She who stumbles

In my post entitled ‘Radical brainmeats’ I mentioned “a woman who’d been diagnosed with a mental illness, and recently had a very nasty experience with the mental health system” who was organising a campaign to raise awareness about mental illness, and to address the mentally unhealthy effects of activist culture.

She died yesterday, of suicide.

It’s horribly ironic. Whenever I think of that post I think of her.

I spent most of last night at the student housing co-op where she lived, commiserating with friends and doing what I could to support them. It was intense.

I think the worst thing about last night was that the people at the co-op — most of them activists of one stripe or another — were so dejected, and that police, University security, counsellors from the university, and ambulance staff were the ones taking charge of the situation. This is a community of people whose response to any crisis is proactive and progressive. Frequently, it’s police and University security that we fight against. With police officers talking about a Coronial inquiry and normally-confident activists (some of whom knew her even less than I did) relying on police for support, I’m worried about the activist community here. Will the state use this as a means of intervening in our fights for social justice?

I’m scared for myself, too. The past few weeks have been heavy, and even though I haven’t done all that much, just the tension of waiting for something to happen, the hope that something will, is giving me headaches and disrupting my sleep. I don’t like to believe I’m emotionally disabled, that I have to be very careful or else I’ll end up completely useless, but all signs seem to point in that direction.

It could very easily have been me to succumb, to be made miserable by the pressure, to lose all hope, to be in a state of near-constant psychological pain that I can neither ease nor talk about.

And although at times I’ve not taken my mental illness seriously — at times that was necessary — right now I take it very seriously.

Mental illness kills. Activism kills.

I feel that this is a form of violence inflicted upon a human being by her environment; and because she was uniquely vulnerable to it, she was its casualty. But it’s a violence that affects us all. A mentally unhealthy environment that causes all kinds of
Just as one might say that the Union Carbide leak in Bhopal was a violent disaster — it was caused by negligence and greed that harmed peoples’ health for years to come — the unhealthy, combative, judgemental, culture of activism has done harm to a human being. Now she is gone from this world. She no longer exists. The life of a woman who had so much to offer has been snuffed out.

And although at times I hoped to ignore my pain and weather the feelings, right now I need to talk about it because the only hope I see is through dialogue, understanding, and working together for change.

Yet I fear that, in the end, the same awful dynamics that harmed her in the first place — and which she was working against — will be reinstated as people argue over the meaning of her death. There’s a strong materialist current that militates against taking the subjective experiences of oppressed people seriously. And that could very easily be reinstated in the weeks and months ahead.
I never spoke to her about how I empathised with her, or how much I agreed with her about the terrible flaws of the activist culture. I kept silent out of fear too. I didn’t want to be scrutinised and judged. And I wanted to say something to her about it, but I was biding my time. Now it’s too late.
I feel like I have to say something now, and it scares me. I don’t want to carry this burden alone, but I also don’t want to expose my personal experiences for public scrutiny, like she, so bravely, did. Is that a kind of vulnerability that kills? I don’t think I’m brave enough to find out.

But how can we face her family if we don’t? How can we face each other? Ourselves?

I… have a lot more to say. But I’ll leave it there for now. Dwelling on this too much is unhelpful, and I have friends who need me right now.