National Association for Rights
Protection and Advocacy
WILL HALL
Will
Hall was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder schizophrenia at age 26 and endured a
year in San Francisco's public mental health system, including locked wards, neuroleptic
drugging, and solitary confinement. He went on to become co-founder of the Freedom Center, a Northampton, MA support,
advocacy, and activist group run by and for people labeled with severe mental illnesses.
Now in its fourth year, Freedom Center has
provided free advocacy,
support, and wellness services to hundreds of people, including peer counseling, a yoga
class, free acupuncture clinic, writing groups, legal advocacy, protests, regular public
educational events, and now a weekly live FM radio program. Freedom Center has received coverage in local,
national, and international press, and was recently given a Community Development Block
Grant from the city of Northampton. In 2004 Will was honored with the Disability Advocacy
Award by the Stavros Center for Independent
Living.
Will also recently joined the staff collective of the Icarus Project, a national mutual aid support
network of people diagnosed with Bipolar disorder and related madness who challenge the
idea of mental illness as disease. The Icarus
Project brings together hundreds of people who embrace their extreme states of
consciousness as 'dangerous gifts' to be nurtured and cultivated, and are struggling to
live outside of and against the corporate mainstream.
Will has been involved in radical movements for nonviolent social change since he was a
teenager. His writing has appeared in The Nation, Greenpeace Magazine, Utne Reader, San
Francisco Bay Guardian, and in the Sierra Club anthology Call To Action: A Handbook for
Peace, Justice, and Ecology, prefaced by Rev. Jesse Jackson. He is also one of the
founders of Valley Free Radio, a new FM
community radio station in Northampton, MA. Will is Choctaw Indian on his mother's side,
and his father is a Korean War veteran and also a psychiatric abuse survivor. A long-time
meditator and yoga practitioner, Will is dedicated to challenging institutional
oppression, healing cultural trauma, and reawakening indigenous mind.
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