Burnout, with Hannah Proctor

Hi, this is Uncommon Sense from the Sociological Review Foundation. I'm Rosie Hancock in Sydney, Australia.

And I'm Alexis Hieu Truong in Ottawa, Canada.

And this show is the place where we grab hold of a word, an idea, a notion whose meaning we really stop to question. Something like care, anxiety, or last month privilege. And we take the time to play with it, see it sideways, more deeply, more critically, and always with our friendly expert guest. It's all with a view to seeing society otherwise, and in the hope that by the end of the show, we've kind of communicated what it means to think sociologically.

So today, we're looking at the word that – well, speaking as an academic here, when based in Canada – I think has become like so mainstream – it's burnout. So, it's hard to define and lacks a single definition, but it's often talked about with reference to like exhaustion and linked to stress and overwork. Perhaps you've got some self help books on it, actually, and maybe you've downloaded a mindfulness app – something to help you keep breathing, you know? Or maybe you found friends flaking on you because - well - isn't like everyone exhausted nowaday? Like Rosie, what does burnout mean to you?

Yeah, it does really feel like a word that's totally just part of the normal culture of academic life now. I'm not sure if I ever actually say that I feel burnt out. But I've definitely felt it - you know - sometimes felt like I've, I've wanted to say it. But also Alexis, in my work, I specialise in environmental activism – and I think burnout really does come into play there – thinking about, like fatigue and exhaustion, and also depression from seeing inaction on climate change. And I could go on there, but I know that you also work partly on mental health, so between us, we could actually have quite a good chat here. But let's bring in our guests to help us.

Hmm, well, here at the Sociological Review Foundation, as our manifesto itself states, we're about challenging disciplinary boundaries within the social sciences, with the view that, like doing so disrupts taken for granted understandings of the world. So who better to talk to today than Hannah Proctor, who's a Welcome Trust research fellow at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, interested in histories and theories of radical psychiatry.

Hi, Hannah. At the time we're speaking, it's still winter in the UK. Your book 'Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat' is coming out. You're also busy with academic work. Are you yourself experiencing - shall we say - burnout? In the conventional sense, there's a lot going on.

Hi, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, I suppose I'm maybe - like you - I maybe would be wary of using the term to describe my own experiences. But I have been interested to read some of the kind of emails that you get sent by sort of university management that sometimes talk in this language of sort of self help. And we have at our university, these breathing benches where you can - you know - take take time out. But it's like, obviously, that doesn't really help if you have such a heavy workload that you're not able to take time to - you know - sit on a bench. But I think - yeah - I suppose my book is about burnout, in specifically in relation to activist burnout and the emotional experiences of people involved in political struggle, experiences of the difficulties I suppose that people have, if they're involved in long term organising, how hard it is to sustain momentum. But also talking about the kind of more grand, grandiose sort of historical defeats after big political movements end in defeat.

Yeah - I mean - like, we've literally you've literally just, you know, said, talked about the benches at your university in Glasgow, right. And it feels like so much of what's in kind of mainstream culture around burnout is from this self help angle. And lots of the books and things are about self help, or the tales of personal struggle, And I'm curious - you know - your book is about something quite different. And, what, I want to know what got you interested in writing a book about sort of activists and political burnout? You write in your introduction about protesting against the war in Iraq, in the early noughties, and the way that was an experience of defeat - which seems like a really important word for you?

Yeah - I suppose - I was interested in what seemed to me something that was completely pervasive and something that so many people would recognise if you talked about it. Just the emotional strains, be they interpersonal strains within small political groups, the kind of feelings of disappointment and, and defeat that can come after - you know - a strike or a movement ends in defeat. So lots of people I know were very active - you know - campaigning for Jeremy Corbyn, for example, and felt this very heavy defeat - you know - in the wake of that. And so I was kind of interested in how it felt - like everyone was always acknowledging and talking about the how emotionally difficult these experiences can be. I was always feeling a little bit wary about using the term burnout. But it was absolutely always my working title for this project, because I felt that people I people in these kinds of - I don't know - organising WhatsApp groups, or just colloquially in activist circles would use this term to describe themselves feeling exhausted, tired, finding it hard to go on. And so it was always my working title. But I was always also conscious of how - increasingly - it was being used in this slightly different way, which is why I then ended up writing a whole chapter about the history of burnout. Because I kind of wanted to sort of interrogate, well, what's the history of this concept? Where did where does it come from? Why do we use it in the way that we do, etc.

