The FED UP Society

If you need supportright now Staffed 24/7Every line below is answered around the clock.

These are staffed around the clock. We are not.

The FED UP Society is a referral and education organization. It is not a crisis service and there is not always someone here. If you are in danger right now, use one of these instead.

Call 855-BLINE99B-LINE, the music industry crisis line. Artists, crew, venue staff, and their families. Text 254-639. 24 hours.
Call or text 988Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, United States, 24 hours
Text HOME to 741741Crisis Text Line, 24 hours
Call 911Immediate medical emergency or overdose
findahelpline.comFree crisis lines by country

What is at stakethe thesis PlayThe engineering word for the freedom a system has inside its limits. A hinge, a joint, a nervous system, a community.

Early death is what it looks like when the play runs out.

What we are protecting

Engineering has a precise word for the freedom a system has inside its limits. Play. A hinge has play. A joint has play. A nervous system has play. A community has play. It is the measured room to move before something binds.

What this population loses, in every case we have described, is play. The knees narrow it. The hearing narrows it. Cost narrows it. A clinician who reads the culture as the illness narrows it. Early death is what it looks like when the play runs out.

The capacity underneath it has a name too: experiential capacity, meaning how much a person can sense, interpret, and participate in, in real time, in the body they actually have. It is built or eroded by the environments we put bodies in, and unlike a mood it can be described, taught, and measured. That is what this organization sets out to protect, and it is what we intend to be able to show evidence about.

What we mean by early death

We use the phrase wider than the mortality tables do, on purpose. It is the overdoses, the suicides, and the hearts that quit too soon. It is also the premature, unwanted loss of the things that make a person feel alive: the knees that keep someone against the wall while they still want in, the hearing that takes the joy out of the music, the instrument that stays in its case, the person who stops showing up as themselves because explaining themselves got exhausting. Walking away when you are finished is your call. Getting benched while you still want the life, by a body, a budget, shame, poor access, or care that never understood you, is what we are here about.

The gapwhy this exists 1989Cross and colleagues define cultural competence for systems of care. Extended since to race, language, faith, disability, LGBTQ+. Not yet to this one.

Cultural competence has another door to walk through.

Care works better when the person delivering it understands the world the patient comes from. That principle is more than thirty-five years old and no longer controversial. It has been extended to race, ethnicity, language, faith, disability, and LGBTQ+ care.

It has yet to be extended to subculture.

And it missed a population hiding in plain sight inside this one. It is not uncommon for these scenes to hold a disproportionate share of neurodivergent people, many of them never identified, because these communities were often the first space they could be in where nobody asked them to mask. It was never a matter of tolerance. Many of these scenes grew up around their own self-governance, a co-developed sensory structure, and a physical ethic of care that the biggest person in the pit is often the first to enforce. That is functioning infrastructure for belonging, designed by the people it holds. The neurodiversity movement and the disability rights movement make the same claim we do: the barrier was built by the system, not the person. We treat it as one story. We do not diagnose anyone, and we will not let a subculture be read as a symptom twice.

The clearest example sits in the diagnostic manual. DSM-5 excludes socially sanctioned body modification from its definition of non-suicidal self-injury, which is the right call. But the exclusion turns on what counts as sanctioned, and different subcultures sanction different practices. Whether a scar is a diagnosis or a decision depends on what the person across the desk knows about the world the patient came from. That is the entire problem, written into a criterion, and it runs in two directions at once.

Signals that are cultural, aesthetic, or occupational get scored as clinical ones. Exposures that are genuinely clinical do not get scored at all, because this population is not classified as an occupational cohort or an athletic one. The wrong signal read, the right one missed. Both errors are correctable, and neither one requires anybody to change who they are.

Read as clinical when it is not

What is in front of themWhat gets recorded

Scarification, branding, stretched lobesSelf-harm history

A hand-poked tattooScored as self-injury on validated instruments

Asking for the evidenceNoncompliant. Poor historian.

An appreciation of the morbidIdeation. Flat affect.

Thirty years in the pitHigh-risk recreational behavior, not thirty years of load

Thirty years of maskingHigh-functioning. Presents well.

Not read as clinical when it is

What the body is doingWhy nothing is offered

100 dB, five nights a weekNot a covered occupational exposure

Four employers in one seasonExcluded from baseline audiometry by design

Ninety minutes in a pit, twice a weekNot a sport, so no load management

A full costume shift at 105 degreesNot labor, so no heat protocol

Every line above reflects documented clinical or regulatory practice. We are describing classification, not motive. Most of the people who do it are trying to help.

