Chapter 2: Activists’ Health Struggles due to Injustice

• What are the (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual) triggers and signs of burnout for you? 
• How can we support each other when facing burnout?
• What is in your “coping bank”?
• How can you create a sense of trust and holistic safety with someone when sharing your vulnerability? 
  • Consider barriers 

• “Activist Burnout Is Real – And You Probably Need to Read These 4 Ways to Manage It”  by Aliya Khan from Everyday Feminism 💜
  • Khan defines burnout and argues that it’s important to know what it feels like for you, build your “coping bank”, find community, and take breaks.
• Amnesty International’s Self-care 101
  • They define burnout, discuss signs of it, and how one can build up their self-care toolbox.
• “Here's How to Recover from Activism Burnout” by Vanessa Willoughby 
  • Willoughby discusses tips on how to stay burnout-free while engaging in activism: she encourages activists to identify their feelings, talk to a trusted confidant, find healthy outlets outside of activism, exercise, learn when to take breaks and say no.

Articles

• “Activism Fatigue: The Mind is a Powerful Resource of Change” by Elizabeth Montoya 
  • “It is never easy to create change. As we are currently witnessing with the civil rights, PRIDE, and BLM movements to see a positive change in our world, one must take action to create a movement. This is not an easy task, and there are bound to be obstacles that need to be overcome. Thus, there may come a point when even the most hardworking individuals feel overwhelmed in their efforts. Such consequence is the result of activist fatigue,  a type of burnout that occurs when one is working towards a goal that involves emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion, all of which can become a chronic condition over time [1]. Activists face unique challenges, as they are emotionally invested in and understand the implications of injustice within marginalized communities [2]. Unfortunately, when individuals are in a state of activism fatigue, they are no longer able to seek help because their hopes for changes are diminished as a result of feeling overwhelmed.”

