Anarchists, anti-authoritarians and radicals of all stripes spend a disproportionate amount
of time and energy confronting the so-called ‘big picture’ challenges of the world.
In this all-consuming competition to change society, too often we overlook the personal
struggles that many of us face, including some of the most basic questions of how we
relate to ourselves, each other, and the world around us.
For some, the mundane tasks of day-to-day living can feel so meaningless,
or so hyper-important,
that even the simplest decisions become impossible to manage.
For others, ongoing or past experiences of physical danger, trauma, and instability,
can severely compound the difficulties that we already face surviving in a white supremacist,
hetero-patriarchal and capitalist society.
Yet despite the large number of us who face these struggles daily,
within our movements, mental health is often tokenized
or treated as an afterthought, and mental illness is often invisibilized.
Mainstream society polarises crazy people.
On the one hand it lifts a few of us up to celebrate our creative brilliance in the fields
of art, film, books and music.
When you hear about slavery for 400 years
For 400 years? That sounds like a choice!
On the other, it stigmatizes and fears us, controlling and locking us up.
Far from being a fast-track to creative stardom, mental illness leaves millions of people to
fall through the cracks of our neuro-typical society.
Most insanity does not get celebrated.
For many, it means losing your job or home because you can't get out of bed.
Not being able to socialize or organize due to anxiety, paranoia, or the inability to
maintain relationships.
Using risky coping mechanisms to try and manage your own symptoms, or relying on the toxic
mental health system for your very survival.
To the extent that they can be separated, the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries
both extract incredible profits in their supposed pursuit of our ‘mental wellness’.
Yet for those who would seek to break free from the State and capital’s system of pathological
diagnoses and lucrative prescriptions... what exactly does that leave us with?
Over the next thirty minutes, we will speak with a range of individuals as they share
their insights on the causes and potential solutions to mental illness, and share their
experiences of fighting stigma, dealing with trauma and getting into the proper headspace
to make a whole lot of trouble.
Mental health means our own interior kind of wellness.
Our own personal equilibrium of how we respond to the ails of the world.
Mental health is your own way of feeling balanced and feeling that you're well.
And we need to take it in a very broad sense.
In different cultures around the world, well-being in itself is so different.
So I would see mental health as a very open way of: are you feeling balanced and able
to face life in the complexity that it is?
As indigenous people we've lived through an enormous amount of trauma, and trying
to find that balance living in the environment that you do is challenging.
Mental health is the term that I use to talk about sort of being unable to cope with reality,
and different forms of things that my brain does... and ways that I change the way that
I perceive the world that are usually pretty harmful to my life.
In the society that we live in, oftentimes mental health ends up actually eclipsing
the larger context.
That language that we use to talk about mental health is the the language
of the biomedical model.
But meanwhile it leaves out the social context.
And we're not talking at all about the living situation that you're in,
or the color of your skin,
or the kind of access you've had to housing,
or the access you've had to education,
and what you have to deal with on a daily basis.
So if you live on reserve you have all kinds of challenges there.
If you live off reserve if you have a whole new set of challenges.
And how do you work through them all?
How do you make it better for the next generation?
Since mental health is primarily influenced by social factors,
there's no real way to solve it without changing the social condition
that we're in.
What we see it as is being able to use your psychological abilities to help fight against
the repression that comes towards you.
We need to figure out ways to increase our ability to fight against the forces that are
helping make us mentally ill, as it were.
So I see mental health not just as something that belongs to a person, or lives in a person.
But rather sort of a response to the condition that is around us that
causes us to hurt in this world.
Mental unwellness in broader society is an epidemic.
Whether it's just plain old capitalism that's, like, really selling the idea of
anything solvable through some exchange of money.
The terms of success - of a successful life - that have been passed down by the state,
by mass media, they're really unattainable for almost everyone.
And then even when people do achieve material success in these terms,
they struggle with finding meaning.
The conditions around us have other psychologically damaging effects.
The way that we relate to each other socially and the tendency towards seeking of, like,
social capital than seeking actual, like, close relationships with people.
When I think about mental health in my "immediate community", I see a community that is making
space for particular people who are living with mental health issues.
What I'm reminded of, is the ability for a Black man in my building to live mad while
Black, and walk around in this building in that way would probably not happen.
Because what I know is happening, not just in the city,
but in this province and in this country,
is police responses to Black people living with mental health issues,
or mad-identified, often, but not always, result in fatal shootings.