As we've mentioned, burnout often seems to be talked about with reference to work, overwork, and a particular kind of exhaustion. I think there does seem to be an assumption out there that burnout belongs to some people and not others. And I'm kind of curious what you would say to that. Do you think that there are hidden classed, gendered and certainly racialised dimensions of conversations about burnout as a phenomenon?

Yeah, I think that's an interesting question and a somewhat tricky one to answer. Because I think, on the one hand, you could answer it in terms of how burnout is conceptualised within this kind of self help industry. And there, I think the archetypical, burnout sufferer would be - kind of - someone working in the creative industries, who is a millennial, and probably a fairly middle class, university educated, and probably a woman and probably white. And I think that's also reflected in terms of like, who writes most about burnout, and who these kinds of books are sort of marketed at. However, I think - obviously - if you were thinking about who gets most burnt out in society - of course - the answer would be very, very different. And I think that it would then overlap much more with questions about sort of, who disproportionately performs more kind of care work and these kinds of questions, which would, I think, then then take you into a completely different direction, in terms of race, class, and gender. And so I think that it's probably, there's a distinction there to be made in terms of like, well, what's actually burning people out the most, if you like, versus who, who is like seen as the sort of person who might buy a book about burnout? I think those two questions you'd answer quite differently, probably.

I mean, I think you show that the history of burnout as an idea isn't, isn't what we might think, or at least it's definitely more complicated. So you go back to a man called Herbert Freudenberger, a German born American psychoanalyst who died in 1999. And who was part of developing the free clinics movement in the US in the sort of 60s and 70s. Yeah. Could you tell us about him and those clinics and how he sort of initially started thinking about burnout?

Yeah, so I think when I was looking into this concept a bit more, I was reading about Herbert J Freudenberger who was the first person to use this term in a sort of clinical context. It's a term that he actually borrowed from hippie drug users that he encountered as a volunteer in the free clinics movement. And so yeah, he was someone who was working in the US free clinics movement, the first free clinic was set up in San Francisco in 1967. And it was intended to provide non-judgmental, free health care to a kind of countercultural clientele initially. So, it was people who had been experiencing - like hippies who had been experiencing LSD trips, for example - they could get kind of non-judgmental health care in this context. The man who founded the free clinics movement described it as delivering health care to alienated populations and he listed hippies, commune dwellers, drug abusers, third world minorities and other outsiders. So that's his kind of way of describing who the the free clinics catered for. And so Freudenberger had volunteered at this free clinic in San Francisco. Then he went back to the East Coast to New York and was involved in setting up the free clinic - the St. Mark's free clinic - in the East Village in downtown Manhattan. And so he would work as a psychoanalyst by day, analysing his more wealthy clientele uptown in Uptown, Manhattan, and then he would travel downtown and volunteer in the evenings. It was this experience of volunteering in the free clinics where he provided sort of mental health care, in this kind of much more countercultural environment, where there was a sort of very casual atmosphere. There was a kind of rejection of expertise, so the doctors wouldn't wouldn't dress differently from the people who would come to receive care, all of these things. So, he was kind of working as a volunteer there and it was that experience of burnout - that he experienced himself as a volunteer - that led him to initially conceptualise burnout as a kind of clinical term. And so - for me - what was interesting about that, is that he's not just saying that he was burnt out, because, you know, he was working all day, and then then doing more activities in the evening. It wasn't simply a form of tiredness, or kind of physical exhaustion, it was much more emotional. And a lot of how he defined it was relating to - he talks about a kind of process of mourning experienced by activists in this context who were involved in a project that had these quite grand social justice aims. But finding - you know - over time, that ugh it's so difficult to actually get anywhere and it's hard to sustain. And so he talks about the sort of disappointment and cynicism that can emerge from prolonged engagement in these kinds of activities. So - for me - what was interesting about it was (a) - I guess - that burnout originated in this kind of context of a sort of politically radical project. But also - secondly - that it had this emotional dimension to it and it was also about a kind of idealism, and a sort of loss of ideals and these kinds of things. So, that that was when I was like - oh, maybe I can call my book burnout, after all?

