Wounds We Won't See

Is it a bad sign when CNN publishes a better take on mental health than one commonly finds in the movement? Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty bad.

But recently, the standard bearer of mediocre centrist journalism featured an opinion piece on the recent suicide of tWitch. For those of you who also have huge gaps of knowledge regarding mainstream culture, tWitch attained his popularity as a producer and DJ on the “Ellen DeGeneres Show.”

The article displays some grave problems, most notably treating depression as nothing other than a brain disease, which is neither an empowering take nor one capable of addressing the complexity or the historical and cultural specificity of depression. (Is anyone hearing a shared motif with that strategy of the early Gay Rights movement that claimed homosexuality was biologically coded?) Nonetheless, the author—some podcaster, bestselling author, and CNN “commentator” who I assume is basically a hack—spends the bulk of the article highlighting and taking down the common responses that circulate when someone commits suicide: he seemed so happy; how could he do that to his family; how could he be so selfish.

Certainly, there are corners of the movement that have gone well beyond these basic rebuttals into a truly wholesome and helpful understanding of suicide, depression, trauma, and mental health. Recommendable writers include adrienne marie brown, Cindy Milstein, Kai Cheng Thom, Raechel Anne Jolie, and one of my favorites because it showed up at a life-saving time for me, the Icarus Project with their zine, “Navigating the Space between Brilliance and Madness.” However, all of the brilliant, heartfelt work some anticapitalists have put into challenging dominant society’s oppressive paradigm around mental health has not translated into a real shift of practices in the rest of our movement.

When someone really dear to me recently checked himself into an institution because his desire to harm himself was getting to be too much to handle, I sent him an audio telling him how proud I was. His reaction? No one else had given a supportive response. Everyone else in his life, many of them avowed anarchists committed on paper to toppling our society’s mental health paradigm, met his giant step forward with sadness, fear, or—most commonly—silence.

“I hate it when they react like it’s something to be afraid of,” a new friend said. We were talking about suicide. More specifically, how others react when we share that we’re feeling suicidal. “I hate how they don’t get the distinction,” they continued, “between, I am in danger and I am having these feelings, so it’s like we can never talk about it.”

“Yeah,” I picked up. “Like, if I’m in actual danger then that means I’m already planning it, which means you’re not going to know anything about it until I decide you do, and then it will be too late...”

—T gave a knowing laugh.

“...so if I’m telling you about it, don’t be afraid, be happy that I can trust you enough, that you can hold space for me to talk about this really difficult thing.”

My friend who checked himself into the hospital was not in a happy place. It makes sense to be sad for him, even if we can also be proud or grateful that he was able to act for his self-preservation. Psychiatric hospitals are not nice places. We deserve much better resources for healing and care. We shouldn’t ever have to end up in institutions designed to isolate and control us.

There have been a number of experiments in radical psychology, frequently connected to anticapitalist social movements, in which people with mental health problems design their own care, or even examples of mental patients taking over the hospital. These experiments are inspiring but rarely long-lasting. They certainly haven’t supplanted the dominant paradigm on mental health and its unhealthy institutions. I don’t think this reflects poorly on the attempts to do things differently. The fact is, healing takes resources and space. And resources for any purpose outside of or against capitalism are in short supply. Resource-intensive liberatory projects are unlikely to last.

Liberated space is even more fleeting than free resources. The State is loath to ever cede an inch of territory. We’re never meant to get any breathing room, any uncontaminated airs to breathe, any respite from the war that is constantly being waged against us.

So if we can only get fleeting glimpses of a better world as a material reality, and the rest, until the revolution comes, can only exist as a dream or a myth we carry with us, can we actually change our practices and our thinking in our day-to-day life and struggle? Sure, capitalism will let us write books about a different mental health paradigm, and there will be no limit to the individualized therapies we can buy, but can we actually practice meaningful and subversive forms of care while living under capitalism?

The next time a friend tells us they’ve had to check themselves into a hospital or says, “I want to kill myself,” could all of us—or at least most of us—respond, thank you for telling me. I love you and I’m here for you, and one day we’ll have a much better place for you to get care, we’ll have more resources for healing and we’ll get to define what healing means, but until then, I’m here.

It seems like it should be possible, even under capitalism, since changing our response in that situation doesn’t require access to liberated territory or resources; it’s just a small shift at the level of individual behavior. The fact that even that kind of change is so hard to attain suggests there’s something deeper at work.

