Burnout names the emotional and psychological toll that political engagement exacts on activists and revolutionaries. The phenomenon encompasses depression following defeat, exhaustion from sustained organising, disillusionment when movements reproduce oppressive dynamics, and the persistent gap between political ideals and actual human capacity for transformation. Understanding burnout requires refusing both individualising frameworks that pathologise political commitment and romantic narratives that celebrate sacrifice whilst ignoring genuine suffering.
Political struggle damages people. This occurs not only through state repression, imprisonment and violence but through the grinding work of organising under impossible conditions. It happens when movements fail, when solidarity fractures, when groups reproduce the hierarchies they oppose. The question becomes not whether activists experience psychological distress but how to understand and address that distress without either abandoning political struggle or pretending suffering does not exist.
Historical symptoms and attachments to the past
Political movements develop complex relationships to their own histories of defeat. Left melancholy describes a backward-looking attachment to dead ideological forms and lost possibilities. Walter Benjamin identified this in Weimar literature where supposedly radical writers produced nihilistic work disconnected from actual struggle. The concept evolved to describe contemporary left formations more attached to impossibility than to potential, dwelling in marginality rather than organising for transformation.
The distinction between melancholy and mourning proves crucial. Mourning acknowledges specific historical losses and works through them. Melancholy treats loss as structural absence, removing experience from history and producing paralysis. Political movements must mourn defeats without becoming trapped in melancholic attachment.
Nostalgia presents similar ambiguities. Medical nostalgia originated as pathological homesickness among displaced soldiers and exiles. Political nostalgia differs fundamentally. It arises not from yearning for lost homes but from longing for freedom and justice not yet realised. This forward-facing nostalgia can energise struggle rather than stultifying it.
The Paris Commune exemplifies how revolutionary memory functions. The Commune appears across left history as both inspiration and site of mourning. Communards exiled to New Caledonia experienced genuine psychological suffering from displacement. Yet figures like Louise Michel refused despair, maintaining commitment to future struggle. The question becomes how to remember historical defeats without reifying them into unchangeable monuments.
Depression and the problem of scale
Depression following political engagement presents specific challenges. It often arrives without obvious connection to particular defeats. Activists describe depression descending as causeless state despite years of organising, creating what theorists call problems of scale, where individuals lose capacity to connect subjective experience to structural forces.
Two inadequate frameworks dominate discussions. Contextual approaches understand depression as arising from general social circumstances. Causal approaches treat it as response to specific political events. Neither captures how depression phenomenologically obscures its own origins. Depressed people may intellectually recognise social causation whilst experiencing complete disconnection from collective possibilities.
The miners’ strike of 1984-85 provides instructive testimony. Women involved describe profound shock and sadness at the strike’s end alongside deep personal transformation. They refuse to regret participation despite exhaustion and defeat. The losses were material, disrupting routines and relationships built during struggle. Working through such defeats requires more than individual therapy. It demands collective practices that prevent despair from persisting indefinitely.
Shulamith Firestone’s trajectory illustrates dangers. Her early work The Dialectic of Sex bombastically insisted on total transformation. Her later Airless Spaces depicted characters sedated and inert, unable to read or care. Rather than reading this as individual failure, it exemplifies feminist theory’s broader retreat from structural analysis toward methodological individualism. The shift from demanding systemic change to focusing on personal adjustment marks a depoliticisation affecting entire intellectual traditions.
Patient urgency and the temporality of change
Patient urgency names the fundamental temporal paradox facing movements. Political change is genuinely urgent. People suffer now and cannot wait. Yet subjective transformation happens slowly and unevenly. People shaped by oppressive societies cannot instantaneously remake themselves to align with revolutionary ideals.
Red Therapy discovered this asynchronicity attempting to transform sexual relationships and family structures whilst organising politically. They found they could not “will ourselves liberated” overnight. Lifetime patterns of conditioning do not dissolve through intellectual agreement alone, creating impossible demands when movements require immediate behavioural purity.