The way you're connecting here, this aspect of, of exhaustion, right, or physical exhaustion with care work, and these ideas of burnout really makes me think about the work of a colleague of mine, Isabelle Le Pain. Who worked on on first line kind of health care workers to really tie this with the idea of emotional labour, emotional work, and how - kind of - all that factors into the exhaustion and emotional difficulties that we, that we experience. And, a bit like you were saying about like breathing and - you know - taking some time sitting down and so on. What, what is - what's really coming out of that is - you learn to manage yourself, right, you become, you become a better manager of yourself and manager of your own emotions. And that, of course, is certainly gendered. Going back to Freudenberger's ideas - like his focus - it started to evolve, yes? Like, there was kind of a shift, I think, through the years? Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Yeah, absolutely. So, by the time Freudenberger dies - and even actually, not so long after he wrote these initial publications on burnout in the free clinics movement - he kind of segues into working much more on, on professional workers and workplace burnout. And so burnout really shifts its meaning, so it does become associated with workplace burnout. It is, like, it is absolutely involving people whose jobs involve - yeah - emotional labour and, and these kinds of things. So, it's not completely disconnected from this free clinics origins. But he over time, becomes basically a corporate consultant. So, he really shifts from working within this kind of radical political context to becoming effectively part of - I guess - the system. And conceptualising burnout as - yeah - the result of working too hard in a kind of cutthroat, capitalist world, something like that. And so you really see this trajectory, that I guess you could also map on to a lot of narratives of how the radical movements of the late 60s, how their kind of radical demands were sort of recuperated by by the system. It sort of, it fits that sort of quite depressing narrative, in some ways, his individual trajectory.

And can we say that this is kind of like going on at the same time as a broader cultural shift in ideas? Around particular ideas, for example, with work, expertise, the rise of service culture, perhaps, litigation culture?

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And, so it's kind of almost like too neat in some ways, how much how much this one concept and this one person's individual trajectories seems to very neatly fit a narrative about - yeah - like, increasing professionalisation. So, for example, originally in the free clinics, there was this rejection of of expertise. But quite soon afterwards, there was a kind of reassertion of the distinct, the difference between the kind of expert giver of care and the sort of person who comes to receive care. There was a kind of a recommitment - I suppose - to both expertise and to, to what I guess we'd now call like boundaries. And I think - yeah - I think there's a couple of existing texts that talk about Freudenberger and talk about this trajectory. There's an article by Bench Ansfield that was published in Jewish Currents, and a more academic article by a historian called Matthew Hoffarth. And they both make this argument - yes that there's a sense in which the trajectory of burnout really fits with this broader trajectory, away from the radicalism of the 60s into this more - kind of - neoliberal capitalist world where these kinds of radical impulses are just sort of then contained within the system in a certain way. And, so the Bench Ansfield piece also talks about it in the context of the gentrification of the East Village in a very interesting way. So, talking about the physical environment in which that original free clinic was founded.

That feels like a really depressing story. Like, the kind of corruption of something that was once really, you know, had wonderful kind of political origins.

Yeah, it is a really depressing story. And I feel like, I'm also - I find it quite a convincing story in some ways. But I did try to push back on it a bit in my book and try to propose an alternative narrative to that. And I was inspired to do that, because I read - there's a book called 'Set the Night on Fire', which is about LA, by Mike Davis and John Wiener. And they - in that book - they talk about the free clinic that was set up in LA, which was the second ever free clinic in the US. They talk about how - actually - it morphed over time to become what's now called the Saban Community Clinic, which continues to provide community health care today and sees 100,000 patients a year. And, so they see that as actually a very concrete positive legacy of the 60s and 70s, that actually continued into the present and was able to sustain itself. And actually, when I looked at the St. Mark's Clinic - which is where Freudenberger volunteered - he obviously left and he went off to kind of become a corporate consultant. But the clinic itself continued. A group - that was a kind of lesbian group - called the Women's Health collective took over the St. Mark's clinic in the late 1970s. And then - in the early 80s, in response to the AIDS crisis - the St. Mark's Clinic merged with an existing free clinic called the Gay Men's Health Project Clinic, which had been set up in the early 1970s, which was set up to kind of offer therapeutic support to gay men and lesbians. And so then these two kind of free clinics were able to merge into the Community Health Project, and really provided - some of the kind of - they were sort of the first responders to the AIDS crisis in a way. And those those, that health project does still exist today, the Callen-Lorde Community Health Centre. So there is a kind of actual legacy of the St. Mark's Clinic that does continue to this day. And that, I think you can tell a more positive, hopeful story.

