Saturday, July 13, 2024
12 - 3 PM
Battery Park
Burlington, Vermont
March Route
We will assemble in a parking lot located at King Street and South Winooski Avenue (essentially, one-half block east of the Hood Plant parking lot).
The march officially begins at King Street and South Winooski Avenue. Begin on South Winooski Avenue (at King Street). Turn left (west) on Main Street, turn right (north) on Church Street, turn left (west) on Pearl Street into Battery Park.
Parking Lot
Battery Park
1 PM
Program
WELCOME
Shea Witzberger, Emcee
Wilda White, Chair, 2024 Vermont Mad Pride Planning Committee
Chris Nial, Speaker
Malaika Puffer, Speaker
Dan Towle, Open Mic
Beatrice Birch, Speaker
Aurora Calderon, Open Mic
J Helms, Speaker
Serenity Lohr, Speaker
Betsy Hoekstra, Speaker
Sasha Warren, Keynote Speaker
Sunny War, Keynote Performer
About the Keynotes
SUNNY WAR is a Nashville-born singersongwriter and guitar virtuoso. She started to play guitar at age seven, and wrote her first song at age 13, while playing in her first band, Anus Kings. Growing up, she was obsessed with AC/DC, ‘80s guitar bands like Motley Crüe, and Bad Brains, the Minutemen, and X. As a teenager, she began drinking heavily, which led to her dropping out of school. She also spent time in psychiatric hospitals. She played punk shows, stole and chugged bottles of vodka, and became addicted to heroin and meth. For money she busked along the boardwalks in Venice Beach, recording an album to sell out of her guitar case. A series of seizures landed her in a sober living facility in Compton.
Music remained a lifeline, and she fell in with a crew at Hen House Studios in Venice, where over the years she made a series of albums and EPs, including 2018’s With the Sun and 2021’s Simple Syrup. Reflecting on her life 12 years after kicking meth and heroin, Sunny observed: “Everyone I loved died before they reached 25. They OD’ed or killed themselves. We were just kids who didn’t have anyone looking out for us. You’re not supposed to know so much about death at such a young age. Maybe that’s why I write a lot about not taking shit for granted, because it always feels like something’s about to happen.”
“I feel like there are two sides of me,” Sunny says. “One of them is very self-destructive, and the other is trying to work with that other half to keep things balanced. Everybody is a beast just trying their hardest to be good. That’s what it is to be human. You’re not really good or bad. You’re just trying to stay in the middle of those two things all the time, and you’re probably doing a shitty job of it. That’s okay, because we’re all just monsters.”
Sunny wrote her latest album, Anarchist Gospel, between a breakup, a move back to Nashville and her dad dying. “What I learned, I think,” says Sunny, “is that the best thing to do is just to feel everything and deal with it. Just feel everything.”
SASHA DURAKOV WARREN, a writer based in Minneapolis, is author of the new book Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt published by Common Notions Press. His experiences within the psychiatric system and a commitment to radical politics led him to co-found the group Hearing Voices – Twin Cities, which provides an alternative social space for individuals to discuss extreme experiences and network with one another. Following the George Floyd uprising in 2020, he founded the project Of Unsound Mind to trace the histories of psychiatry, social work, and public health’s connections to policing, prisons, and various disciplinary and managerial technologies.
In his book Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt , Warren offers a unique and engaging look at radical changes in psychiatry. He explores two main trends in mental health services throughout the 20th century. One trend aims for idealistic and complete care, while the other is content with just managing or getting rid of chronically idle populations.
Warren connects moral treatment to the utopian socialist movement. He compares the French Institutional Psychotherapy by Félix Guattari with Brazilian art therapy by Nise da Silveira. He also links the Mexican antipsychiatry movement’s thoughts on violence with ideas from Argentinian psychoanalysis and Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial therapy. Additionally, he contrasts the Italian Democratic Psychiatry and Brazilian anti-institutional movements with the 1960s–70s North American, counterculture’s antipsychiatry factions.
Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt challenges the separation between social and biological approaches to mental health, as well as between psychiatry and anti-psychiatry. By examining the history of psychiatry in the context of revolution, war, and economic development, Warren presents a different history of mental health care. This history is based on shared struggles against scarcity, poverty, isolation, and exploitation.