Journal articles

• Knuckey, S., Satterthwaite, M., & Brown, A. (2018). Trauma, depression, and burnout in the human rights field: Identifying barriers and pathways to resilient advocacy. Columbia Human Rights Law Review, 49(3), 267.
  • “This Article is part of an effort to close these gaps and to document the mental health of human rights advocates, who, in the pursuit of the rights of others, may neglect their own wellbeing. The Article is also part of an effort to understand the causes and dynamics of both positive and adverse wellbeing among advocates, with a view to improving how advocates are prepared for and conduct their work. It is crucial to identify specific factors that might place human rights advocates at risk for negative mental health impacts, as well as those factors that may help them develop resilience and ensure sustainable work practices, at both the individual and the institutional levels.”
• “The Politics of Exhaustion” by Akwugo Emejulu and Leah Bassel (2020) 💜
  • “This article proposes a tentative politics of exhaustion as a way to understand the promise and perils of women of colour activists’ solidarity work.” 
  • “They found that the activists frequently prioritize collective needs above their own and engage in unsustainable care work that leads to their burnout.” -Liu
• Chen, C. W., & Gorski, P. C. (2015). Burnout in social justice and human rights activists: Symptoms, causes and implications. Journal of Human Rights Practice, 7(3), 366-390. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhuman/huv011
  • “Although people involved in every kind of professional or volunteer work can be susceptible to vocational burnout, research suggests that social justice and human rights (SJHR) activists, whose activist work is fraught with unique challenges, can be especially susceptible to it. Building on a small but growing body of scholarship on SJHR activist burnout, this study is an attempt to gain insight into SJHR activists' own experiences. In order to deepen the relatively slim present understandings of SJHR activist burnout, we adopted a grounded theory approach to analyse interview data from 22 SJHR activists involved in a wide variety of SJHR movements and organizations in the United States. This analysis revealed patterns in the activists' perceptions of the symptoms, causes, and implications of their burnout and pointed to several dimensions of the internal cultures of United States SJHR movements and organizations, including, in the words of one our participants, a ‘culture of martyrdom’, that hasten activist burnout and, as a result, render SJHR activism less effective and efficient. We discussed these findings and how they might inform efforts to strengthen SJHR movements by tending to the well-being of SJHR activists.”
• Gorski, P. C. (2015). Relieving burnout and the “Martyr syndrome” among social justice education activists: The implications and effects of mindfulness. The Urban Review, 47(4), 696-716. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-015-0330-0
  • “Activist burnout, which causes activists to disengage from their activism, is a formidable barrier to the sustainability of social justice movements, including those focused on social justice in educational contexts. However, the cultures of these movements often disregard the importance of self-care, seeing it as self-indulgence, putting activists at even higher risks of burnout. In this study, one of the first to assess the impact of specific self-care strategies on activist burnout, data from interviews with 14 social justice education activists are analyzed in order to uncover how they used mindfulness practices such as yoga, tai-chi, and meditation to cope with burnout. The analysis revealed a variety of ways in which mindfulness mitigated their burnout experiences. It revealed, as well, a shared perception that, beyond helping to sustain their activism, mindfulness made them more effective activists.”
• Gorski, P. C. (2019). Racial battle fatigue and activist burnout in racial justice activists of color at predominately white colleges and universities. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 22(1), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2018.1497966
  • “Activist burnout scholarship has inadequately considered challenges marginalized-identity activists, such as racial justice activists of color, experience in the course of their activism – challenges from which privileged identity activists, such as white racial justice activists, are protected. This article attempts to address this gap through a phenomenological study examining activist burnout in racial justice activists of color whose primary sites of activism are predominantly white colleges and universities in the United States at which they work. In order to stretch activist burnout theory to differentiate unique marginalized-identity activists’ burnout causes from general causes that do not consider specific activist identities, the lens of racial battle fatigue is employed. Findings show that, although participants shared many causes of burnout that are consistent with general non-identity-specific causes described in existing literature, racial battle fatigue hastened their burnout while their activist commitments elevated their battle fatigue.”
• Gorski, P. C. (2019). Fighting racism, battling burnout: Causes of activist burnout in US racial justice activists. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42(5), 667-687. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2018.1439981
  • “Social movement scholars have identified activist burnout – when the accumulation of stressors associated with activism become so overwhelming they compromise activists’ persistence in their activism – as a threat to movement viability. This phenomenological study on the causes of burnout among racial justice activists in the United States was designed to bolster understandings of burnout and inform strategies for sustaining racial justice movements. Thirty racial justice activists who had experienced burnout were interviewed. They described four primary burnout causes: emotional-dispositional causes, structural causes, backlash causes, and in-movement causes. Implications for activist and movement sustainability are discussed.”
• Schaufeli, W. B., & Buunk, B. P. (2002). Burnout: An overview of 25 years of research and theorizing. In M. J. Schabracq, J. A. M. Winnubst & C. L. Cooper (Eds.), (pp. 383-425). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/0470013400.ch19
  • This chapter contains sections titled:
    • The Short History of An Ancient Phenomenon
    • Definitions of Burnout
    • Old Wine in New Bottles?
    • Measurement and Prevalence of Burnout
    • Correlates, Causes, Symptoms and Consequences of Burnout
    • Theoretical Approaches
    • Interventions
    • Final Remarks
    • References

Videos

• “The cure for burnout (hint: it isn't self-care) | Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski” TED
  • “You may be experiencing burnout and not even know it, say authors (and sisters) Emily and Amelia Nagoski. In an introspective and deeply relatable conversation, they detail three telltale signs that stress is getting the best of you -- and share actionable ways to feel safe in your own body when you're burning out. (This conversation, hosted by TED curator Cloe Shasha Brooks, is part of TED's "How to Deal with Difficult Feelings" series.)”

