FOUNDER'S MESSAGE

We are mad as hell, and we're not going to take this anymore!! Please join us as we educate souls everywhere to "STOMP THE STIGMA!"

Joe Pantoliano
Founder & President

"By Surrendering To Your Shame, You Obliterate The Blame."

 "Mental Illness is the only disease that you can come home with... and get yelled at for having it."

Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn't permanent.
- Jean Kerr (1923-2003)

"In the medical model, you take a person with a mental illness, you provide treatment in the hopes of reducing symptoms, and then they're supposed to approximate some notion of normality. Our research shows the opposite. You take a person with a mental illness, you then reduce the discrimination and stigma against them, increase their social roles and participation, which provides them a reason to get better in the first place, and then you provide treatment and support. The issue is not so much making them normal but helping them get their lives back." 
- Larry Davidson, a professor at Yale University

"...madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we received the greatest blessing.  ...the men of old who gave things their names saw no disgrace or reproach in madness; otherwise they would not have connected with it the name of the noblest of all arts, the art of discerning the future, and called it the manic art...  So, according to the evidence provided by our ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than sober sense... madness comes from God, where as sober sense is merely human." - Socrates
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII  by Plato, translated by Walter Hamilton

"My brain is your business"
- Deborah Gibson

"When our failings generate fear, we then have soul-sickness. This sickness, in turn, generates still more character defects. Unreasonable fear that our instincts will not be satisfied drives us to covet the possessions of others, to lust for sex and power, to become angry when our instinctive demands are threatened, to be envious when the ambitions of others seem to be realized while ours are not. We eat, drink, and grab for more of everything than we need, fearing we shall never have enough. And, with genuine alarm at the prospect of work, we stay lazy. We loaf and procrastinate, or at best work grudgingly and under half steam. These fears are the termites that ceaselessly devour the foundations of whatever sort of life we try to build. "
-Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 49