Articles by Will Hall

WILL HALL, MA, DIPL.PW is a counselor, teacher, writer, and community development worker. Active during the University of California anti-apartheid movement, he went on to work for the Santa Cruz Resource Center for Nonviolence and the Earth Island Institute. In his 20s he was forcibly committed to San Francisco’s public mental health system, and, while in the locked unit at Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, he was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder schizophrenia and put on disability. He became a leading psychiatric survivor organizer, including host of Madness Radio, co-founder of Freedom Center and Portland Hearing Voices, and a co-coordinator of The Icarus Project, and he is author of the Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs, translated into 15 languages. For his work Will has received the Judi Chamberlin Advocacy award, the Portland Oregon Open Minds award, and the Stavros Center for Independent Living Disability Advocacy award. He has appeared in the media internationally, including Newsweek and the New York Times, and is in the documentary films Healing Voices, CrazyWise, and Coming Off Psych Drugs. A longtime meditator and yoga practitioner, Will is a PhD candidate in the School of Mental Health and Neuroscience at Maastricht University, The Netherlands, and he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more info and to contact Will, go to www.willhall.net. “When I was growing up, I wanted to be a magician. Then I wanted to be a biologist, then I wanted to be a psychologist, then I wanted to be a community organizer, then I wanted to be a philosopher. Now I’m sort of all of them.” — Will Hall interviewed in the Portland Mercury newspaper