The Politics of Survival

How political is our response to mental suffering? When that suffering has a political cause, can our response ever be apolitical? When is the treatment of suffering also a maintenance of its conditions of possibility? Dean Spade’s essential body of work, most recently Mutual Aid (2020), provides both a treatise on the necessity of care work for political transformation and a comprehensive practical guide to building the kinds of nonhierarchical organizations we wish to see in the world. It challenges us to accept both our relationality and our suffering, and to integrate our ethical views into an ongoing practice. “The false separation of politics and injustice from ordinary life,” he observes, “and the idea that activism is a kind of lifestyle accessory – is demobilizing to our movements, hides the root causes of injustice, and keeps us passive and complicit” (Spade, 2020, p. 27). This passivity and complicity is often reproduced in discourses of recovery, mental health, and criminal justice.