Crisis and the Collective

“The system is in crisis”

I have heard this simple piece of wisdom from so many of the people I work with. Recently someone told me “I’m not in crisis, the crisis is not me. It’s the system.”

I am a crisis worker, and I primarily work with clients over the phone to provide support and connect them to other services. Nearly everyone I speak to is experiencing insecure housing, financial struggles, increased disability, isolation from community – and incredible psychic distress as a result. When they call in, they are viewed as a person “in crisis”. We are explicitly trained to see only the crisis of the individual.

But truly, the crisis does not stem from the individual. The language used around this matters, and true to form, the mental health industry has no interest in naming the root of mental unwellness. It absolutely fits the neoliberal agenda to maintain that crisis is an individual experience – that our crisis is solitary and discrete, disconnected.

What difference would it make to see our psychic pain in plurality? A collective view of psychic pain is a powerful underlying force of liberatory movements, as radical psychotherapist and father of decolonial theory, Frantz Fanon wrote many decades ago. A radical, collective orientation to “mental illness” is a prerequisite for any of us experiencing healing. The wound that needs healing is spread across oppressed peoples of the world, and healing is no more a solitary experience than is psychic pain. We could, then, also consider that a better word for “healing” is “liberation” – this the action needed to relieve the pain.

For those of us who work deeply entrenched in a colonial and neoliberal system of “mental health”, it is important to weave its undoing into our direct work with clients. I have noticed that many people will cling to an individualized version of their suffering, which is a view we have all been conditioned into. They may feel invalidated by any attempts to observe their pain as shared, or as a collective experience. This reaction makes sense, given that people have so deeply internalized the dominant pathological models and the framework of psychic distress as disease. People know that in order to receive any care, they need to use the language of the mental health system. In the work I do, clients that do identify their psychic pain as a collective social symptom are branded as non-compliant, paranoid, and delusional.

As people trained in various fields of care work, we need to invest in alternative systems and demonstrate liberatory care and actual healing in order to enable this crucial shift away from hyper individual, neoliberal notions of crisis and illness. When people come to us for help, we can meet them with care that treats them as a whole person and we can show them that another way is possible. The Liberatory Wellness Network and other projects that are fully politicized toward liberation are helping to concretely build this movement.

People do need someone to reach out to when the systemic crisis they exist in feels particularly crushing and agonizing. As carers in this position of support, we can help people divest from an individualized framework and welcome them into the liberatory care options we are actively building – peer networks, anarchistic mutual aid, and other wellness workers who won’t stigmatize or individualize their suffering.