• What are the (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual) triggers and signs of vicarious traumatization for you?
• How can we support each other when facing trauma?
• What is in your “coping bank”?
• How can you create a sense of trust and holistic safety with someone when sharing your vulnerability? 
  • Consider barriers 

Articles 

• “Trauma and Social Justice: Why We Can’t Talk about One Without Including the Other” by Hala Khouri 💜
  • “For the past 15 years I have been training yoga teachers, clinicians and other direct service providers to be “trauma informed.” This starts with educating people on the impact of unresolved trauma on individuals and communities.  This lens can help us understand why our students might be shut down, or why a client is anxious and mistrustful. This lens asks us to assume that everyone is doing the best they can in the moment, and that most of our behavior is an attempt to regulate ourselves and feel safe and good.  We can group the cause/source of trauma into two main categories- overwhelming events (shock trauma), profound lack of attunement and mirroring (developmental trauma). Most mental health paradigms include only personal and interpersonal events in these categories.  Shock traumas are things like car accidents, natural disasters, violence, witnessing violence, even childhood surgeries.  Developmental trauma usually refers to the lack of attunement between a child and its primary caretaker.  A child who is not attuned to will not feel that the world is a safe place for them and this can impact them for their whole life.”
• CDC’s 6 Guiding Principles to a Trauma-Informed Approach 
  • Safety
  • Trustworthiness and transparency
  • Peer support
  • Collaboration and mutuality
  • Empowerment voice and choice
  • Cultural, historical, & gender issues 
• Defining Vicarious Trauma and Secondary Traumatic Stress
  • The source defines vicarious and secondary trauma.
• “Trauma is an Experience, not an Event” by Santiago Delboy
  • The article talks about what trauma is and explains how it’s an experience, rather than an event: what is traumatic for one person, isn’t necessarily for another.
• “The Legacy of Trauma” by Tori DeAngelis 
  • Intergenerational trauma: “An emerging line of research is exploring how historical and cultural traumas affect survivors’ children for generations to come”
• “Understanding the Window of tolerance and How it Affects You” by Mind My Peelings 
  • The article explains what is the window of tolerance, how trauma affects it, how to recognize your window of tolerance, and how to manage it. 
• “A Beginner’s Guide to Trauma Responses”  Crystal Raypole
  • The article discusses the fight, flight, freeze, and fawn trauma responses.
• “Understanding Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn Response” by Sherry Gaba
  • Gaba focuses on the fawn response and how to recognize it.
• Tend and Befriend by Leslie E. Korn
  • “Whereas Selye’s model has dominated the concepts of stress response, Shelley Taylor and her research group posit a female stress response model they call Tend and Befriend. This model adds a dimension to the fight or flight/freeze concept and suggests that women (and other female animals) respond to stress by engaging in activities of care and connection; tending to the care of offspring and family and engaging in behaviors that support social connection, affiliation and attachment.”
• “Trauma - reaction and recovery” by Better Health
  • The article discusses some common mental, emotional, physical, and behavioral reactions to trauma. 
• “Spirituality and Trauma: Professionals Working Together”  US Department of Veteran Affairs
  • The source discusses how trauma may impact spirituality. 
• 'I just need to know these people are OK': CNN's Nima Elbagir on frontline reporting
  • “The award-winning journalist is this year's Peter Stursberg Foreign Correspondents Lecturer”

Guides

• Coping with trauma: A social justice law student’s guide by Anna Kline
  • Made for law students but applicable to a wider range of students as well 
  • “When working in social justice you will come across clients who have trauma backgrounds which impact them (see Trauma Informed Lawyering workshop for skills for working with clients with trauma). Social justice work can also feel overwhelming and can bring a sense of disempowerment about affecting change in systems.”
  • “Clients’ trauma and systemic disempowerment can impact you. This workshop will: 
    •  raise awareness of the impact of clients’ trauma on you 
    • raise awareness of the impact of disempowerment 
    • introduce  coping strategies to prevent or regulate your reactions, maintaining positive mental health, which in turn supports your ability to lawyer and help your clients 
    • provide resources to support your coping strategies”
• “Live within Your Window of Tolerance” Guide by Laura K. Kerr
  • Discusses the window of tolerance and coping techniques.