I would say generally in my community, a lot of people have struggles.
A lot of people see therapists.
Some people have diagnoses.
Some people are medicated.
So I would say, like, in the anarchist community a lot of people are struggling,
but there's, like, a lot more conversations about that.
A lot more informal peer support than in other communities that friends and family who are
not anarchists are a part of.
What I see happening in the mental health system is that there are an incredible number
of people who struggle with issues of trauma.
And what happens is when they come into the system and end up getting diagnosed with a
mental illness, what's happened to them in the past gets eclipsed by this culture,
which is very wrapped up in this whole model where there's a drug for
everything that you could possibly need.
A huge piece of what we can do is think outside the medical box
and use more transformative ways of thinking.
Human beings are social creatures, meaning that we simultaneously engage with
and are shaped by our surroundings.
This fact is often overlooked by those who see madness as nothing more
than a neurochemical imbalance.
In reality, social factors such as how broke you are, the color of your skin,
your gender and sexual orientation, and how well you pass
as a productive member of capitalist society,
all play huge roles in determining how you are treated, what health care
and social supports you have access to, and therefore greatly shape your
emotional and mental well being.
The hyper-individualization promoted by our current social media paradigm swaps human
contact for superficial interactions based on curated personas of likes and follows.
Did you lose your subscribers?!
The realm of spirituality has been so co opted and tainted by religious institutions that
many of us have no access to rituals and traditions that could help us feel a meaningful connection
to the world around us.
Profiting off this mess is the pharmaceutical industry, comprised of some of the world's
biggest corporate powerhouses, who spend billions each year lobbying doctors to push their newest
and most lucrative designer drugs, all with the goal of getting as many people medicated
as they can.
♫♫ Crazy I'm crazy for feeling so lonely
I'm crazy Crazy for feeling so blue ♫♫
When one in four people suffer from mental illness,
I have to sort of question what that means.
Whatever the status of mental health is, it’s rapidly declining.
And I think that’s happening in an intentional manner.
It just seems to me that anything and everything is being described as a mental health problem
– in such a way that creates this, like, false idea that there is a mental health
solution for that.
Possibly in the name of a pill, but often in the name of
some other additional kind of control.
A lot of the factors that lead to what we tend to call mental illness are entirely out
of the control of the people who are experiencing them,
and aren’t really from a biological or chemical root.
They’re from the social condition that the people are in.
How can we live in the world that we’re in and be “well”?
We need to recognize that the society that we live in is actually very unhealthy.
If we’re starting from this place that what we’re trying to do is get people to be healthy
so that they can fit into society...
that to me is really scary.
Because I’m often sad, and I’m often hurt.
And I’m often anxious and paranoid ... and those are for very real reasons.
My spirit can’t be stable if the material world around me is absolutely scary.
The real visceral and true fear of deportation, bankruptcy, homelessness, incarceration...
these are things that contribute to someone’s individual experience of despair.
And rather than offering a solution, it’s always just some pill, or injection.
Or just... removal.
I work with refugee claimants.
The very first weeks they arrive here in Canada, they live a whole different range of challenges.
A lot comes from what they carry.
What they lived in their countries: war, rape, being jailed, being tortured.
But also a lot of things they lived trying to get to Canada.
So some of them might have travelled a whole year, crossing ten different countries without
documents, without papers, before they arrive here.
So it’s a very heavy weight they carry with them.
And also a lot of challenges they face is actually arriving here with nothing and having
to face what it is to be a refugee claimant in Canada.
One of the hardest things is being in a state where you don’t know what’s going to happen
to you, right?
So you might wait a year, two years, to know if you’re going to be able to stay here.
So this period of just... not knowing what you can build for yourself and your kids
as a life is very hard.
Very stressful.
I think it’s really important, if we’re gonna talk about mental health
and mental wellness, that we think about ourselves
related to a larger social context.
I think one of the things that really impacts our mental health is that we live in such
an individualistic society, where we think the things that are happening to us
are happening because of our brain chemistry.
Or they’re happening to us because of some fault of ours,
because we’re not strong enough to survive.
When really they’re these larger social issues that are impacting everyone.
On a personal level, I get into trouble when I get disconnected from things
that are meaningful to me in the world.
One of the things that I wanna do with my life is engage with all of the imbalances
of power with communities that are trying to counter those imbalances.
A lot of the factors are just like the standard foundations of society, which is anti-Blackness,
racism and capitalism.
And until those are destroyed, there’s no actual solution.