It may not get written in a chart, but all of it gets felt. People stop showing up for care, and then they stop showing up at all.

In health and wellness care this does not register as a gap in cultural understanding. It registers as personal style, and a system does not believe it owes anyone anything on account of their style.

The discipline already exists. It was built for a different kind of performer.

Six hours on a dance floor is an endurance event. Ninety minutes in a pit is a contact sport. A faire performer works a full shift in costume in desert heat. Drummers, circus and sideshow performers, aerialists, skaters, and derby athletes are training at volume, most of them without a plan and none of them with a team behind them.

There is a field for this and it is roughly forty years old. Performing arts medicine treats musicians and dancers as the athletes they are: warmups, load management, hearing conservation, overuse and recovery protocols, and clinicians who specialize in keeping a performer performing. It grew up inside conservatories, orchestras, ballet companies, and universities, and it is keyed to those institutions. Sports medicine has already published the finding that performing artists are underserved.

The people we serve sit further out than the people that finding was about. No conservatory. No company. No team physician, no athletic trainer, and in most cases no employer who would be responsible for any of it. The knowledge exists. It was never translated for this population, and the rooms that hold it were not built with them in mind. So a 45-year-old distance runner is handed a plan to keep running, and a 45-year-old who still wants the floor may be asked whether they are not a little old for this.

Same body, same load, different respect.

That is the gap this organization exists to close. Not because nobody is doing anything for these communities, but because this specific piece, the preparation and the recovery and the practitioners who understand both, is the piece nobody owns.

The discipline exists. It was never pointed here.

This population has never waited to be rescued

Working performers built a mutual aid fund in 1882. Punks ran needle exchanges off card tables before most public health departments would. A bass player who had lost her own hearing started one of the first hearing conservation organizations for musicians. Faire performers fund each other’s surgeries. The care has always been built by hand, by the people who needed it.

In the last year alone, more people have come online doing exactly this work: harm reduction crews, hearing projects, sober-support networks, therapists quietly advertising that they get it. That is good. We want more of it, and we are not competing with any of it. Substance harm reduction in particular is a field with capable organizations already in it, and we treat them as partners and referral destinations rather than something to duplicate. We bring them into rooms and we point people to them. We do not need to be them.

What we have not found is the connective layer. There is no shared registry, no common standard for what a competent provider looks like, no kit a stranger in another city can pick up and run with, and no way for a hospital or a funder to find any of these efforts even when they want to. That is the piece we are building, and we are building it so more of everything else can follow.

Lineagewhy "society" 140 years1882 to now. This population has been building its own care infrastructure the entire time.

The barrier was never the body.

In 1990, people who had been written off as unfit to live among everyone else organized, took the fight to Washington, and got the Americans with Disabilities Act passed.

Their central claim was not that they needed fixing. It was that the infrastructure had been built without them. The barrier was the building, the stair, the assumption. Build the ramp and the ability to participate returns.

We are not borrowing that claim. We are continuing it, and one of the founding directors of this organization helped win it the first time. That work changed the physical landscape of the country, and the reasoning behind it does not stop at the curb cut. The pathology was not in the hair, the ink, the music, or the morbid art on the wall. It was in the stare at the gym or the wellness clinic, and the assumption in the exam room.

That is why this is a society. It is what we are, and it is what we intend to change.

And we are not the first table

Working performers built the Actors Fund in 1882 because nobody was going to cover them. Punks ran needle exchanges off card tables in the late eighties, before most public health departments would. A bass player who had lost her own hearing started one of the first hearing conservation organizations for musicians in 1988. Renaissance faire performers have been funding each other's surgeries for years. This population has been building its own care infrastructure for a hundred and forty years. We are the next table, not the first one.

A person carried horizontally on the raised hands of a crowd at a punk show, band backdrop behind them — **The load-bearing structure.** Phoenix. This is not a metaphor we invented; it is how the room already works.

Programwhat we do FourThe same four functions Congress wrote into the Rehabilitation Act for independent living centers.

Four core functions.

These are the same four functions the independent living movement wrote into federal law, applied to a population that has not yet been offered them.

