About Alyssa
Alyssa Cypher (they/them) is a radical mental health community organizer, activist, and consultant. They are also an artist, focusing on poetry, collage, and cross-stitch as mediums to express madness and neurodiversity.
They are the founder of Inside Our Minds, a mutual aid collective that provides subsidized, community-based radical mental health programming to the Pittsburgh area.
[Image of Alyssa, a white, non-binary person with red hair that is shaved on the sides and a few inches long on top. They are smiling and wearing a colorful Hawaiian shirt.]
Radical Mental Health & Madness in Pittsburgh
I am now officially a published poet! “Birds Don’t Visit Anymore” was accepted to publication in Issue 3 of Pittsburgh Poetry Journal. I am so excited and honored that PPJ chose my poem, especially since I am a (formerly) unpublished poet without an MFA or technical […]
I recently created a mixed media piece on the co-optation of mutual aid for Carnegie Mellon’s Center for the Arts in Society. The materials used, particularly the use of stitching into a photograph of my arm, are a direct reference to Agnes Richter – a 19th […]
Last week, I was interviewed by Leah Harris for an article on survivor-led mutual aid projects during COVID-19. The article, “‘Not Fragile’: Survivor-Led Mutual Aid Projects Flourish in a Time of Crisis,” was published by Mad in America, a science, psychiatry, and social justice online newspaper […]