What would it look like for us to reimagine care without coercion and punishment, centering the needs of those most harmed by prisons, police, immigration officers, and psychiatric institutions?
As an answer to this question, we have created and are offering to our community the Care on Our Terms: Imagining Crisis Support Beyond the Suicide Hotline zine. This zine explores how we can turn towards each other for support in crisis.
With the passing of last July’s Executive Order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on American Streets,” Mad, mentally ill, disabled, and unhoused people are increasingly warehoused and disappeared through institutionalization. Now, our community and our neighbors are even more vulnerable to unjust incarceration. Our collective building towards autonomy-centered care has never been more essential. We keep each other safe from state violence.
Mental health crisis is not a crime and suicidality is not an irrational response to the violent society we live in – a society that regularly denies people life-saving health care while allowing genocides and wars to be funded by our tax dollars; allowing Black folks, children, and trans people to be murdered in schools and on the streets; and allowing undocumented people to be arrested and deported simply for existing.
We are not free until mentally ill and suicidal people are free. Free from non-consensual interventions, medical abuse, and incarceration. We seek to build a world where people experiencing mental health crises are met with life-affirming care instead of carceral interventions that seek to confine and control behavior.
We hope this zine inspires you to dream up new desires for care and to build towards those desires in your own networks.
Zine Artwork by Veshalini Naidu in collaboration with the #SafeHotlines campaign
The Care on Our Terms zine also doubles as a coloring book! Print your own black-and-white version at home!
Are you a community organization that serves LGBTQIA+ people? Do you want to have copies of the Care on Our Terms zine on hand? Fill out the form below by Apr 17 to receive 50 free copies!