Videos

• What is trauma? The author of “The Body Keeps the Score” explains | Bessel van der Kolk | Big Think
  • “Contrary to popular belief, trauma is extremely common. We all have jobs, life events, and unpleasant situations causing us daily stress. But when your body continues to re-live that stress for days, weeks, months, or even years, that stress changes your brain, creating trauma inside your mind, and that trauma can eventually manifest in your physical body. “
  • “As you can see, trauma isn’t what happens to you, but how you respond to the traumatic situation. Something that is traumatic to one person may be no big deal to the next. Whether something becomes traumatic or not has a great deal to do with who’s around you while you experience this event. Were you alone and scared, were you comforted by friends and family?”
  • “The problem with trauma is that it starts when something happens to us, but that’s not where it stops - it changes your brain. Once your brain changes and you’re in constant fight or flight mode, it can be hard to stay focused, feel joy, or experience pleasure until this trauma is healed. Luckily, modern psychological practices are developing innovative ways to heal from trauma that actually work.” 
• Widow of Tolerance by Sophie C
  • The video covers the window of tolerance: optimal zone, hypoactivation, hyperactivation. It shows what happens when someone is triggered and how trauma impacts the window of tolerance.
• Trauma and Your Nervous System from Dr. Mariel Buque (holistic psychologist, Intergenerational Trauma expert, and sound bath meditation healer)
  • “Your nervous system can become disrupted during trauma. Learn the 101 of how nervous system works with trauma here.”
• Workshop series (need to pay): Politicizing Your Practice
  • “A three-part pre-recorded workshop series presented by Dr. Jennifer Mullan of Decolonizing Therapy™ designed for private therapy practices, non-profits, organizations, and universities that are interested in cultivating a decolonized, anti-oppression lens and praxis in their work.”
  • “This workshop series is an invitation to re-examining the ways that we have been educated, socialized, and often unconsciously herded into believing that Mental Health - as it stands- is healing and not oppressive. When in fact the current Mental Health Industrial Complex focuses on Treatment, not wellness (more on that in the series). This series seeks to invite you and your organization in. It works best when engaged with and chewed upon- not quickly digested.”
  • Session #1: Historical Trauma & Intergenerational Trauma Transmission
  • Session #2: Structural Oppression in Mental Health
  • Session #3: Politicizing Our Mental and Emotional Health Practices

Journal articles

• Knuckey, S., Satterthwaite, M., & Brown, A. (2018). Trauma, depression, and burnout in the human rights field: Identifying barriers and pathways to resilient advocacy. Columbia Human Rights Law Review, 49(3), 267.
  • “This Article is part of an effort to close these gaps and to document the mental health of human rights advocates, who, in the pursuit of the rights of others, may neglect their own wellbeing. The Article is also part of an effort to understand the causes and dynamics of both positive and adverse wellbeing among advocates, with a view to improving how advocates are prepared for and conduct their work. It is crucial to identify specific factors that might place human rights advocates at risk for negative mental health impacts, as well as those factors that may help them develop resilience and ensure sustainable work practices, at both the individual and the institutional levels.”
• “Soul Pain: The Hidden Toll of Working With Survivors of Physical and Sexual Violence” by Sarah L. Jirek (2015) 💜
  • “This study extends prior research on vicarious traumatization and emotion management by exploring a deeper, more life-altering effect of working with traumatized clients—namely, “soul pain.” Analyses of in-depth interviews with 29 advocates working with survivors of physical and sexual violence reveal that, as a direct consequence of hearing countless stories of human brutality, some staff members experience a profound wounding of their spirit. This finding expands our understanding of the occupational hazards of the helping professions by revealing another dimension of advocates’ lives—that of the soul or spirit—that may be affected by their work with trauma survivors.”
  • Soul pain- “a deep, gut-wrenching ache that pierces the core of one’s being. It is a spiritual pain, a sorrow born of seeing the cruelty that human beings inflict on one another and of feeling powerless to stop it.”
• Biobehavioral Responses to Stress in Females: Tend-and-Befriend, Not Fight-or-Flight by Taylor et al 
  • Abstract: “​​The human stress response has been characterized, both physiologically and behaviorally, as "fight-or flight." Although fight-or-flight may characterize the primary physiological responses to stress for both males and females, we propose that, behaviorally, females' responses are more marked by a pattern of "tend-and-befriend." Tending involves nurturant activities designed to protect the self and offspring that promote safety and reduce distress; befriending is the creation and maintenance of social networks that may aid in this process. The biobehavioral mechanism that underlies the tend-and-befriend pattern appears to draw on the attachment-caregiving system, and neuroendocrine evidence from animal and human studies suggests that oxytocin, in conjunction with female reproductive hormones and endogenous opioid peptide mechanisms, may be at its core. This previously unexplored stress regulatory system has manifold implications for the study of stress.”

