About Indigo

Photo of Indigo, smiling. She's a white, cis woman in her 50s, with turquoise hair and glass.

I’m a mad survivor artist, activist and (re)searcher based in Naarm (so-called Melbourne, Australia).

I built this website to share my work and life stories about madness, trauma & oppression, resistance and creativity.

I hope it’s of value to my mad / survivor community—and perhaps also to those who want to stand in solidarity with us.

My positionality in brief

I’m a white settler, living and working on the stolen lands of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nations.

I am mad, living with experiences that have led to hate, violence and incarceration. I’m a psychiatric survivor and a survivor of some horrid mad-making things, including child sexual abuse and bullying. During my years as a psych patient I was given many labels, like ‘schizophrenia’, ‘schizoaffective disorder’ and ‘bpd’, but I have shed these labels. They are just the reductionist stories of people who hurt me. Like all psych labels, they exist as tools of injustice, designed to discredit, control, hide and silence people.

I’m fat and multiply disabled, including chronic pain and being hard of hearing—all of which makes it hard to move easily about the world. I am a cis-gendered woman, and I identify as queer and sexually disoriented.

I’m an ex-consumer worker, with 18 years experience in and around the mental health system, fighting for reform, calling for the voices of survivors to be heard and respected—but I absconded from that work in 2022, with rather a lot of heartbreak.

All of these experiences lead me to think and work from a critical, abolitionist perspective. I do not believe in reform anymore. I have never seen it work, and it can utterly consume us (nevertheless, I understand and hold respect for those survivors who are still in there, holding the line in this exhausting, lonely work).

Instead, these days, I work when I can to build a different, better world where we can be free of psychiatric oppression—free of all oppression. My work is dedicated to:

Searching out new ways of knowing with my mad comrades—learning from the wisdom of our madness experiences with a sociopolitical lens, not a biomedical or psy perspective.

Growing loving, creative and anti-carceral survivor initiatives, free of the psych system.

Creating opportunities for epistemic justice*, and exploring emancipatory peer practices. To me, that means moving towards voice, freedom and resistance, rather than labelling, regulation and resilience.

Drawing on creative arts practices as a natural partner to madness, as a tool for expanding the possibilities for voice, justice, connection and emancipation.

Standing in solidarity with mad, psych survivors working towards our collective liberation. I do this in informal meet ups, peer support and supervision/coreflection relationships.

*Epistemic injustice is a term coined by Miranda Fricker. Epistemic is another word for knowledge. Many folks, including psych survivors, have written about how it applies to us. It is epistemic injustice when we speak of what was done to us and we are not believed—because of our psych labels, race, gender, sexuality and/or disability. Every time a psychiatrist tells us we lack insight or capacity it is epistemic injustice (arguably the purpose of psych labels is to make the testimony of some people less credible). It is also epistemic injustice when we want to speak out but the words or concepts don’t yet exist for what happened. This is common, for example, for many abuse experiences which do not have nouns or verbs, and exist only as memories or in our bodies, and so we cannot speak or even begin to be believed or find justice or freedom. Epistemic injustice occurs for many oppressed groups of people, particularly in relation to colonized people, gender, madness and disability. Read more: Daya (2022); Russo (2023); LeBlanc & Kinsella (2016); Fricker (2007); Dotson (2014).

I’m a psychiatric survivor

Many people like me identify as psychiatric survivors. This is an intentionally political identity which makes clear that the places which claimed to help me (psychiatry) were actually just sources of more oppressive, traumatic experiences for me to survive.

I was incarcerated in psych wards off and on over 11 years, often by force, often involving cops. I was given electroshock, forced drugs, strip searched and locked in solitary. All in the name of ‘safety’ and ‘care’. But actually, psychiatry treated me much more like my childhood abusers than anything resembling ‘care’. It was state-sponsored institutional abuse.

I wrote about some of these experiences in a paper called Russian Dolls and Epistemic Crypts (2022). This outrage continues to fire me to speak out against the violence of psychiatry and to be an activist for change.