These two kind of levels that you're evoking - the corporate consultants right, and and then the community level and the collective effort, right. It kind of really brings us to think about - like - who's profiting from from from these kinds of concepts and ideas and experiences also. So, the backdrop for some of what we've been talking about, talking about here - especially earlier, like Freudenberger's story, and that of burnout as an idea - it really seems to be, as Rosie mentioned, the story of contemporary capitalism and its evolution. It's something explored in a landmark work from the turn of the millennium, 'The New Spirit of Capitalism' by Luc Boltanski and Eve Capello. The translation of a new edition came out in 2018. Tell us what they argue and why it relates to this idea of burnout.

Yeah, so I suppose I think about 'The New Spirit of Capitalism' as sort of exemplifying a particular kind of argument that - you might, like people might have encountered in, I don't know, the documentaries of Adam Curtis. They're really animated by a very similar kind of argument. Which is that, you have these movements of the 60s and 70s that were - not just like the kind of uprisings in 1968 - were not just crushed. But that the new spirit of capitalism, rather than the old spirit, recuperated their demands. So, there was a kind of rejection of hierarchy and embrace of individual autonomy, an emphasis on liberation. But instead of it being - kind of maybe - like collective liberation, more kind of individualised liberation. A sort of emphasis on, on authenticity, on creativity on, on kind of novelty. All of these things that maybe they see as having their origins in these liberation movements, they found a way of being sort of almost like contained within and kind of included within capitalism. So then - I think - you also see this kind of spirit, I suppose, in the kind of self help work on burnout, in a way. That the cures to burnout in a self help book would also be quite individualised. Yeah. So there's this kind of - I suppose I was interested in my book in situating emotional experiences in relation to these broader historical trends in some way. And so then it also - ironically, I suppose - means that in the, in the realm of healthcare, you have something that started off as an initiative to provide free, non judgmental health care, then just morphs into something where it's kind of - you know - providing rich corporate boardroom members with kind of help with their own experiences. Which is kind of - you know - do we really need that? I don't know.

Or like how to survive, how to, how to survive the kind of horrors of capitalism. So you can keep being productive and keep producing.

Exactly. Rather than maybe questioning the system in the first place - and being like, maybe society shouldn't be organised in this way?

Yeah. I mean, so speaking of kind of the organisation of society, I feel like - probably certainly us on this call would agree that - you know, structural conditions today do make it pretty hard to do the right thing, to care for each other or to pursue social change. And the more that we're overworked and undervalued, the less that we're able to care for others. That's an issue that's raised by the Care Collective in their 2020 manifesto, and also by people like Bev Skeggs, who we had on this show. There's an episode with her on care from - I think - back in season one. But in addition to there being structural conditions, like - you know - poverty, let's say, that get in the way of care and solidarity, there are also what you could call discursive ones, as well. And I'm thinking here of the role played by - sort of - whoever is in power at the time. Like, how our leaders and those who represent us either validate or deny our exhaustion or the causes that we care about, and can contribute to that psychological toll of defeat that that you've been speaking about. Like - you know - on climate activism.