Books

• Writing into the Wound: Understanding Trauma, Truth, and Language by Roxane Gay 
  • Content warning: sexual assault, fat shaming, and other distressing content 
  • “Bestselling author and cultural icon Roxane Gay is no stranger to trauma. As a young girl, she was the victim of a horrifying act of violence that changed her life and would strongly influence her career as a writer. In her 2017 memoir Hunger, she addressed that trauma head-on, writing with bracing honesty about her body and the ways that food can be used both to bury pain and make oneself disappear. The response to Hunger by some critics who seemed to take perverse pleasure in highlighting Gay’s vulnerabilities was itself a fresh wound. By exploring trauma publicly, Gay suffered more of it.”
  • “In her Scribd Original Writing into the Wound, Gay not only talks openly about trauma in her personal life—from her fraught time as an undergraduate at Yale to the stress of returning there as a visiting professor to the fallout from Hunger—but also about the collective trauma we’ve experienced this past year. COVID-19, racial and economic inequality, political strife, imminent environmental disaster, and more: Gay catalogs it all with her trademark candor and authority. To make sense of our pain, she suggests, we need to explore it fully, even as we’re still in the midst of it. Just as she writes her way through her own traumas and coaches her students to do the same, she urges us to take a long, hard look at the wounds we all share: ‘The world as we knew it has broken wide open. There is a before and an after, and the world will never again be what it once was. That sounds terrifying, but it is an opportunity.’”
  • “‘To change the world, we need to face what has become of it,’ she writes. ‘To heal from a trauma, we need to understand the extent of it.’ Full of wisdom and rage and grace, Writing into the Wound is a remarkable consideration of where we are, and where we need to go, by one of the finest authors and cultural critics of her generation.’”
• The Politics of Trauma by Staci Haines
  • Recommended from Radical Guide for Social Justice: Healing Justice
  • “The Politics of Trauma offers somatics with a social analysis. This book is for therapists and social activists who understand that trauma healing is not just for individuals—and that social change is not just for movement builders. Just as health practitioners need to consider the societal factors underlying trauma, so too must activists understand the physical and mental impacts of trauma on their own lives and the lives of the people and communities with whom they organize. Trauma healing and social change are, at their best, interdependent.
  • “Somatics has proven to be particularly effective in addressing trauma, but in practice it typically focuses solely on the individual, failing to integrate the social conditions, structural inequities, and systemic forces of oppression that create trauma in the first place. Staci K. Haines, somatic innovator and cofounder of generative somatics, invites readers to look beyond individual experiences of body and mind to name and examine the social, political, and economic roots of trauma—including racism, environmental degradation, sexism, and poverty. Haines helps readers identify, understand, and address these sources of trauma to help us bridge individual healing with social transformation.”
• What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Dr. Bruce D. Perry and Oprah 
  • About: “This book is going to change the way you see your life. Have you ever wondered "Why did I do that?" or "Why can't I just control my behavior?" Others may judge our reactions and think, "What's wrong with that person?" When questioning our emotions, it's easy to place the blame on ourselves; holding ourselves and those around us to an impossible standard. It's time we started asking a different question. Through deeply personal conversations, Oprah Winfrey and renowned brain and trauma expert Dr. Bruce Perry offer a groundbreaking and profound shift from asking “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?” Here, Winfrey shares stories from her own past, understanding through experience the vulnerability that comes from facing trauma and adversity at a young age. In conversation throughout the book, she and Dr. Perry focus on understanding people, behavior, and ourselves. It’s a subtle but profound shift in our approach to trauma, and it’s one that allows us to understand our pasts in order to clear a path to our future―opening the door to resilience and healing in a proven, powerful way.”
  • Podcast on the book: Brené with Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Bruce D. Perry on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Unlocking Us with Brené Brown

Podcasts

• Breaking News Has Broken Us from How's Work? with Esther Perel
  • “A large and scattered network of journalists meet for a virtual session with Esther. Over the past year, they've reported on the biggest stories of their careers, but they are burned out, isolated, grieving, and disconnected from the very thing that supports and energizes them all: their newsroom.”