***

You know what question I fucking hate? “How are you?” or its many variations like “how are things?” “how’s it going?” I hate it because you’re not supposed to answer honestly. If you’re British, it seems like you’re not supposed to answer at all, the interrogative functioning linguistically as a synonym of “hi”. The vast majority of the time, the person asking “how are you?”, if they are neurotypical, does not want to know how you actually are, or at best, they might want to know on some ideal plane but they are not equipped to hear an honest answer. Probably, they may sincerely desire for you to be good, or at least, on balance, okay. But if neither of those are the case, the conversation they are prefiguring will not have the capacity to handle it.

This is an especially dangerous feature of our everyday culture because the truth is, we are not okay. There are folks who are able to feel that we are deeply unokay, but they are not allowed to express it, and then there are the normies who on the whole think they’re fine, which is in itself deeply problematic. I think this is an unfair but necessary generalization: the neurotypical, the well adjusted, the people who are more or less alright, are not just symptomatic of but integral to the collective disease that is endangering life on this planet.

Far from being healthy, by being able to adjust to a pathological society they are showing that they do not have the emotional strength to reject the normalization of harm and instead can only take the easy path of invisibilizing and reproducing that harm.

Just as many totalitarian systems have classified rebellious people as mentally and emotionally deranged, while classifying those too afraid to stand up to totalitarianism as normal, people today who do not have serious mental health “problems” may just lack the courage to feel anything too deeply.

Let me go back and contradict myself: what I have just laid out is an unfair generalization. Just because someone has the disadvantage of being normal doesn’t necessarily mean that their emotional processes are superficial or obliviously entitled. My best friend is highly stable and well adjusted, yet he has a developed emotional intelligence and he’s such a great support for his loved ones who are going through a rough time. He’s just empathetic and has done the work. (But yeah, I can only really think of a couple other people who are neurotypical and able to hold space for the really hard feelings. And most of them have gotten seriously depressed in the last few years, even if they don’t identify as having depression or being fundamentally bipolar or depressive people.)

On the flipside, as with any other oppressed category, belonging to team crazy does not automatically make people aware of the lines of power and oppression that move through us, and it does not prevent us from living out our craziness in a way that reproduces psychoemotional regimes of oppression or harming those around us. That’s why I like the framework of the dangerous gift so much: if we don’t do the work (and to do the work, we can’t fucking be alone, we need support from folks who have already gone through it and are still alive, or who at the very least love us unconditionally and actively even if they don’t understand what we’re going through) we will almost certainly hurt ourselves and people around us.

So the generalizations I made above are unfair, but they are also true, because any constitutive act of collective self-awareness in reaction to a shared experience of marginalization and oppression must begin with a loud, abrasive fuck you to the normals constituted by that line of exclusion. And that fuck you is useful because you can learn a lot about people and how feasible it would be to work with them, based on how they respond when they hear anger directed at white people, cis men, or other normalized categories. Do they make it about themselves and their big hurt feelings, or do they try to empathize?

I’m not trying to write a manifesto though, calling on people who are crazy to permanently think of ourselves on the basis of a shared trait. Because it’s a weak link, because craziness is so far from a homogeneous experience, and because we make ourselves stupider* and more unfeeling when we dichotomize the world. Besides, I don’t really trust a crazy person who believes in stable categories. Believing in a category is such a normal person mind-trap.

Facetiousness aside, what I really want to talk about is how we’re all in a really bad place, no matter how we personally experience that fact. Though I feel anger, I don’t actually want to degrade people who respond to a toxic situation by going emotionally numb or looking for distractions. That happens to me too sometimes. And if we get better at care, at embracing the pain some of our loved ones are experiencing more acutely, all of us will benefit, all of us will become more able to understand and deal with the things happening to our world. And more of us will be able to share our gifts.

*I understand that many people have a bad reaction to the word “stupid” because they hear it within an ableist paradigm. I can empathize with this. We live in a society of IQ tests and eugenics. But I also feel the need to emphasize that this is not the only paradigm within which a concept of stupidity can exist. In fact, I don’t know of any society that doesn’t have some concept of intelligence, and the folks who respond to oppressive systems by policing language will use exact synonyms of “stupid” and “smart”, showing that they haven’t actually engaged in any paradigm shift.

When I talk about stupidity, I’m talking about a refusal to do the work, to engage with the world around us and try to understand it. This kind of intelligence or dullness cannot be measured quantitatively, it can’t be ranked, and it is not a result of genetics or bad breeding amongst the lower classes or any similar bullshit. In fact, the kind of stupidity I’m talking about is a characteristic of privilege, because it’s people who already benefit from patently false stories about how the world came to be this way who have a vested interest in not asking the tough questions.

