Burnout – How to be well in a sick world
“Change is hard” reads the opening of Burnout by Hannah Proctor. It is undeniably true. What is also true, as Proctor cogently argues, is that we don’t recognise this and its implications often enough.
Burnout is Proctor’s attempt to recast how we think about mental health and healing, predominantly in left-wing movements, drawing on a variety of historical experiences. The book is organised as a series of meditations on different mental maladies: melancholia, PTSD, depression, and so forth. In each chapter, Proctor explores how these maladies specifically afflict activists, how these have responded, and how Left thinking has diverged from, or engaged with, mainstream psychiatry.
Burnout was born from Proctor’s own experiences of despair and depression, and she does not hide how her subjective position has influenced her research and writing. She treats her case studies with gentleness and generosity, even where she disagrees or sees flaws, and steers clear of common polemical or analytical styles of writing. Yet I cannot believe Proctor is really as bereft of hope as she at times claims she is, especially in the Afterword. Someone who had truly lost hope would not have been able to extend the level of compassion to her subjects as Proctor does. Many of her pages read as if she wants to reach back in time to offer succour and healing to the broken and lost souls that litter her pages.
In a further act of self-criticism, Proctor also berates herself for not offering more ready-made solutions for activists suffering from distress or despair. Some reviews make the same point, but I would argue it misunderstands the nature of aid, as opposed to advice. Yes, it is true that there is no neat listicle of ’10 Proven Ways to Defeat Despair’. But it is not true that this is the only road to enlightenment. As Proctor observes repeatedly: healing is a process, not a state. We may never be healed, but in a society that damages us every day, we should always be healing. If the reader is open to entering into dialogue with the insights, perspectives and reflections in the book, it absolutely has the potential to aid them in their healing journey.
If the healing of the self is an unceasing process, then that is true even more for the healing of society. And yet, what shines through time and again in Burnout is how social movements felt themselves singularly burdened to achieve fundamental social transformation during their lifetimes. Proctor keenly observes that it is this recurring sense of urgency that ultimately turns to crushing despair, as activists realise that they can transform neither themselves nor society at the pace they hoped. Burnout returns repeatedly to the idea of ‘patient urgency’ as both a description of this asynchronicity and a way to achieve the elusive balance between being alive to the urgency of our task, but patient enough to accept our often frustratingly slow progress.
The state of patient urgency can be achieved at the level of an individual, but it could equally be realised at the level of a movement. Burnout registers this option, but does not strongly explore it. Which is a shame, because an obvious inference from its argument is that much distress and despair could be avoided if we set ourselves more realistic ambitions. Proctor is wary of conceding too much to patience, rightly noting how it could equally lead to complacency and disengagement. But history shows us that no generation achieved the revolution it aimed for, and yet that does not mean its efforts were in vain. We are all links in an intergenerational chain, with each generation gifting the fruits of its victories and the lessons of its defeats to the next. Such a perspective seems much more conducive to patient urgency, because it absolves any generation of the duty to overcome every historical injustice at once, while not denying the scale and urgency of our task. That isn’t to say this perspective is always easy in the face of polycrisis. But it is more sustainable, and ultimately more true. We might like for this not to be an intergenerational struggle, but it is, and it is healthier to face up to that.
There are two obvious and linked critiques of taking such an intergenerational perspective. The first is the one already identified in Burnout, namely complacency and disengagement. Yet if Burnout demonstrates anything, it is that we are more likely to over- than undercommit ourselves. The second critique is that the links in the chain can weaken and break. Where activists drop out, movements fade and institutions falter, successive generations are left isolated and weakened. This risk in itself is reason to prioritise space for healing and self-care, because we owe it to the next generation not to burn ourselves out before we can pass on the torch of justice. And it adds a productive purpose to the rituals of commemoration and remembrance, not just as sources of inspiration (or left melancholy), but as a living connection to the past and future. Maybe we cannot be healed. But we can care across space and time, so that maybe, someday, we will be whole.