The Combahee River Collective articulated an alternative. They committed to “a lifetime of work and struggle before us,” accepting that change happens gradually. Their practice of criticism-self-criticism operated as ongoing process rather than final judgment. This patience distinguished them from groups like the Weather Underground, whose brutal sessions demanding instant transformation caused serious psychological damage.
The concept challenges both revolutionary impatience and therapeutic accommodation. Movements cannot wait for perfect conditions or complete psychological transformation before acting. They must work in the meantime, accepting contradictions and gaps between ideals and practice as persistent features of political life.
Exhaustion and prefigurative politics
Exhaustion emerges specifically from sustained political engagement. The activities that prefigure liberated futures can themselves become depleting. Collective action, mutual aid and organising require emotional and physical resources that get exhausted when demands vastly outweigh capacity.
Post-revolutionary Russia experienced epidemics of nervous exhaustion among party activists. Inessa Armand’s physical deterioration and eventual death from cholera exemplified how revolutionary commitment consumed bodies. Waves of suicides among party members revealed how medical diagnosis could cloak political disillusionment.
Civil rights organisers documented similar patterns. SNCC activists experienced depression and battle fatigue emerging only after prolonged engagement. The psychological costs accumulated through repeated arrests, violence and interpersonal tensions within movements. Guilt exacerbated exhaustion when activists blamed themselves for insufficient commitment.
Free clinics and radical health initiatives responded by understanding healing as inseparable from political struggle. The Black Panther survival programmes, Common Ground in post-Katrina New Orleans, and contemporary healing justice collectives developed care webs acknowledging that carers themselves require care. These models refuse separation between individual wellness and collective liberation.
Criticism-self-criticism and consciousness transformation
Maoist and feminist traditions developed practices of collective self-scrutiny as alternatives to individual therapy. These aimed to transform consciousness as part of social transformation. However, urgent demands for immediate change often conflicted with slower realities of actual transformation.
William Hinton’s documentation of Chinese villages showed both potential and dangers. Self-criticism sessions could democratically examine behaviour and root out attitudes inherited from exploitative systems. They could also create psychological damage through harsh denunciation. The artichoke metaphor captured the ideal of carefully peeling away defensive layers. The reality sometimes involved creating new wounds.
The Weather Underground’s sessions exemplified worst possibilities. Lasting entire days, sometimes with participants drugged, sessions involved merciless attacks for any sentiment deemed bourgeois. Former members express bafflement at how people dedicated to ending oppression became cruel to each other.
Feminist consciousness-raising developed different approaches. Carol Hanisch clarified these were political practices, not therapy. Women discussed personal experiences to identify shared oppression grounded in social structures. This would reveal that personal problems were political problems requiring collective action. The emphasis on mutual understanding rather than harsh judgment distinguished this from criticism-self-criticism.
Yet consciousness-raising groups also experienced trashing. Women were targeted for destruction through psychological manipulation for insufficiently rapid transformation. Jo Freeman identified impatience with the pace of personal change as key cause. The fundamental problem remains: people formed in oppressive societies cannot immediately shed their conditioning.
Trauma and its depoliticisation
Post-traumatic stress disorder emerged as diagnostic category in 1980, representing paradigm shift from understanding mental illness in relation to lived experience toward symptom-based classification. This depoliticisation has profound consequences for how traumatic experiences get recognised and treated.
PTSD’s emergence involved erasing Vietnamese perspectives from scholarship on the Vietnam War. When applied globally as universal category, it functions as what David Becker termed “the Coca-Cola of psychiatry,” imposing Western frameworks that bracket out sociopolitical conditions generating suffering.
Palestinian psychiatrist Samah Jabr argues individual treatment cannot proceed effectively without acknowledging ongoing occupation. Continuous structural violence prevents compartmentalised therapeutic approaches. Hans Keilson’s concept of sequential trauma recognises that persecution accumulates across time rather than occurring as discrete events.
