Mutual Aid Self/Social Therapy

From the introduction: "The Jane Addams Collective formed as a response to the needs of radical activists for community mental health support. We wanted to rely on each other for this instead of traditional therapy or psychiatry, in part, because the activity of working together to address our common problems was an opportunity to build our community stronger. We saw it as a way to not only help each other with immediate and chronic problems, but as a way to start to trust each other with intimacy and vulnerability, as a way to say that the new society we are trying to build should not have shame about emotional honesty.

"In our attempts to build Mutual Aid Social Therapy (MAST), our goal has been to help ourselves and others learn skills to help us survive, skills that can be used for the rest of our lives to be strong and well. This is the self-therapy part of MAST. We believe psychological health can be a revolutionary process. Maintaining a healthy and open sanity in a repressive and insane society is part of a sustainable resistance to the status quo. We seek new ways for our community to provide “therapy” by the community that reflect our ideals. MAST is just one part of this ecology of mutual support and responsibility.

"MAST is an open-source and evolving set of cognitive techniques aimed at promoting better emotional health for individuals in a non-hierarchical and non-pathological model. MAST draws heavily upon the techniques found in Rational Emotive Therapy, Existential Psychology, Cognitive Behavioral Techniques, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and related systems. We have also recently employed Symbolic Techniques in the process."