Guiding principles

Antinormality Club is a journey into the unknown. It’s something we’ll build together, based on our collective needs, ideas and wisdom, and something that will never be fixed or finished.

But taking an emergent approach doesn’t mean we have no direction. Instead of setting a destination and fixing a route, the development of the club so far has been guided by a set of principles, centring the things we value and the ways we want to relate to each other.

These principles draw on the work of many organisations, who are acknowledged in the links, as well as my own experience and reflection. I hope they’ll become shared principles that evolve as we learn together.

To turn these principles into a collective statement of intent, I need your input. You can leave your comments at the bottom of this page, or drop us a line with your feedback.

Care as a means and an end

Tending to and nourishing each other is central to our interdependent humanity. How we act, relate and communicate is as important as what we do.

Care is something we can offer ourselves, but self-care is too often individualised and commoditised. Care is something we build in community and share with each other, as an expression of resistance and joy.

We will not treat each other as fragile, but we will be sensitive to the fact that our experiences have had a deep impact on us. This means centring choice and control, making space and time for care, and listening and asking for what we need.

Survivor-led

We will not be complicit in the mental health system’s approach of doing things to people. This means a commitment to every level of our work, from the everyday to big decisions, being led by people with experience of mental ill-health, distress and trauma.

We also reject the mental health system’s approach of labelling and speaking for people. Everyone should be able to choose the ways in which their experiences are named, understood, and addressed.

Mutual learning

Everyone’s perspective matters. Our most important skill is listening, with the understanding that all viewpoints are both valid and partial, including our own.

Everyone has expertise to offer and everyone has something to learn. Dogmatic approaches to mental health risk erasing alternative perspectives and limiting our opportunities to learn. Survival and healing look different for everyone, including which aspects of their identity and experiences they choose to share. Likewise, there are many possible versions of a mental health system that centres care and justice.

Changing our minds is not a sign of failure; it’s a sign of growth.

Mutual accountability

We are responsible to each other, not for each other. We commit to relationships of connection, presence, openness and learning, and not making choices for or taking control from another person.

We cannot give power to each other, but we can avoid taking it away from each other. This means trusting each other to know how best to meet our own needs, including when and how to ask for what we need from others.

Collective liberation

Recognising the validity of different viewpoints is not the same as tolerating viewpoints that invalidate others’ identities or experiences. We are not neutral on systems of oppression and commit to holding ourselves and others accountable for our part in sustaining these.

This includes holding boundaries around the behaviour of anyone involved in our work; prioritising the perspectives and needs of those who are multiply marginalised; acknowledging the deep connections between mental health and colonialism, capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy; committing to ongoing learning in our efforts to resist these systems of oppression; and working for cross-movement solidarity.

Both-and

False binaries limit our thinking and connection. Harm happens at multiple levels – individual, interpersonal, collective, systemic – and must be addressed at all of these levels. We can work for wholesale systems transformation while seeking to improve our experience of the current system. Both-and, not either-or.

Move slowly

We will resist productivity culture in all its forms, including the co-option of wellbeing to serve capitalism. We will work slowly enough to accommodate everyone’s needs, to give us time to rest and reflect, to sustain the work over time, and to ensure we have the space to put all of these principles into practice.