Yeah, that's really interesting - the discursive aspect of it. I think that's, that's really true. And that there's a sense that -again, I wonder - like, it does feel like there is, there is a sort of acknowledgement on the one hand of the sort of pervasive exhaustion of certain kinds of prevailing conditions. Whilst at the - on the other hand - not necessarily a consensus about how to go about changing things so they might be different. And I think a lot of these things obviously came to the fore during COVID, where - you know - it was so stark. The kind of structural issues became - were so sort of - laid bare. And there was this sudden flourishing of mutual aid groups and this kind of emphasis on - kind of - also a kind of reciprocity, maybe on a kind of community level, and all of these things. But it's very easily and quickly forgotten. And those things - I suppose - also were quite spontaneous and relied on people also being able to give up their time and energy to help others. Which - yeah - it's a bit of a catch 22 I think, some of these questions.

Yeah. And I mean, I wonder - it's interesting - because I know that you've written about care in the context of social movements. And I wonder if there's this difference here - you know - particularly thinking about the longevity of - let's say - organisations like the St. Mark's clinic in its various forms. That when these things are emerging from - sort of - the dense relationships that you might have within social movements and the organisational supports that there could be, that's a little bit different from - perhaps - these more spontaneous, more - let's say - disorganised. I don't mean that in a pejorative way, but - you know - just more disorganised things that came up during COVID, maybe? I mean, that's just kind of, but - you know - you've written about an idea called 'network care'. I think, in the context of a clinic set up in Greece in the wake of the financial crisis - and we're going to flag that up in our show notes. But I did also want to ask you about the Black Panthers - who you have also written about - because their work involved setting up structures of care and community which we still see in a lot of activism today. So, can you reflect on that a little bit?

Yeah. So, the Black Panther's survival programmes and their medical free clinics came out of this broader radical health movement in the US - that the free clinics that I've discussed also came out of. So, in the the example of the book I was talking about about LA like they also discussed a Black Panther clinic that emerged at that time. But I think - for me -what the Black Panther Party's slogan - 'survival pending revolution' - is very helpful for thinking about the temporality of some of these questions. Because - I think it can be - it can be tempting to really also romanticise these kinds of very small scale, volunteer-run attempts to make up for the withdrawal of like state support, for example. And so you see that in the example that I discussed, the social solidarity centre that was set up in Thessaloniki in Greece. This was set up in the wake of the financial crisis after these kinds of anti austerity uprisings around 2010 2011. And this is in a context where the public health care system has been suddenly dismantled, millions of people left uninsured. And so it's obviously - in some ways - you can see that the thing, the ways that, that people responded to that by trying to set up these health care centres that also provided some care for the givers of care. So, this is what I'm talking about in terms of the webs of care or reciprocal care - that you're also looking after the people who are doing the caring work. Which - again - I think is something that that came out so starkly in the COVID crisis is the - you know - you have to look after care workers, you have to look after healthcare workers, etc. But I think something that I'm really conscious of, is that these kinds of small scale initiatives are not the solution. This is survival pending revolution, right? This is like - in the meantime - in the meantime, it's better than nothing. Right? But - actually - this is part of a broader struggle for a world in which there would be - you know - where, where those kinds of initiatives aren't necessary anymore. Because -actually - there are proper functioning healthcare systems that are - you know - available to all.

You were speaking about initiatives. Could you give us a kind of insight in terms of like how work - for example - from the Black Panthers and care in regards to solidarity and such, right, how they've maybe inspired some forms of anti racist activism?

I mean - I think in a sense - with the Black Panthers survival programmes, they were almost seen as - absolutely - part of the activism that was being, that was that was kind of being enacted by the party. So, providing these kinds of community resources and - you know - which, which were not just in terms of health care. But - you know - they were running, I don't know, buses so that people could visit friends and family members who were incarcerated. Like all of these different kinds of initiatives were absolutely - kind of - integral to the activist work. So, it was kind of a way of almost embedding within a broader activist movement, these kinds of - yeah - care, I guess. And I suppose that is - in a way - something that I found quite inspiring about reading about how healthcare was sort of at the centre of the the liberation struggles of the 60s and 70s. These kinds of struggles were not seen as a kind of separate issue almost. But - kind of - everything was, was somehow combined. But I suppose then - something that I've been thinking about when trying to think about activist burnout specifically, is how might it be possible to kind of absorb some of the lessons from these initiatives into - so for example - the idea of forms of reciprocal care. How might it be possible to - kind of - learn something from those and to kind of bring them into other kinds of movements and sort of embed these things within other political movements in a way that they don't feel like a - kind of - add on extra. But just something that is maybe like necessary to keep going.