• What is the role of grief in activist work? How can we make space for everyone to feel what they feel (be human) in this community? 
• How can we recognize and learn to label grief? What are the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual signs of grief?
• How can we cope?
• Who bears the burden of having to live with prolonged grief due to social injustices? Who benefits? Why?
  • What are some limitations of empathy? Could empathizing instead of experiencing trauma be a form of privilege? What implications does this have for activist work?
• Why is emotional labor (such as coping with grief) often treated as invisible labor? Who does that benefit? What inequities does it sustain? What implications does this have for activist work?

Keynote presentation

• Audre Lorde (1981): “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” 
  • “Women respond to racism. My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.”

Articles

• Stages of grief from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler
  • “The five stages, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order. Our hope is that with these stages comes the knowledge of grief ‘s terrain, making us better equipped to cope with life and loss. At times, people in grief will often report more stages.”
• “The Power of Grief-Fueled Activism” by Isabel Fattal 
  • Content warning: discussion of Parkland school shootings
  • “The Parkland students’ turn to political action may seem fast—but protest can be an important expression of grief.”
• “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning” by Claudia Rankine 💜
  • Content warning: racial violence, discussion and details of police brutality 
  • “Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black.”
  • “In refusing to look away from the flesh of our domestic murders, by insisting we look with her upon the dead, she [Mamie Till Mobley] reframed mourning as a method of acknowledgment that helped energize the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s.”
  • “The Black Lives Matter movement can be read as an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness.”
• “Who Gets to be Afraid in America?” by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi 💜
  • Content warning: racial violence, police brutality, discussion of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery  
  • “Americans don’t see me, or Ahmaud Arbery, running down the road—they see their fear.”
• “The Perils and Possibilities of Anger” by Casey Cep 
  • “After centuries of censure, women reconsider the political power of female rage.”
• “Climate Grief: How We Mourn a Changing Planet” BBC Article by Panu Pihkala 💜
  • “The enormous transformations to our planet from climate change can have powerful effects on our emotions, making us grieve for what is lost.”
  • “The range of things (and creatures) that people mourn for is wide: loss of human, animal and plant life, but also loss of identities, beliefs, and lifestyles.”
  • “If grief is not recognised, it can manifest itself as anxiety.”
• “Climate Activist Toolkit” LLC Library Research Guide 💜
  • The guide contains descriptions of climate grief and coping methods, support groups and information resources and low-cost places to get help.

Books

• Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper
  • “Far too often, Black women’s anger has been caricatured into an ugly and destructive force that threatens the civility and social fabric of American democracy. But Cooper shows us that there is more to the story than that. Black women’s eloquent rage is what makes Serena Williams such a powerful tennis player. It’s what makes Beyoncé’s girl power anthems resonate so hard. It’s what makes Michelle Obama an icon.”
  • “Eloquent rage keeps us all honest and accountable. It reminds women that they don’t have to settle for less. When Cooper learned of her grandmother's eloquent rage about love, sex, and marriage in an epic and hilarious front-porch confrontation, her life was changed. And it took another intervention, this time staged by one of her homegirls, to turn Brittney into the fierce feminist she is today. In Brittney Cooper’s world, neither mean girls nor fuckboys ever win. But homegirls emerge as heroes. This book argues that ultimately feminism, friendship, and faith in one's own superpowers are all we really need to turn things right side up again.”

Videos

• Grief, Love, Action: Transforming Collective Sorrow into Collective Power event co-hosted by Narrative Initiative and Women’s March Network 
  • About the event 
  • “We have been memorializing this long period of collective loss in many ways, telling a national story of family, grief and community that exposes major fault lines in our society. Grief has always been with us, but we have a chance now to acknowledge how sorrow lives in all our communities, and what we do with it together. These leaders will explore the possibilities of transforming collective grief into collective power and action through the quality of our storytelling.”

