Burn Up, Don’t Burn Out: Mental Health and Freedom.
Last week, I documented the events at Warwick Uni and the police brutality that followed a peaceful sit in. This week, as a continuation of those events I want to try to present an understanding of how these attacks are made to deter us, not only through fear but through trauma and helplessness.
Every activist is at some point in their trials made acutely aware of burn out; the moment at which the fight to change society infringes on your own mental health. Recently, I’ve been experiencing that tension. It is, with little exaggeration, a process of consumption. You balance between the urge to continue the fight and the separate urges that you turn inwards against yourself.
This morning I went to see the doctor. Since my arrest at the Warwick demo, I have seen an increase in anxiety, I’ve been suicidal and I’ve struggled to maintain a serious balance in my relationships. I shake and sweat at night and I dream about losing my sight through violent means. He changed my meds and sent me on my way. Continue reading
New Year, New We? The Dialectics of Survival in 2015
Today I walked the ten miles from Leamington Spa to Coventry because I had eleven pence in my pocket and the barrier guard was up and at ‘em. Eleven pence. This is my sole capital. A first class honours graduate in 2015. Though I have a roof over my head every night, I have no fixed abode and move between friends’ houses (an act of solidarity that means everything.) In the look ahead to 2015, Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani paints a grim picture for Britain as a whole over the next twelve months. I want to portray a more personal understanding of that reality, alienation and anxiety that five years of austerity have created.
In previous articles I’ve focused on my mental illnesses, and I am still trying to understand how they are connected intrinsically to contradictions within capitalism. There is a very raw dialectical nature to the way that mental illness is not only treated in our society but consumed and experienced too. I suffer from severe depression, bouts of dissociation and what for now remains to be a self-diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder. This helps to explain an addictive personality and my inability to maintain relationships. But how much of this comes from a historical background of unstable family and acute poverty? How much of this comes from the impossible expectations upon myself under the age of austerity? Continue reading →