates when we can, and I dream about our collective liberation.

I continue to wonder and wander, to try and morph from worrier to warrior. I am not quite lost, but not quite found. I exist, I try, I resist, I rest.

Trigger warning free: this site is unapologetically direct

I’m not a fan of the mental health system, by the way. I reject psych labels, and I believe the psych system should be abolished. 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 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.