It’s an outrage to me that billions of dollars are continually poured into (p)silly research on psych drugs and brain imaging, and into psychiatric systems that lock us up and control us—when what would make so much more difference is an end to transphobia, colonialism, misogny and capitalist exploitation.

Or more love, less hate. Or more affordable housing, less billionaires. Or more land back, less mining. But, I guess that doesn’t serve the powers that be.

I’m mad

Madness is another intentionally politicised identity. Like queerness, identifying as mad is a way to reclaim language that was previously used to hurt. In this instance, to discredit, ‘other’ and control.

By using the word ‘mad’, we move away from the pathologising labels of psychiatry that say our experiences are an illness or disorder—and instead, we can claim madness as a deeply meaningful, and often valuable, human experience.

I continue to live with madness. It exists in my life as turtling (what others call dissociation), huge shape-shifting emotions, suicidality and self-injury. I used to hear voices but these days I tend to see visions instead.

I try to love my madness, 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.

Leaving “lived experience work”

I used to do hopeful ‘lived experience’ work in the psych system, but in 2022 I absconded and became an abolitionist. I still feel a sadness when I think of that old hope, my belief that if folks in the system could just hear us, then they would care, and things would change. I didn’t understand how systems work, or the social and political function of the psych system. I didn’t understand power.

Photo of Indigo sitting at conference table speaking into a microphone.

For 18 years, I worked inside the mental health system, trying so hard, with all I could, to influence change.

I felt optimistic that one day the places that claim to help us would stop hurting us. I ended up in some pretty senior roles with supposed influence. For example, I was the general manager of advocacy at a major NGO, a senior advisor to the chief psychiatrist of Victoria, an advisor to the royal commission into Victoria’s mental health system. I sat on boards, audits and reviews, I led advocacy campaigns, I met with the minister and politicians, I met with my mad survivor/consumer community. I worked all-nighters, through weekends, never stopping, so determined to make a difference.

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 finally 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.

I am only now, a few years on, reaching the space where I can start to write about this, and I hope to share some blog posts on this site about my experiences as a ‘consumer worker’.

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. I am behind schedule, frequently overwhelmed and confused, and discovering that academia is also a colonial and carceral institution. But I’m doing it at art school, which gives me more freedom for mad ethics.

Short film (11min) on my art installation Slice/Silence,
which became the basis of my PhD on self-injury, injustice & silencing.

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)

Imperfection and mess versus ‘recovery’

I feel embarrassed about some of the older blog posts on this site. There are many reasons for this, but one is that I engaged in the well-trodden path of sharing my story as though it was finished, and promoting the idea of the ‘recovered consumer success story’. It was all in good faith, it was true for me at the time, but a decade on my story has continued to evolve, and it is much messier. I am often a big mad mess. All I can do is to keep speaking as authentically as I can—and perhaps there is some value in sharing this personal evolution? We all keep growing and learning.

For many years I worked full time, with a high profile. These days, sometimes I’m still invited to give public talks, and sometimes I still do education work, if the ethics feel good enough. I work on my PhD, but this is often chaotic. 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… pondering the big mad questions, or disappearing.

In the painful time after leaving consumer work, I also began a tentative journey of pursuing ‘victims of crime’ compensation for childhood sexual abuse. I wanted to give myself an experience of justice, but I forgot that justice doesn’t really come from state systems. The pain of opening up these old histories in detail, of trying to access historical records, has been an anguish. I have become lost a lot of the time, seeing frightening visions, the old shame rising up again, new fears making an appearance. It has been a lot of work to navigate fresh madness experiences, keep myself free of psychiatry, and still keep going.

I got too isolated in the years following consumer work, 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. My health has taken a big hit and I spend a lot of time working on that, too.

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 disappear, I return.

I search, I create, I resist.

I hide, I burst out, I rest.

I am imperfect, I am still here, I am trying.