***

Later, I’m walking with my partner, telling her about this newsletter, and I say I think maybe I should delete all of the foregoing section. We’re talking about a person we know who isn’t doing a great job of handling their craziness. They have a gift, for sure, but most of the time they’re terrible at empathy, they don’t really see the people around them, and they show up demanding support and almost never giving care. We both agree that this is someone who could easily—who sometimes does—grab onto mad as an oppressed and stable identity in order to justify how they show up in the world, to talk about their madness as an essential difference that separates them from others. And this separation probably makes it harder for them to see what they share with others, what they can offer others, and how they need to keep moving, healing, and growing.

What I want to focus on is deep empathy, the capacity to hold contradictions, to see multiple realities, to not be afraid of suffering. But I want to do this in a way that breaks through categorical separations without moving towards homogeneity or any other stable end goal. What I want is for people to realize that no one is healthy in this society and being able to see that and imagine other realities is a gift; what I want is for us to show up for each other, to be able to recognize each other’s wounds and also recognize each other’s strengths and special abilities; what I want is to be able to move through the world the way I need to without being ostracized, demonized, fired from a job, or sent to the hospital. (Also, a word of love and tenderness for crazy folks who are racialized, who instead of the hospital are more likely to be met with the cop’s taser or bullet.)

We need to name the difference, to be able to talk about our experiences, and in this need and this marginalization many of us will find common ground, but it does us no good to construct a stable identity. R identifies her craziness as a result of trauma that happened at a certain point in life. I identify one of my things as the result of something similar, and the other one of my things as deeply, deeply me. It would be entirely neurotypical, medical even, to believe that she and I had to agree on shared definitions and frameworks for our experiences of reality.

As we continue walking, we discuss older movements against white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia. Was it a necessary tangent for each of them to not just explore but reify the identity of the oppressed, in order to build collective power and move forward, or was it a strategic dead end they could have avoided turning into in the first place? Queer theory, intersectionality, and the reactionary embarrassments of TERFs and minority nationalists all show us that treating an oppressed group like a home country and fighting to defend its borders always reproduces the original logic of oppression. What’s not so clear is where to go from here. How to heal these wounds we won’t even see.

This friend I mentioned at the beginning of the essay. There were plenty of days when I knew he wasn’t doing well and I didn’t reach out. It’s hard to acknowledge crisis, even when you’re used to dangerously hard feelings being a part of your every day. We live in a society in which everyone is expected to be okay, a society so atomized that we have to fight for the space to share that we’re hurting. Empathy can also come out as guilt for not being there, for not being more supportive before someone turns to self-harm or institutionalization. But when you’re the one at the end of your rope, knowing the people you care about will turn immediately to sadness or guilt when they find out how you’re actually doing doesn’t make it any easier to share.

I don’t know how to talk about the friend who recently committed suicide in this newsletter. I feel conflicting impulses—healthy and fearful—to end this newsletter on an optimistic note. If I decided on such an ending, I would talk about the outpouring of support I recently witnessed in response to another health crisis. But that was a different kind of crisis, a real one as opposed to an emotional or psychological one, as people tend to understand these things. Does that devalue the support? After all, the health crisis in question is also one wrapped in plenty of stigma, as all matters of unhealth are in an ableist society. Nonetheless, it is always inspiring to see groups of friends step forward where our society’s official structures fail us. It makes it easier to imagine a world that is better in other ways too.

But still, things keep falling through the cracks, the same kinds of things, again and again.

That is, often, why I write. Because I’m at a loss for what else to do.

Postscript: Citations and Tangents

CNN Opinion, “The problem with how many are talking about tWitch’s death”

adrienne marie brown, Emergent Strategy

Cindy Milstein, Rebellious Mourning

Kai Cheng Thom, I Hope We Choose Love

Raechel Anne Jolie, Rust Belt Femme

Icarus Project, “Navigating the Space between Brilliance and Madness”

Jane Addams Collective, Mutual Aid Self/Social Therapy

Texts of the Week

There are a lot of these this week, since I didn’t include postscripts in the last two newsletters

Alex Gorrion, Anarchy in World Systems

This could be good reading to shore up that earlier newsletter about Musk and Xi

Sean Cooper, “What Happens When a Buffett buys Your Town”

Saidiya Hartman, The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner

Header image: Antonin Procházka, Kocka