care as a community good

To make diagnosis something ‘empowering’, the first step is to completely break it apart and acknowledge all of its potential different and conflicting functions. Diagnosis can give you access to community, or cut you off from community. It can give you access to benefits, or it can bar you from income through employment. It could get you your meds

Mutual aid, of which defense committees are good examples, has the power to change our social relationships, to galvanize us into groups and communities that confront specific crises—and then move on to fight much broader battles. We saw that kind of reconfiguration happen around Marissa’s case, as people moved from concern to collective action, an

The question of impact is my favorite. If the people doing the impacting are tired and sick and frustrated and have all these needs that are not being met, what good is that impact? The quality of work that we can do for each other depends on the quality of care that we’re experiencing and cultivating for ourselves. I can’t say that enough.

Awareness’ is an unambitious political end-goal for a few reasons. Firstly: awareness of what? The information circulated in ‘awareness’ narratives often uncritically props up neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism supports the privatisation of major businesses, cuts to state welfare, and an emphasis on ‘individual responsibility

we all have needs that need to be tended to. I always wonder, what if care is the work? What if caring for ourselves is the revolution, meaning, what would happen if we divested from dismantling white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and invested our energy in equitizing the care we are able to provide one another?

That ‘individual responsibility’ idea is present in so many messages from awareness campaigns: the idea that it is our duty to reach out to loved ones and services for help; the suggestion that mental health support should come in the form of a ‘service’ at all; the emphasis on individual tools like therapy, meds, self-help, mindfulness and apps to

The Seattle-area resource Big Door Brigade defines mutual aid as “when people get together to meet each other’s basic survival needs with a shared understanding that the systems we live under are not going to meet our needs and we can do it together RIGHT NOW!”