This discussion in your work - like by bringing it to this idea of like, also the collective aspect, right. And it really puts into context, these ideas of, of disorders or distresses as mental illnesses, right. That - with a biomedical lens - really make us think that they are maybe the same as a broken leg, right? Like, it's a specific thing. But pointing to this idea of temporality, you you show how it really like it gets constructed through the course of like, social changes, institutional changes, economic changes, right. So, it's really giving us a lot to think about. Before we move on to the next session, we'll just have a small word from our producer Alice.

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Okay. So, here's where we'd like to hear about someone who's given you some uncommon sense, who's made you question the seemingly obvious, the taken for granted and see things a bit differently.

Today, we're talking about Frantz Fanon, someone who - actually, I guess - Shamus Khan mentioned only last month in a different context, where we were discussing privilege, race and capital. Hannah, can you first tell us who was Fanon? A short but fascinating life and a huge legacy, yes?

Yeah, absolutely. So, Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925, which was - at the time - a French colony. He trained as a psychiatrist in France. He published the book 'Black Skin, White Masks' in 1952, which is a very famous and important book about the psychic effects of racism. He went then to work in Algeria at a psychiatric hospital. And then he was in Algeria, when the Algerian revolution took place and was there during the Algerian War of Independence, which broke out in 1954. He joined the National Liberation Front, and he became very involved in the anti-colonial struggle. He died very young at the age of 36. He had been expelled from Algeria in 1957, and went to Tunisia. And - I suppose - my interest in Fanon is as a psychiatrist. And, I should say, I'm not an expert in Fanon at all. But I've just found some of his, his clinical work and the fact that he was a clinician who was also very much engaged with questions of political liberation and political struggle - I found them very helpful for approaching my own work. I think it's important to say that there's been something of a recent flurry of interest in Fanon as a psychiatrist.

And the book we're talking about today is 'The Wretched of the Earth'. You want to draw attention to the chapter called 'Colonial war and Mental Disorders', right? And to an analysis of it by American cultural theorist Fred Moten, correct?

Yeah. I'm interested in the final chapter of 'The Wretched of the Earth', which was published in 1961. So, Fanon - I think - is sometimes maybe mischaracterized as almost celebrating political violence. He does make an argument in the early chapters of that book, that justify the armed struggle against colonialism in the Algerian context. And, the French philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre wrote a very famous introduction to the book. And, in that introduction, Sartre wrote that Fanon's work shows that anti-colonial violence can heal the wounds it has inflicted. And - so - there's an argument that's that's made by by Sartre that that kind of implies that Fanon has this kind of an idea of political violence. That is, that violence can be healing. And while it's certainly the case that Fanon does make a political argument in favour of political violence, he does not make this argument. And I think that the closing chapters of 'The Wretched of the Earth', where he talks about his clinical work with both colonisers and colonised - so people who were tortured and people who were torturors, and including people who were really involved in the armed struggle - actually shows how individually wounding and difficult the struggle for liberation can be for those who are involved in it. And so obviously, he's talking about this quite extreme situation - much more extreme than some of the activism that I look at in my book, in that he's literally talking about people who are involved in an armed struggle. But I think it's important - for me - I think it's very important that Fanon really, really dwells on how psychologically difficult this struggle can be. Even for those who - they don't necessarily regret their actions - they don't intellectually think that political violence, for example, is wrong. But they they come to feel deep anguish and torment - I guess now we would say trauma - as a result of the things that they have done, if that makes sense. So, I think - in terms of my book - it's it's about kind of how these kinds of contradictions come on a psychological level. How - on the one hand - it might be possible to say that a struggle for political liberation might necessitate certain kinds of confrontation with the oppressor. The actual toll that that takes on the individuals who are involved in that is, is - you know - it's intense and extreme. And it's not, it's not easy, and it's certainly not something to be kind of - you know. I think that this this famous phrase of Sartre that anti-colonial violence heals the wounds that it has inflicted, I think - on at least on the sort of individual level that Fanon discusses - is a little bit misleading. So I was kind of interested in this.