Information and referral
We build and maintain a list of clinicians, therapists, physical therapists, athletic trainers, audiologists, movement and strength coaches, sports medicine and recovery practices, and the partner organizations doing harm reduction, all of whom will not pathologize the culture, and we point people to them at no charge. A listing is a starting point for your own judgment, not an endorsement.
Education
Two directions. We teach the community how their own bodies take this life, which is mostly information that exists but was never sent to them, and we brief providers on what they are looking at, so the next person through the door is met as a patient. Cultural competence has been extended to a dozen populations already. We are doing the work to extend it to this one.
Advocacy
We push venues, agencies, and funders toward practices this population can use: hearing protection as standard, injury prevention and recovery built into how shows and festivals run, and care that assumes competence.
Peer community
We put a table at the show, and someone at the table who has been where you are. Anyone can run one. The kit is free and always will be.

What we are not

Not a treatment provider. We refer. We do not diagnose, prescribe, or treat.
Not a crisis service. The numbers above are staffed around the clock. We are not.
Not an endorsement machine. A listing means a provider has shown evidence of competence with this population, not that we vouch for every outcome. The directory is a compass, not a rating.
Not a rescue narrative. Alternative identity is not a pathology. This population encounters specific physical and sensory loads and specific barriers to conventional care. That is the problem we are describing, and it is the only one.
Not here to clean anything up. Not the noise, the volume, the darkness, the aggression, the costume, or the catharsis.

Methodhow a listing is earned Nothing is publishedAccounts of care go to a person here, never onto the site. This is not a review platform.

Judged by the people who were in the room.

A provider does not earn a place on our list by holding a credential, paying a fee, or persuading us. They earn it from the people who received the care.

Credentials tell you someone is licensed. They do not tell you whether the pit got charted as community or as reckless behavior, whether the scarification got read as a body someone owns or as self-harm, or whether the person got treated like a patient or like a story to tell later. Only the patient knows that.

Unfamiliar is not the same as pathological. That is most of what we teach.

So listings rest on evidence from people who went. That evidence stays private and goes to real human review; it is not published and it is not a public review. Providers are described, not ranked, and a thin record is labeled as a thin record. A provider whose record turns sour comes off the list.

If something serious happened, the kind of thing that belongs in front of a licensing board, we will point you to the right one. We cannot investigate, and we will not be the reason it went nowhere.

The same honesty applies to what we teach. This field runs from settled evidence, like hearing conservation, sleep, and load management, to methods that are promising and unproven. We will always say which is which. An organization that points people toward recovery and performance care has to be more careful about that line than anyone, not less.

Who this is forthe doors Six doorsAll free. Listing costs nothing, the kit costs nothing, nothing here sits behind a fee.

Pick the door that is yours.

Clinicians and providers

Physicians, therapists, physical therapists, athletic trainers, audiologists, movement and strength coaches, sports medicine, recovery and bodywork practices. Ask to be listed, free. Or come the other way and let us brief you on what this population carries through the door.

Get listed, or get trained →
Health systems and researchers

Our policy is nothing about us without us. If you want to study this population to provide better care, the scene is a co-author, not a sample.

Explore a partnership →
Policymakers and public agencies

City, county, state, and national. Hearing protection as a standard rather than a courtesy, injury prevention and recovery treated as part of how live events run, and the fact that this population is currently invisible in every health equity framework we can find.

Talk policy →
Venues, promoters, festivals

We scale to the room. A corner of the bar and a stool is enough, a full table is better, and we work with whatever the night has. Hearing protection, prep and recovery guidance, water, stickers, and someone who knows where to send a person. Where harm reduction supplies belong in the room, we help you bring in the organizations that specialize in that work rather than pretending it is ours.

Put us at your show →
Funders and foundations

The provider network is the asset. Slow to build, hard to copy, useful the day it exists, and it produces the first real evidence base on what competent care looks like for this population.

Ask for the working plan →
Everyone else

Run a table. Send a name. Take a board seat. Tell us a provider treated you well, or badly. Press lands here too.

Say what you need →

The other doorfightearlydeath.com One nameFED UP stands for Fight Early Death. The community-facing site carries the full phrase.

Two doors, one building.

The organization runs a second site, fightearlydeath.com, that says all of this in the scene’s own language and at its volume: the free provider directory, the station kit, the verification system, and the crisis lines, built to be read in a parking lot between sets. Somebody from the scene walks in that side and finds out there is real infrastructure underneath it. Somebody from a health system walks in this side and finds out the people it serves are the people who built it. Neither one is the sanitized version of the other. They face different directions.

