Staying Wild, Surviving Together: Mad Justice and Reimagining Care

Join us for a powerful online abolitionist webinar exploring why we must dream, build, and fight for a world beyond psychiatry. Rooted in Mad pride and resistance, this session will unravel the violence of the medical model and how it pathologises our natural responses to a brutal world.

Psychiatry, like the prison system, polices difference and marginalisation, cages distress, and criminalises survival. But our grief, rage, and breakdowns are not disorders—they are truths. They are reasonable responses to unbearable conditions and can be paths to healing and liberation.

We need to stop diagnosing what is political, stop sedating what is sacred, and stop demanding placid compliance and wellness as conditions for belonging.

Our panel:

Indigo Daya:

Indigo is a mad, queer, multiply disabled psychiatric survivor who brings lived experience of violence, incarceration, and psychiatric labelling to their abolitionist work. After 18 years in the mental health system—including as a consumer worker—they walked away in 2022, no longer believing in reform that continually harms survivors. Their work now centres on building alternative solutions to psychiatric oppression—ones rooted in collective care, creativity, and justice. Indigo is passionate about epistemic justice, survivor-led initiatives, and using the arts to amplify mad wisdom and resist carceral systems. They work in community with fellow survivors through peer support, co-reflection, and mutual learning, always with a vision toward collective liberation.

Dr KJ Hepworth:

KJ is a queer, disabled activist/scholar, passionate zine maker, artist and teacher whose work centres on making space for access, connection, and mutual care. As the current co-recipient of the Stratford Scholarship, where they are exploring what care could look like outside of psychiatric systems of harm. Their work asks: What would it mean to hold each other in our full humanity, without pathologising pain? Across all of their work, KJ is committed to imagining and building liberatory futures, and creating accessible tools that help communities move toward those visions together.

Mush McLoughlan:

Mush McLoughlan is a white settler living on unceded Wurundjeri land. They are a mad psych survivor and deathsinger (someone who lives with ‘suicide’) and dream of a world free of cages of all kinds; from prisons to psych wards. Mush has a long history of navigating mental health systems, particularly crisis and suicide prevention services. These experiences have shown them the violence of coercive and pathologising approaches—and sparked their commitment to imagining and building radically different ways of being with people experiencing ‘suicidality’ or singing their death song. Mush began doing this work, co-founding and co-facilitating Alternatives to Suicide Naarm and with their 2024 Stratford Scholarship project where they explored deathsongs as a non-pathologising, community-based responses to ‘suicide’.

Tabitha Lean:

Tabitha Lean is a criminalised, Mad survivor and resister. She is a poet, artist, storyteller, disruptor, and troublemaker. Her work emerges from lived experience of both criminal and psychiatric incarceration, and is grounded in collective care, creative resistance, and the refusal of carceral and psychiatric control. She lives and creates at the margins — with love.

Tabitha is a co-recipient of the Stratford Scholarship, where she hopes to open a creative portal of possibility to imagine worlds beyond cages—where communities of care, grounded in radical reciprocity, render coercive psychiatry obsolete.