So it's, it's really like - with this kind of sociological approach - it really kind of helps us see how things that are, that could be understood as pathologies of the individuals - right - or can be understood as not an individual thing. But more as - maybe - a form of resistance to colonialism and oppression, or certainly in relation to the effect of psychiatry, oppressors, and so on, on the individuals, right. And - I guess - looking at the lived experiences and resistance of those maybe labelled mad. This kind of makes me think about the emerging field of Mad Studies and how this scholarship has been - kind of - questioning the traditional biomedical lens around surrounding like mental illness and disorders to look especially at like, things like resistance. In talking about Fanon, you bring in the idea of what you call 'anti adaptive healing'. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Yeah, so this is a term that I use in my book to describe something of this contradiction. And this - I know - I didn't answer your question previously about Fred Moten's essay on on Fanon, which is called 'The Case of Blackness'. And in that essay, Moten asks, how can the struggle for liberation be aligned with the eradication of the pathological? So if you think about - like you were just saying - mental health and mental illness are both often defined in relation to prevailing cultural and social norms, right? So, how can someone who wants to completely transform society through - for example, an anti colonial struggle - how does that desire and how does that kind of political belief to basically totally transform everything - that is, the cultural and social norms - go hand in hand with a desire to make people feel better, mentally. When so often, the kind of process of making feel better, people feel better mentally is a kind of assimilatory process. It's making people - you know - be able to kind of function well within the existing structures of society. And so I think - for me - anti adaptive healing gets at something about this, this tension between a - kind of - how do you feel well, in a sort of, quote, unquote, sick world, you know? And I think, I think that Fanon's work really - because he was, you know, a clinician who was working with, like, people who were really struggling, psychologically - you really, you really see this kind of tension come to the fore in a very interesting, and very, I think, humane way.

So I mean, how - you know - how did Fanon reconcile these tensions that we've just been talking about in his own work in the 1950s, at the Blida Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria? I mean, could he reconcile those tensions? Like, are there limits?

Yeah, so there's an interesting book that was published relatively recently by Camile Robcis who talks about French institutional psychotherapy. And so, Fanon had kind of experience before going to Algeria, of working with these kind of radical psychiatrists in France who developed what they've called social therapy methods, that would kind of - actually quite similar to some of the free clinics stuff. Like questioned expertise, introduced social activities among the patients and didn't use - you know - constraints and restraints, these kinds of things. And so Fanon had had had that experience working in France. And so when he arrived in Algeria, he tried to implement some of those methods within the psychiatric hospital that he was working with, working in in Algeria. And there's a, there's an essay that's included in this big collection - 'Alienation and Freedom' - that he co wrote with Jacques Azoulay, who I think was one of his sort of medical interns, which describes their attempt to introduce some of these methods on the wards in Algeria. And they describe how they found that these techniques were very successful with a group of European women in the hospital - but completely failed with groups of Muslim men. So they'd introduced certain kinds of activities, a film club, ward meetings among the patients, different celebrations, theatrical evenings, a sort of newspaper that was produced by the patients, these kinds of things. And so, they were kind of a bit perplexed as to oh - and obviously, these kinds of methods were seen as being like quite quite kind of enlightened and politically radical. And they kind of, they came to realise that the kinds of activities they'd introduced were actually unsuited to the specificities of Algerian culture and society. And so, they basically had to develop something that was more - I guess - culturally appropriate. So when they had thought about social therapy, they hadn't actually thought about - well, what do we mean by the social, whose society are we talking about? And so they ended up then questioning - I suppose - the whole notion of like, well, what do we even mean by the social when we're thinking about mental illness and mental health? And so, then they ended up then adapting, again, in order to sort of better suit the patients that they actually had and the specificities of the culture that they were working in.

So Fanon - himself - sounded like he was at risk of burnout in the conventional sense, right? I feel even reading his some of his work takes an emotional toll. Like what kind of lessons can we draw out here in terms of burnout, specifically, like lessons for thinking about it as a concept? As we were discussing earlier.