Sponsors
TRAILBLAZERS
Disability Rights Vermont
Intentional Peer Support
LMW Design
Pathways Vermont
Vermont Psychiatric Survivors
ADVOCATE
Wilda L. White Consulting
ALLY
MadFreedom, Inc.
PARTNER
Northern Vermont University, NVU Graduate Program
SUPPORTER
The Copeland Center
CONTRIBUTORS
Community Health Centers, Safe Harbor
VERMONT PSYCHIATRIC SURVIVORS, INC. is an independent, statewide mutual support and civil rights advocacy organization run by and for psychiatric survivors.
Founded in 1983, we offer mutual support, publish a quarterly newspaper that is distributed throughout Vermont, offer patient representation in Vermont psychiatric hospitals and residential facilities, sponsor peer-led support groups, advocate and educate to challenge discrimination, and offer technical assistance to allied organizations.
Scan to read Counterpoint newspaper: vermontpsychiatricsurvivors.org
Speaker Bios
BEATRICE BIRCH,
executive director and founder of Inner Fire- ‘Deep Healing without or minimal Meds’, is a Hauschka Artistic Therapist and has worked in integrative clinics, rehabilitation centers and prisons in England, Holland and the USA, where her work calls upon the whole human being: body, soul and spirit. Her belief in the creative human spirit and the choice to be proactive in the healing journey is foundational to all her work. Founded in 2015, Inner Fire, www.innerfire.us in southern Vermont, is a proactive healing community offering striving individuals the choice to recover from debilitating and traumatic life situations, which typically lead to addiction or mental (soul) health challenges, and strengthen themselves on a deeper soul-spiritual level while tapering slowly from their mind-altering, psychotropic medications. We are not anti-medications but rather we believe in the power of choice.
AURORA CALDERON
is a Christian wife and mother of four. Hailing from Harlem, New York transplanted to Norfolk, Virginia, I call Burlington my home. Chef by trade she fancies herself a multi-medium creative because she’s a beginner sketch artist, she makes beaded and wire wrapped jewelry as well as various resin art creations. She’s living with a few mental health struggles and traumas both old and new. She’s actively engaged in her healing journey by way of prayer, therapy, and medication. She tries to use her creativity as a way to express and process her experiences.
J RIVER HELMS (they/them) has worked for Pathways Vermont since 2019. In their current role as Director of Training & Advocacy, J directs Vermont’s Peer Workforce Development Initiative and Pathways Vermont Training Institute. They previously worked as a Service Coordinator on one of Pathways’ Housing First ACT teams and a peer support advocate at HCRS. J is neurodivergent, has navigated intense anxiety, sadness, and grief, and was suicidal for several years. They also have a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and have published poetry and prose in dozens of print and online literary magazines. J believes strongly that each person is the expert of their own experience, that people have a right to their own stories, insight, and meaning-making processes, and that all mental health services must be provided through a lens of cognitive liberty and epistemic justice.
Continued >>
Continued >>
Speaker Bios
Betsy Hoekstra is a passionate participant in life. She has not only survived, but thrived following her experiences of psychosis and psychiatric injustice, and now works in service of the vision for all people in psycho-spiritual crisis to be held in dignity, self-determination and compassionate support. She is a peer support staff supervisor in Pathways Vermont’s Soteria House, a philosopher of science and psychiatry, and proudly part of the emerging field providing peer support services for psychedelic crisis at music festivals across the US.
K&R KREATIVE SOULS, led by the husband-wife duo Kairi Chapman and Rozette Mclean-Chapman, specializes in the traditional visual arts and performing arts, along with crafting. Together, they bring a harmonious blend of creativity, expertise, and a shared vision to their artistic endeavors.
SERENITY LOHR has been working at Alyssum for years. Starting in 2017 at 23 years old, she walked into the retreat center bringing her own lived experience with anxiety and depression, as well as a lifetime of watching the closest adults in her life struggle immensely with their mental health and within the mental health system. Representing Alyssum at the Mad Pride Parade 2024, Serenity hopes to share just how special and unique Alyssum is. It is a sanctuary for a lot of past guests; a place where people can put their baggage down, be heard and understood, and talk with peers who just may have been in the same places of the guests Alyssum serves.