Open fightearlydeath.com →

Governancewho is building this Up to nineThe bylaws allow nine. We intend to use more than three.

Three seats filled. The rest open on purpose.

This is a small organization at the beginning of its life, run by people who are in the community it serves rather than studying it from outside. The founder does not set his own compensation. The directors with no financial interest in the organization do, in advance, with comparison data, on the record.

Alongside the board there is an advisory council drawn from the scene: musicians, venue operators, harm reduction workers, and people who have used the referrals. The council does not vote. What it tells us gets published, along with what changed because of it.

Ryan Today

President and director Ryan Garey on the filings

Performer, researcher, and educator, and a lifelong participant in the punk, hardcore, and goth scenes in Phoenix. Twenty-five years of practice in how environments act on bodies, built into frameworks he teaches on sensory capacity, how the body processes time, and the physical inputs that shape tissue. He has spent those years working with people in mania, in addiction, in grief, and with people who looked fine from the outside. He founded the FED UP Society after realizing that everything he had access to was invisible to the people standing next to him at shows, and he is closing his private practice to do this work instead.
Sherry Watson

Founding director

Nearly three decades in nonprofit leadership, with more than $130 million in funding generated across the organizations she has built and advised. She organized in the disability rights movement that won the Americans with Disabilities Act, and worked the long fight to move people out of institutions and back into homes of their own. She helped build the national infrastructure connecting independent living centers across the country, whose four functions are information and referral, education, advocacy, and peer support. This organization runs on the same four, because she brought them.
Craig Jacobson

Director San Diego, California

Built, ran, and sold several companies over three decades, marketing firms among them, and is now mostly retired and active in the San Diego arts scene. He brings the operating and marketing discipline of someone who has signed the front of paychecks, and the conviction that an organization with no exit in mind should be structured so that nobody can buy it. He and Ryan have worked together since 2008.
Fourth seat, and beyond

Open

The bylaws allow up to nine directors. The next seats go to credibility inside the scene rather than credibility on paper: a venue operator, a booking agent, a touring musician, someone working in harm reduction, someone who has been on the receiving end of the care. If that describes you, the form below reaches us directly.

Phoenixproving ground ForkableEverything that travels is public. Start one where you are without asking us.

A proving ground, not a headquarters.

Phoenix is where we happen to be, so it gets to be the place where things are tried and where they are allowed to fail. It is not the center of anything. We are not building an empire with branch offices.

What travels is the commons. What stays local is everything that matters to the people in the room.

The commons
The registry, the station standard, the free kit, the provider questions, the trust protocol, and everything we learn about what worked. Public, forkable, and the same in every city.
The local
Culture and implementation. Which venues, which providers, which language, which nights, which problems come first. Nobody in Phoenix is qualified to decide that for anybody else.

If you want to start one where you are, we would rather help you do that than finish here first.

Transparencywhere things stand No determination letter yetWe do not claim tax-exempt status until the IRS issues one, and we say so on every receipt.

The honest version, published on purpose.

Legal status	Arizona nonprofit corporation, formed 2026.
Tax exemption	We intend to apply for recognition of exemption under Section 501(c)(3). The IRS makes exemption retroactive to the date of incorporation for organizations that apply within 27 months. Until a determination letter is issued, we do not claim tax-exempt status and we say so on every receipt.
Staff	None. Volunteers and directors.
Compensation	Any pay to the founder is set by the directors who have no financial interest in the organization, in advance and on the record. Never by the person receiving it.
Can this be bought?	No. There are no shares and no owners. On dissolution every asset must pass to another exempt organization. The marks are open, the kit is public, and the provider network is not for sale to anyone, ever.
Program spending	Published here once there is a full year to publish.
What we will not take	Money that comes with conditions about who we serve or how we talk to them.
What we do not do	We do not run substance harm reduction programs. Capable organizations already do that work well, and we refer to them, bring them into venues, and support them. We fill the gap nobody is filling.
Corrections	If something on this site is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say what changed.

Participationwork with us

This reaches a person, not a queue.

Run a table. Send a name. Take a board seat. Tell us a provider treated you well, or badly. Press and anything else land here too.

Care that does not mistake culture for the problem.