This zine is an excellent introduction to making your own herbal medicines with plants that you forage yourself in the wild. It features an essay explaining the importance of making our own medicine and then outlines how to make several different types of herbal medicines. These include infusions, decoctions, salves, syrups, infused oils, tinctures, glycerites, etc.
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Black Cross Health Collective is an affinity group of health care workers who live in Portland, Oregon. We formed after the WTO protests because we saw a need for medical care that is specific to the radical community. We think our needs as radicals are different, and that groups like the Red Cross don’t give us the skills we need to keep ourselves and each other safe in the streets. So we called upon our own medical experience (as nurse practioners, nurses, EMT’s, clinical herbalists, and more), as well as our experience in demos and direct actions, and formed Black Cross. Since then, we’ve done first aid trainings in Portland and around the country, provided medical support at local and national demos, and are conducting trials looking for a way to neutralize pepper spray.
We believe that health care is political. The kind of care we do or don’t receive, where and how we receive that care, who provides that care, who has access to training to provide care, and what kinds of trainings are smiled or frowned upon, all involve inherently political issues.
We believe the system needs to be changed… the health care system right along with all the others.We’ve put this zine together mostly to go along with a first aid training. While doing the trainings we realized there was way more to say about first aid than we would have time to say it in. So we thought a little reading would maybe be helpful to y’all.
Remember the most important words you can ever learn to say are “I don’t know.”
Fight the power, do no harm.
– Black Cross Health Collective
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Version 1 of the Activist Trauma Support zine, 36 A5 pages in PDF including Editorial, Avoiding Burnout at Climate Camp 2006, Total Eclipse, International Groups, Out of Action in German for G8, Report from Israeli T-Team, ATS Trauma Briefing, 2 Minute Relaxation, My Experiences Post Stirling, Callout for more articles.
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We believe that there is an urgent need to talk publicly about the relationship between social injustice and our mental health. We believe that we need to start redefining what it actually means to be mentally healthy, not just on an individual level, but on collective, communal, and global levels.
We know that many people at Occupy sites around the country are struggling to figure out how to build spaces of support and healing. We also know that police violence and the stresses of street protest can have very real mental, emotional, and energetic effects that are all too often not taken seriously.
“Like all governments, presidents, and authority, psychiatry never gave me freedom. Assigned psychiatric labels didn’t help me – they only filled me with an internalized sense of victimhood and inferiority. Medication didn’t ‘cure’ or ‘fix’ me – only damaged me, numbing me to my own senses in order to create an emotional void between me and the fuckery of civilized life. So instead, with nihilist celebration I descend into madness, taking aim at social order and civilization. With armed animalism I realize now that there was to fix my natural contempt for domestication and social control reminds me that I was never ‘broken’ to begin with.”
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The writers of this book conceptualize emotional resiliency as something to build up and work on collectively, to take inventory of, to find respite in and something to call on as a set of guiding strengths and principles when responding to trauma. Our conceptions are informed by what we know of trauma, PTSD, PTSC and the characteristics of each, which is related in the following pages. We believe it is useful to ground our collective knowledge of trauma in its own particular conceptual and ideological history; integral to our purpose is an alternative to the widely popularized neoliberal notions of self-care that are as disempowering and isolating to us as they are reinforcing to the hegemonies of capital and state power. We aim to propagate resiliency as a methodology to counter the traumas weaponized by the various oppressive forces that divide and diminish us, thereby building our long-term capacity for rebellion against them.
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Quite a while ago, just before the upheavals of the ’60s-shifts that have not ceased, but have been forced in less direct, less public directions — Marcuse in his One-Dimensional Man, described a populace characterized by flattened personality, satisfied and content. With the pervasive anguish of today, who could be so described? Therein lies a deep, if inchoate critique.
Much theorizing has announced the erosion of individuality’s last remnants; but if this were so, if society now consists of the thoroughly homogenized and domesticated, how can there remain the enduring tension which must account for such levels of pain and loss? More and more people I have known have cracked up. It’s going on to a staggering degree, in a context of generalized, severe emotional disease-ease.
Marx predicted, erroneously, that a deepening material immiseration would lead to revolt and to capital’s downfall. Might it not be that an increasing psychic suffering is itself leading to the reopening of revolt — indeed, that this may even be the last hope of resistance?
And yet it is obvious that “mere” suffering is no guarantee of anything. “Desire does not ‘want’ revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right,” as Deleuze and Guattari pointed out, while further on in Anti-Oedipus, remembering fascism, noting that people have desired against their own interests, and that tolerance of humiliation and enslavement remains widespread.
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The mental health system, despite all its complexity, can be described as a drainage hole for human suffering. Mostly, the pain that flows into it seeps into the groundwater, but occasionally it will reverse course and erupt into “normal” life as if from a geyser.
Reducing a wide collection of psycho-social phenomena into one generic mold of “human suffering” without committing a grave injustice to the diversity of voices within the “patient” community, voices that yearn to be differentiated and heard, is extremely difficult. Nevertheless, my experience has shown that a certain pattern or structure does underlie most interactions in the mental health system — often, the pain encountered in its bounds combines a type of Hurt, the conviction that something wrong and unjust has happened to me, with some kind of Silence, indicated by a paucity of language in the interpersonal space and in some cases, the actual inability to put one’s experience into words. These two features — Hurt and Silence — usually merge and become inseparable. Thus, in the interaction with the “consumer,” the mental health “professional” can either reinforce the foundation of Hurt and sentence the “consumer” to continued silence or, alternatively, work toward the disentangling of these two elements.
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This piece of writing comes out of a series of discussions which occurred on the forums of libcom.org. It was repeatedly raised that depression, mental illness, and emotional stress are very common amongst libertarian political activists. Furthermore, suffering from mental illness as someone who is politically active often comes with its own set of complications. Sometimes the wider anarchist/ activist community is supportive and helpful. Other times, we can feel just as alienated amongst fellow anarchists as we do from the rest of capitalist society.
With that in mind, the goal of this pamphlet is to offer some advice on what’s generally helpful in maintaining overall mental health. We have various sections that look at these issues from different angles, roughly as follows:
General advice
Management strategies
Personal accounts
Links
Advice from anarchist/radical mental health workers
Essays on organisational culture and mental health
Tips and discussion topics for groups and organisations
We don’t, however, want to pretend for a second that this pamphlet is a substitute for professional medical advice. While we’re critical of certain aspects of mental health treatment, if you’re suffering from severe depression or considering hurting yourself, please speak to someone immediately.
Living with depression isn’t easy. Far too often, on a societal as well as inter- personal level, mental health issues are ignored—or worse, written off with sufferers being blamed as weak or just overreacting.
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Prisoners all over the world commonly experience medical neglect and a dehumanising separation from wild places. However, weeds come up through the concrete cracks. This book contains detailed profiles of ten plants that are commonly found in prison yards. It is based on my use of plants during my own 3.5-year prison sentence, with suggestions on how to prepare medicines in prison with limited resources.
It also includes tips and tricks for making the most out of foods, spices and condiments available from the prison canteen (commissary), as well as sections on how to connect with plant allies emotionally and how to care for wounds in a prison environment.
For readers on the outside, it provides practical advice about how to work with common weeds in simple and direct ways and will inspire solidarity across the walls.