I think when I was talking earlier about the Black Panther Party's free clinics, I was talking about the sort of temporality and that of that - and I think that that question is also relevant when thinking about Fanon. Because, again, he's thinking about people who are fighting for a liberated future, but who are wounded individually in the meantime. So, I'm very interested in this question of like, the meantime. Because it's all very well to say, oh, well, if society was structured differently, people wouldn't feel so bad all the time. But okay, but well, how do you get there? And how do you look, look after people that - like - on the way? So I think - for me - that Fanon is very instructive in this respect. And I should say that - you know - after he, his experience of working in the psychiatric hospital, he ended up resigning his post. And this was - you know - his resignation letter, really articulated - I think - this sort of concept that I call anti adaptive healing, where he's saying - you know - he, I'm just going to quote from his his letter that he sent. He said - 'If psychiatry is the medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment, I owe it to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization'. He means -obviously - in the context of a colonial, a colonial, a colonial context. So, this question of, it was impossible for him to actually work as a psychiatrist within this colonial environment precisely because being - quote unquote - well, would mean almost like affirming this colonial kind of power relation, if that makes sense? So I think - obviously - I'm, I'm talking about many different contexts in my own book. But I think there's something about this, well, how do you feel, how is it possible to feel well, in a world that is so oppressive? That's, that's just a kind of slightly irreconcilable tension that - I think - Fanon's work articulates in a certain way.

Hannah, I love talking about Fanon and we could easily keep going on this for ages. But, we're definitely going to put, we're definitely going to put some references to his work in our show notes. But we're getting towards the end of the show now and before we go, we wanted to grab your tip for something, not academic, that speaks to our theme today. Do you have something in mind?

Um, yeah. I was actually just reading this, this new novel, that's called 'Hyper', by Agri Ismaïl. And it's - you know - when you're writing a book, you're, you start thinking that it's about literally everything ever. And one of the things that I became very interested in - but that isn't really touched on that much in my book - is that when you think about the aftermaths of political movements, you often actually are thinking about family relationships. And so this is a very interesting book where the main character - the main kind of family drama - is it's about a man who was the founder of the Communist Party of Kurdistan. He's forced to flee Tehran, for London with his family. And then it's about his three children living in the present and they live in this very - sort of - hyper contemporary world. One of them is working in Dubai. One of them works in the financial sector in, in London. But it's very interesting because - it's like - from this family, where there was this kind of very politically militant person who's then - you know - gone into exile. And then his, his children living this kind of hyper capitalist existence. And something that I read a lot of, while I was writing this book, were examples where there was maybe one really really politicised family member and how that kind of plays out within the dynamics of the family. And I think that novels are often a very interesting place where you see these kinds of dynamics explored. And - yeah - it's not, it's not very directly about burnout. But - for me - it was sort of about how, how political commitment is lived in sort of day to day lives, or something like that. So, yeah.

We could talk about that for a long time, Hannah. And actually - you know - this idea of, this idea of someone in the family being politicised and how that affects the family that feels like very real – it is in my family. I mean - you know - we would love to, to think about what we all - also not just sort of what, what out there and pop culture speaks to burnout. But, also, what we all engage with when we're feeling burnt out as well. But we're going to have to save that for another day, because we are out of time. And thank you so much for sharing - you know - your your take on burnout, and I don't think I'm gonna see it in the same way again. So thanks so much for taking part Hannah.

Thanks so much for having me and for your questions.

So, if you've enjoyed today's show - remember - you can head to our archive to enjoy related ones on themes like care with Bev Skeggs and our special episode on solidarity hosted by Karis Campion. There's also Imogen Tyler's series - 'The Stigma Conversations - particularly an episode with the GP Andy Knox, talking about burnout, exhaustion and the stigmatisation of those who care for others.

Yep, that's all over at thesociologicalreview.org, where you can also catch up with our monthly magazine, new fiction and the latest from the journal. And - given today's theme - why not read the Sociological Review Foundation's manifesto while you're there? It begins by stating 'our deeply unequal world needs a critical and engaged sociology now more than ever'. We couldn't agree more.

We'll be back next month with more Uncommon Sense. Our producer is Alice Bloch. Our sound engineer is Dave Crackles. Thanks for joining us. Bye.

Bye.