When I think about the conditions that contribute to unwellness for Black people,
the number one is generally the experience of
the transatlantic slave trade, first and foremost.
The experience of colonialism.
The ongoing experiences of colonialism.
The ongoing occupations of Black spaces.
I see the hyper-surveillance of those communities as a particular kind of occupations.
And I’m using that word sort of in soft quotes, while keeping in mind the context
of what the word ‘occupation’ means here.
500 years of colonialism has really taken its toll on Indigenous people.
And it’s taken it in so many different ways.
There’s been a lot of hurt.
There’s been a lot of pain.
There’s been a lot of trauma that’s been passed on from generation to generation.
It’s a real struggle to get better when you’re left to fend for yourself.
But it seems like in a lot of the communities, they purposefully take everything away
and then are—it feels like they’re just waiting to see everybody die.
I think that with the high rates of suicide in every single community—I know the Inuit
community is probably the highest, but you know, even in my community, y’know,
the suicide rate is pretty high.
I think that when you’re always surrounded by death, because people give up,
that having these ceremonies to turn to, where you can honor their memory
and be surrounded by healers is a good way.
And because the Indian Act forced us to give up all those ceremonies,
now is the time where we have to re-learn them.
Of all the modern sciences aimed at reproducing subservience and reinforcing State power...
psychiatry is particularly nasty.
Its history is fraught with the warehousing and torture of countless individuals in sanitariums
and asylums.
In their eternal quest to understand and destroy that which is different, states have performed
every conceivable type of experiment on human test subjects, from mass sterilizations
and LSD-induced comas to decades of routine lobotomies.
Psychiatrists’ enthusiastic embrace of eugenics during the early 20th century was a major
inspiration for Nazi scientists, providing them a convenient pseudo-scientific justification
for the Holocaust.
And while the term became taboo after WWII the inherent link between psychiatry
and eugenics continued long after, and some would argue, still exists today.
Although psychiatry poses amidst the hard science-based branches of medicine,
nowhere else is the creation of medical conditions and disorders
so socially manufactured as in psychiatry's bible,
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual or DSM.
While the process of deciding how to categorize the mentally unwell can involve aspects of
the scientific method, it is oftentimes no more than a room full of old white men promoting
their collected social biases and individual agendas.
Ralph was sick. A sickness that was not visible like smallpox,
but no less dangerous and contagious. A sickness of the mind.
You see... Ralph was a homosexual.
Within the sacred pages of the DSM, homosexuality was considered a mental disorder until 1987,
and to this day, many transgender people need to be diagnosed with a mental illness in order
to receive the treatments they need.
Women who may have once been labeled as nymphomaniacs or hysterics,
are today branded instead with BPD,
or borderline personality disorder, a catch-all diagnosis primarily inscribed
on women whose histories of trauma are not seen as real or legitimate.
Although there have been attempts to distance psychiatry from this legacy, its ongoing history
is one of padded cells, forced injections, electroshock, and indefinite institutionalization.
If you find yourself on the wrong side of the modern mental healthcare system,
you can easily fall into a vicious feedback loop of mental health crises,
often caused by trauma, leading to further violence and re-traumatization.
This may take the form of forced hospitalization, incarceration,
hurting yourself or people that you love,
or ultimately ... being murdered by the police.
The state engages with mental unwellness by being the identifier of those of us that are
well and those of us that are unwell.
So the state and psychiatry define being well in terms of how well you conform to a normal
and in this society that normal encompasses all of the problematic
natures of mainstream society.
If you went back and asked your guidance counselor what their version of success would be for
you moving forward, well, it’s like how well you conform.
They started the residential schools to assimilate the children.
It was the law that if you didn’t give up your children you were sent to jail.
They call the foster care system the next residential school.
The kids that are in care aren’t brought up in a good way
and they fall through the cracks.
The state usually criminalizes mental unwellness.
Generally if you look at the ways that psych wards operate,
it’s not significantly different than prison.
And if you look at the way prisons operate they’re usually used as psych wards.
There’s no real distinction between the carcerality of american society in general
and the way that we treat the mentally ill.
Including the way that police shoot mentally ill people.
News 1: A police officer shoots and kills a teenager with schizophrenia.
News 2: A mentally ill man being shot four times by a police officer despite the fact
that the victim showed no threat of force.
News 3: And a mentally ill man shot dead by two Dallas officers.
I’ve spent four and a half months in state jails, about a month and a half in psych wards,
and there are some, like, really noticeable similarities.