• Why is depression not an individual issue but a public health issue, linked to experiencing/witnessing intersecting inequities? 
• How can we recognize and learn to label depression? What are the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual signs?
• How can we cope?
• Who bears the burden of having to live with depression due to social injustices? Who benefits? Why?
  • What are some limitations of empathy? Could empathizing instead of experiencing trauma be a form of privilege? What implications does this have for activist work?
• Why is emotional labor (such as coping with depression) often treated as invisible labor? Who does that benefit? What inequities does it sustain? What implications does this have for activist work?

Articles

• “Organizing our way through mental illness: Lots of activists live with mental illness – so why is social justice organizing still so ableist?” by Saima Desai 💜
  • Content warning: mental illness (depression, anxiety, suicide, eating disorders, self-harm, bipolar disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD]), rape, police and gun violence, Islamophobia and anti-Blackness
  • “I explain to myself and others over and over that depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain. I’ve been told that I’m just “too sensitive,” that I should “snap out of it,” that my depression can be cured by doing yoga or eating kale or smiling more. Those messages are dangerous and invalidating, tossed out casually by well-intentioned people who insinuate that I’m just “weak” or even making it up for attention. I cling to that chemical imbalance, to tell myself that I’m not just delicate, or self-centered, but that my mental illness is as valid and real and deserving of medication as any physical illness. And yet, I’ve begun to wonder if that’s the whole story.”
  • Articles’s sections
    • Mental illness is political
      • “Maybe the high prevalence of mental illness is caused – or at least contributed to – by the nature of our work. Our work is to stare straight at injustice, to document violence, to analyze both the political and the personal through a lens of unequal distributions of power.”
    • Trauma, psychosis, healing, and exhaustion
    • On identity and interconnectedness
    • “Bodies in the streets” and the ableism in organizing 
    • Staying sane in the time of Trump
• “What MarShawn McCarrel's Death Says About the State of Mental Health in America” by Zak Cheney-Rice 💜
  • Content warning: racism, discussion about suicide of MarShawn McCarrel, BLM activist, including quotes from a suicide note
  • The article argues that activists need to address mental health. 
  • "A lot of interpretations of disease can be socialized interpretations rooted in anti-black racism. Unless you have a therapist who has done a critical analysis of race and mental health, you could fall victim to care that actually reinforces violence." -Adaku Utah, co-founded a healing space, Harriet's Apothecary

Videos

• “Imade on Depression, and the Intersections of Social Justice and Mental Health” by Imade Nibokun (3:26 min)
  • Content warning: suicide, racism 
  • “Imade Nibokun (@imadeintruth | @DepressedWBlack) is a writer and activist in North Carolina. In this video, she talks about her experiences with depression and the relationship between social justice and mental health.” Nibokin discusses why mental health & healing matters in social justice spaces

Journal articles

• Knuckey, S., Satterthwaite, M., & Brown, A. (2018). Trauma, depression, and burnout in the human rights field: Identifying barriers and pathways to resilient advocacy. Columbia Human Rights Law Review, 49(3), 267.
  • “This Article is part of an effort to close these gaps and to document the mental health of human rights advocates, who, in the pursuit of the rights of others, may neglect their own wellbeing. The Article is also part of an effort to understand the causes and dynamics of both positive and adverse wellbeing among advocates, with a view to improving how advocates are prepared for and conduct their work. It is crucial to identify specific factors that might place human rights advocates at risk for negative mental health impacts, as well as those factors that may help them develop resilience and ensure sustainable work practices, at both the individual and the institutional levels.”
• Stern, M., & Brown, A. (2016). “It’s 5:30. I’m exhausted. and I have to go all the way to f%#ing fishtown.”: Educator depression, activism, and finding (armed) love in a hopeless (neoliberal) place. The Urban Review, 48(2), 333-354. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-016-0357-x
  • “Many recent critical engagements with contemporary educational policy tend to be framed through the language of neoliberalism. Though these critiques are useful in providing a rich understanding of the political and cultural economy of public education, their level of abstraction demands more grounded and embodied approaches. In conversation with queer, feminist, and affect theory, this qualitative project uses the feelings of activist educators in Philadelphia to gain a deeper understanding what it means to live and labor in neoliberal times. Specifically, this article locates depression as a precise kind of political affect experienced by educators in an age of corporate accountability structures and austerity. Educators describe a kind of professional depression and, in turn, locate their activism as a therapeutic antidote to the current trends in education policy. Using the Freirean notion of armed love, we contextualize and theorize how new educator movements and activism strive to provide community for educators to endure, heal, and work towards greater educational justice.”

