Who Isn’t Struggling with Mental Health this Mental Health Awareness Month?
Written by Gabriela, APTP Volunteer Coordinator
Chances are, if you’re living and laboring under capitalism with multiple genocides unfolding as we watch on our phones, and the effects of climate catastrophe making themselves known, then you’re aware of our collective mental health struggles.
I am the volunteer coordinator at the Anti Police-Terror Project and a huge part of my role is coordinating volunteers for our program Mental Health First (MH1), which is a non-police community crisis response program operating in Oakland and Sacramento since 2020. I have personally taken dozens of calls from participants (callers) on our hotline and can report that one of the biggest struggles facing our community right now is figuring out how to continue functioning in the face of the normalization of so much mass death and suffering.
People are dealing with worsening depression while experiencing so much apathy and cognitive dissonance from people they had previously been close to. Some are worried sick about loved ones in Gaza or Sudan or Haiti or the Democratic Republic of Congo. Others are suffering debilitating anxiety related to the corporate-fueled climate catastrophe and wondering whether our planet will even be habitable in the next five, ten, or fifty years.
“The traditional mental health industrial complex would have us believe that the solution to these societal ills is to treat them as divorced from our daily lived experiences.”
The traditional mental health industrial complex would have us believe that the solution to these societal ills is to treat them as divorced from our daily lived experiences; as if what is happening in the world around us is “not our problem,” therefore our exacerbated mental health issues should be addressed at the individual level, and disconnected from the current global trauma.
APTP knows that isn’t the case. Many, if not most, of the ways that folks experience mental health struggles and crises are directly tied to structural oppression and violence that accompanies surviving under racism, capitalism, imperialism, genocide, and other forms of state terror. It has been both incredibly healing and heartbreaking to support people in mental health crisis. Experiencing the healing in real time for the participant and the volunteer affirms how messed up this reality is and how helping others who are struggling can be a healing modality in itself.
Healing because this phenomenon demonstrates the true power of community and the ways that simply holding space for a person’s humanity can be such a powerful tool in fighting and dismantling the machine that seeks to harm and eradicate us while improving your own mental health.
Heartbreaking because it is so tragic to consider how so much needless additional trauma has been inflicted by traditional mental health care systems neglecting to consider the role that state violence plays in a person’s mental and emotional state.
“Our MH1 and Healing Justice frameworks are addressing mental & emotional crises now through care that is rooted in community, autonomy, and shared humanity, while simultaneously dismantling the systems that uphold the root causes.”
Mental health issues are not individual problems that should be internalized and solved one-by-one, but rather by shifting realities one-by-one. Our Mental Health First and Healing Justice frameworks are addressing mental and emotional crises now through care that is rooted in community, autonomy, and shared humanity, while simultaneously dismantling the systems that uphold the root causes.
Until, and as we work towards, those new realities, it is an honor and a privilege to support the work of APTP’s Mental Health First Program as one way of normalizing this work and creating communities in which we can all thrive.
This is where you come in. For 15 years volunteers have been the engine of APTP’s work. If you’re interested in joining our team of volunteers providing this crucial support to folks most in need, please join us at our next volunteer training on July 13th from 10am-5pm on Zoom.
Please consider also supporting our work with a donation — or perhaps by becoming a monthly donor — to ensure we can continue to provide and expand these crucial services for our people.