There’s coercive violence, isolation - but the difference is that
like, when I’m in jail, I’m well and I’m myself,
I’m in a battle against the state and they're my enemy
and they’ve locked me in a cage.
And when I’m in a psych ward, it’s like a whole different world.
I don’t understand what’s going on. I have no connection to myself.
If I refuse medication, I’ll be tackled to the ground
and have it injected into me.
The trauma that I feel in my life from having been in jail is so much less profound than
the trauma that comes from a psych ward.
Generally mental illness is treated as something to push under the rug and hide
and either like fix with, you know, dumbing you down enough that you can
actually deal with whatever bullshit society is giving you.
Or, with putting you away if you’re unable to actually get back
into the capitalist flow of things.
Generally, the state engages with unwellness on a complete individual basis.
The problem is individualized and the solution is also individualized.
Self-care is usually a stand-in for a lot of neoliberal approaches
to dealing with mental health problems.
I worry that sometimes this expectation that people practice self-care
kind of misses the target in many ways.
Generally it focuses on a very individualized approach of like, taking care of your personal
needs as far as like attention or how people interact with you or things like that.
My wellness is maintained by taking pharmaceutical drugs
that are made by some of the worst corporations in the world.
People that are capitalizing off of hyper medication,
they’re advertising to doctors to try and get, you know,
as big of a quarterly fucking profit as they can.
You have to simultaneously be able to hold the understanding that the pharmaceutical
industry, like, really what they’re interested in is profit and they’re gonna try to get
as many people as they possibly can addicted to their drugs
… with the reality that like, there’s actually a lot of people for whom
the drugs are really helpful, you know?
Not nearly as many people as who are on them...
but I think it’s really important to be able to have that analysis
where you don’t just get shut down and think in a black and white framework.
And I think that just because a system exists doesn’t mean that we can’t critique it
while understanding that there are some people that might benefit from that.
And that there’s no shame in being able to be a person that decides
what your care might look like. That doesn’t make you less critical,
that doesn’t make you less of a mental health advocate.
As a psychiatrist, I basically have to work with a lot of people who have,
at least historically if not currently, found psych drugs and hospitalizations
helpful at least to some extent. And I think that’s fine.
What I do like to focus on with people is maybe a return to true informed consent.
I like to focus, when possible, on supporting people who maybe can’t find somebody who
is able and willing to help them taper or withdraw from the medications that they’ve
been taking or live in a less coercive environment during a crisis.
You have to walk in the white man’s world to get the accreditation that they find believable
in order for you to help your own people.
For instance, I can get a psychologist from Health Canada. They’ll pay for that.
But I can’t get funding from Health Canada to pay for my spiritual elder
cause he doesn’t have a degree in spirituality.
Rather than unquestioningly accepting the State's authority on the causes and nature
of mental unwellness and official dictates on what our interventions can and should
look like, today many crazy people are asserting our power to choose the right mix
of institutional and informal supports for the problems we face.
This growing movement seeks to counter stigmatizing conceptions of mental illness
that paint it as an isolated and individualized phenomenon,
positing instead the need for dynamic peer-based solutions
rooted in interconnectedness and community support.
Social media, with all its flaws, can play an important role in building
peer to peer networks, by offering us the ability to connect with others
who have faced similar experiences. This can be particularly helpful for individuals
that face geographic or emotional barriers to community and mental health support.
Because at the end of the day… the best person to take care of someone in
mental health crisis is often someone who’s already been through it themselves.
When we try to support or be allied with people that face this type of mental health issue
or trauma, we should be, in a way, curious.
Not be afraid to ask questions.
To learn.
And to try to connect with those people we try to help.
And really try to understand on a human and deeper level what these people faced
in the past, and what they are feeling right now.
The government did everything that they could to destroy us... and yet we’re still here.
We all carry a different kind of trauma.
And sometimes those traumas eat away at us until there’s nothing left.
And sometimes those traumas, we’re able to work through them and they become our
—almost energy source.
To keep moving forward so that we can help the next generation.
I have hope that, y’know, this generation is addressing these issues in a good way.
So that we don’t continue the trauma.
And try to reverse it if possible.
Situations and humans are so complex.
And we need to really be open to that complexity.
Never try to simplify or put labels on people.
This person is ‘traumatized’, or this person is ‘gonna be okay’.
She’s ‘strong’, she’s ‘resilient’, right?
We simplify situations that are very complex.