• What is the role of anxiety in activist work?
• How can we recognize and learn to label anxiety? What are the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual signs of anxiety?
• How can we cope?
• Who bears the burden of having to live with prolonged anxiety due to social injustices? Who benefits? Why?
  • What are some limitations of empathy? Could empathizing instead of experiencing trauma be a form of privilege? What implications does this have for activist work?
• Why is emotional labor (such as coping with anxiety) often treated as invisible labor? Who does that benefit? What inequities does it sustain? What implications does this have for activist work?

Articles

• “Who Gets to be Afraid in America?” by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi 💜
  • Content warning: racial violence, police brutality, discussion of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery  
  • “Americans don’t see me, or Ahmaud Arbery, running down the road—they see their fear.” 
• “Climate Activist Toolkit” LLC Library Research Guide 💜
  • “The guide contains descriptions of climate grief and coping methods, support groups and information resources and low-cost places to get help.”
• “The Rise of Anxiety in the Age of Inequality” by Graham Peebles 💜
  • “In a world so focused on mindless consumption and status acquisition, the developed world’s epidemic of anxiety and depression should come as no surprise”
  • “Sufficiency is laughed at, abundance encouraged, waste ignored and human dignity eroded. And if – as is the case for the majority – the means to consume, compete and dominate, are lacking, self-worth falters, anxiety envelops, depression threatens and suicide lies in wait.”
  • Economic inequality and anxiety: “One of the major causes of anxiety generally – and specifically of ‘status anxiety’ – is wealth and income inequality. Evidence published by Richard G Wilkinson, author of The Impact of Inequality, showed that in developed countries, mental illnesses ‘were three times as common in societies where there were bigger income differences between rich and poor.’”

Journal articles

• Bondü, R., & Inerle, S. (2020). Afraid of injustice? Justice sensitivity is linked to general anxiety and social phobia symptoms. Journal of Affective Disorders, 272, 198-206. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2020.03.167
  • “Justice sensitivity is the tendency to perceive injustice and to adversely respond to it.”
  • “This study is the first to link justice sensitivity to anxiety symptoms.”
  • “Particularly the tendency to feel unjustly treated was related to anxiety symptoms.”
  • “Justice sensitivity predicted these symptoms beyond other influential risk factors.”
  • “Justice sensitivity deserves more attention by anxiety research and intervention.”
• Fenton, J. (2013;2012;). Risk aversion and anxiety in Scottish criminal justice social work: Can desistance and human rights agendas have an impact? The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 52(1), 77-90. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2311.2012.00716.x
  • “This article explores the difficulty that criminal justice social work (CJSW) might have in implementing a desistance approach to work with offenders. Supporting desistance requires responsive, autonomous social workers and this article questions whether criminal justice agencies, characterised by risk aversion and managerialism, would be able to tolerate the anxiety this would inevitably, and properly, generate. Suggestions are made regarding the place of desistance work within a positive human rights framework, which might provide a force against the corrosive progression of popular punitivism – a major factor in the persistence of risk averse, managerial practice”

Guides

• Harms, A. (2021). Ray, Sarah jaquette. A field guide to climate anxiety: How to keep your cool on a warming planet. Berkeley, CA: University of california press, 2020. pp. 207. ISBN: 978-0-520-34330-6 https://doi.org/10.1002/wmh3.405
  • “Sarah Jaquette Ray’s A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety offers itself as an ‘existential toolkit’ for the ‘climate generation.’ This book makes an overdue and very welcome contribution to the world, where the mental health impacts and cascading losses that climate change generates are increasing rapidly. It synthesises a range of psychological theory, personal experience, Buddhist philosophy and activist self-care wisdom. This is organised into a series of strategies that can help people of any age to play the long game of fighting for climate justice.”