CHRIS NIAL is the team lead for Pathways Vermont’s Community Center and Statewide Warmline. He serves as the co-chair to the board of Alyssum, and has been working in mental health peer support for the past 4 years following his own experience with a mental health crisis and extreme state. He is incredibly passionate about making more spaces for alternative approaches to mental health outside of the traditional medical model, and promoting the voices and choices of psychiatric survivors, ex-patients, consumers, and mad folx.
Speaker Bios
MALAIKA PUFFER is a psychiatric survivor, peer supporter, and activist in Brattleboro Vermont. She hates psychiatric incarceration, coercion, and the pathologization of distress and difference. She loves cross-movement solidarity, creative ways to survive and make meaning, and being around other mad people.
SAMBATUCADA is an all-volunteer street bateria and community of men and women from all walks of life, united in their love for Brazilian music and percussion. Based in Burlington, Vermont, USA, and founded in 1995 to play at Burlington’s Discover Jazz Festival, Sambatucada has developed steadily under the leadership of drummer extraordinaire Bruce McKenzie. Over the years, Sambatucada has become well known all over northern and central Vermont for exciting performances at parades, festivals, celebrations and community events of every conceivable variety, including Burlington’s Discover Jazz Festival, First Night, Magic Hat Mardis Gras celebration, Vermont Pride Parade, and many more.
DANIEL TOWLE is president of Parker Advisors, LLC, a mental health and homeless advisory firm based in Montpelier, Vermont. Dan is also chair of the Mental Health Block Grant Planning Council, and a member of the Adult Mental Health Standing Committee.
WILDA L. WHITE is a Mad activist and founder of MadFreedom, Inc., an advocacy organization whose mission is to end the discrimination and oppression of people based on their perceived mental states. Wilda lives in Waterbury Center, with Marley, her black lab.
Continued >>
One-Weekend-a-Month
In Person (Williston, VT) or via Zoom Cohort/Learning Community Model
Specializations in: Integrated Mental Health & Substance Use Counseling for Children, Youth, and Families and Adults
Preparation for Licensure: VT LCMHC, LADC (most content for LADC)
Some Critical Occupations Scholarships for Vermonters in 2023-24
Learn more: Admissions@VermontState.edu
SHEA WITZBERGER
(they, them, theirs) is a facilitator, advocate, artist, and careworker. They work in the queer anti-violence and survivor support field, and also create art and events that celebrate life cycles, transitions, community, grief, and liberation. From officiating weddings and end of life ceremonies to outdoor performance work to organizing and facilitating community processes, they seek to be in right relationship and community with other people and non human kin.
LMW Design is a boutique creative collaborative specializing in branding strategy and visual communication for social service organizations, the health & wellness industry, and unique passion projects. Services include brand building, graphic design, website design, and social media outreach.
A Proud Supporter
Partial Client List:
As we’ve grown, The Richards Group has stayed true to our family-owned, independent roots. We’re still your hometown agency, with expanded services and products to support our community’s changing needs. Providing comprehensive coverage for your life, business, and future. For the Community. For Good.
Rutland County Head Start Vermont Psychiatric Survivors MadFreedom Wilda L. White Windham & Windsor Housing Trust Housing Trust of Rutland County Community Care Network Bridgewater Historical Society Right to Wellness www.lmwdesign.com
Mad Pride Day Planners & Volunteers
PLANNING COMMITTEE
Ashley Bernstein
Sarah Chase
Hilary Melton
Calvin Moen
Sarah Launderville
Chris Nial
Ed Paquin
Malaika Puffer
Aaron Schiff
Wilda White
VOLUNTEERS
Catarina Campbell
Karim Chapman
Amey Dettmer
Max Dybvig
Lucy Gluck
Sierra Hunt
Jay Ingram
Skylar Kelley
Sarah Knutson
Hillary Jeanne Leicher
Abby Levinsohn
Ward Nial
L. WHITE CONSULTING
helping purpose-driven individuals and organizations realize their social justice aspirations
WILDA