People tend to have a lot of personal and community ways of dealing with
mental health problems, but societally we tend to fail entirely.
Generally what I’ve noticed in communities is a desire to help
and a lack of ability to.
The actual, like, social conditions that cause these kinds of problems are
more what needs to be addressed.
And no one really seems to do that very well.
The best community support that I’m a part of is very informal.
It’s just talking with friends about how we’re doing, and what we’re thinking about.
A lot of it is about building those relationships beforehand.
Because whatever you do when a crisis occurs is going to be affected by and influenced
by the actual relationships you have with people.
Y’know, just making sure that our interactions with people are consensual.
Understanding what it may feel like for someone to feel really scared
and be sharing something with you.
Not only what do they need, but what can I offer?
And I think for me, actually that’s one of the first questions.
There’s this opportunity in the crisis, and in the breakdown,
for it to be a breakthrough.
If you stick around, y’know, if you go through the hard times
and get through the other side there’s a damn good chance
you’re gonna come out with some wisdom that you never would have had.
As a community of people who like, actually, care about making change in the world,
we need to lay the foundations for a more understanding relationship to crisis.
The best community support doesn’t have to look like an intervention.
And ideally, when our communities are in a good place, and when individuals have
really good, caring relationships and support networks set up,
then the crisis doesn’t happen. Or it can be alleviated.
I think that what we really have to begin to take seriously is that emotions surface
at a different range for different people.
And I think that some times there’s a way that we think listening is enough.
And it may be sometimes people might require something of us.
The authority that a psychiatrist is granted can be subverted to lift the voice of the
participant in the therapeutic relationship.
The role of the therapist, psychiatrist, social worker, mental health worker
... should be to step the fuck back and model a non-hierarchical,
non-secretive way of being with one another.
I hope that all of the work that our communities are doing around healing from trauma,
around transformative justice and community accountability
– that these can coalesce into some peer support models
and some models for, like, intervening in crisis.
And as much as I hope, and am excited about this work, I’m also skeptical
because of the magnitude of mental health crises.
There are so many different issues that face us that sometimes it can be overwhelming.
But if you keep moving forward, and you keep addressing these issues and keep trying to
find those solutions ... it brings hope to others.
From the epidemics of suicides and overdoses, to the shock and rage
sparked by the never-ending wave of police killings,
it’s painful to think about all those who’ve died as a
result of complications with mental health and their inability to receive
the support that they needed.
But their stories and lives aren’t forgotten.
Even as we continue to struggle within and against a world
that is growing increasingly scary,
we must take steps to collectively prepare ourselves for the battles to come.
Finding new ways to manage mental unwellness, with all the beauty and conflict that entails,
is a fundamental component of building stronger, healthier communities of resistance.
If we are able to do this, our movements will not only become more sustained and resilient,
but will gain new layers of possibility as we travel into the uncertain future together.
So at this point, we’d like to remind you that Trouble is intended to be watched
in groups, and to be used as a resource to promote discussion
and collective organizing.
Are you interested in starting a local peer support group, or just wanna better integrate
mental health awareness into your existing organizing projects?
Consider getting together with some comrades, organizing a screening of this film,
and discussing where to get started.
Interested in running regular screenings of Trouble at your campus, infoshop,
community center, or even just at home with friends?
Become a Trouble-Maker!
For 10 bucks a month, we’ll hook you up with an advanced copy of the show,
and a screening kit featuring additional resources and some questions you can use
to get a discussion going.
If you can’t afford to support us financially, no worries!
You can stream and/or download all our content for free off our website: sub.media/trouble.
If you’ve got any suggestions for show topics, or just want to get in touch, drop us a line
at trouble@sub.media.
A reminder that our online store is fully stocked with fresh swag for any subMedia fans
on your holiday shopping list.
We’re a broke collective funded entirely by donations, and all proceeds from these
sales go towards making it possible for us to make more films like this one.
We’ll be doing our last shipment of the year on December 16th, so be sure and get
your orders in before then at sub.media/gear.
This episode would not have been possible without the generous support of John Hamilton.
This is the last episode of the year… and after this we’ll be taking a month off.
But stay tuned early next year for Trouble #18, as we take a closer look at policing,
and community resistance to state violence.
So we see, in the context of the War on Terror,
within the last, y'know 10, 12, 15 years,
an attempt to fuse policing resources to better respond to what are perceived
as domestic threats.
FUCK. THE. POLICE!
Now get out there…. and make some trouble!