Chilean therapists working with dictatorship survivors developed alternatives to PTSD frameworks. They refused clinical neutrality, explicitly engaging with political contexts of torture and disappearance. Their work demonstrates that adequate responses require simultaneously acknowledging psychological damage, recognising specific historical origins, and maintaining orientation toward social transformation.
The contrast between memorialising 9/11 deaths versus erasing AIDS deaths reveals how states selectively determine which losses are mournable. ACT UP demonstrated that mourning and militancy need not oppose each other. Grief can fuel demands for justice rather than producing paralysis.
Mournful militancy and collective mourning
Mournful militancy names how grief becomes political force when state violence continues whilst being officially denied. Protests function not merely as political expression but as sites of collective mourning and healing. When mourning is obstructed by ongoing oppression, militant insistence on justice and acknowledgement erupts.
Crowds engaged in protest demonstrate sophisticated symbolic activity. They create intergenerational connections and work through trauma collectively through what can be termed creative repetition. This differs from compulsive repetition that entrenches trauma. It represents reparative engagement tending toward healing.
Brazil’s truth commissions and monuments to dictatorship victims coexisted with state suppression of protests making connections between past and present violence explicit. The state tolerated institutional remembrance but not spontaneous invocation of continuity. The name of disappeared bricklayer Amarildo de Souza, shouted collectively on streets, opened possibilities for healing that individual grief cannot achieve.
George Floyd’s dying words “I can’t breathe” echoed globally, becoming ghostly reference to other deaths and embodying structural police violence. Individual deaths become catalysts for collective mourning when understood as manifestations of systematic violence. This requires holding rage and care simultaneously, grief and militancy together.
Anti-adaptive healing
Anti-adaptive healing refuses to adjust individuals to unjust conditions. It contrasts sharply with therapeutic approaches seeking to restore functional participation in existing systems. The question becomes how to ameliorate suffering whilst maintaining refusal of intolerable conditions.
Frantz Fanon’s work proves exemplary. Attempting to introduce therapeutic practices at an Algerian psychiatric hospital, he discovered healing within colonial society was impossible when belonging meant oppression. Rather than abandoning therapeutic work, he shifted practice to support anti-colonial struggle directly. This figure of the militant psychopathologist captures the paradoxical position of those attempting to heal without affirming oppressive systems.
Toni Cade Bambara articulated this through fiction. Her character Velma Henry embodies costs of complete self-sacrifice. The novel refuses to celebrate exhaustion as revolutionary virtue whilst acknowledging that survival requires rest and care. Bambara insists on acting “as if the revolution is here,” understanding healing and struggle as inseparable.
Contemporary healing justice initiatives demonstrate that reciprocal, community-embedded care provides genuine alternatives to both individual therapy and state abandonment. The Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective and Thessaloniki solidarity clinics exemplify care webs acknowledging carers’ exhaustion whilst refusing to separate healing from political struggle.
The depoliticisation of burnout
Burnout originated in 1970s free clinics serving marginalised communities. Herbert Freudenberger coined the term describing exhaustion among volunteers engaged in radical solidarity work. The concept emerged from specific material conditions: healthcare workers treating stigmatised populations with minimal institutional support.
Early burnout was inseparable from questions of social justice and costs of sustained resistance. The Black Panther Party, Young Lords and later ACT UP understood health as inseparable from political liberation. They approached care work as fundamentally political, grounded in solidarity rather than charity.
However, burnout has since been thoroughly individualised. Contemporary discourse treats it primarily as personal psychological problem requiring self-care and mindfulness. This transformation reflects broader patterns whereby radical critique gets reabsorbed into neoliberal frameworks locating problems within individual psychology.
The shift from understanding burnout as structural diagnosis to treating it as individual pathology mystifies its social origins. Meaningful responses require not therapeutic self-intervention but collective political transformation, building sustainable movements, and economic arrangements oriented toward collective wellbeing rather than perpetual exploitation.
Sustaining struggle without hardness
The central question remains how movements sustain themselves without damaging people within them. Change is genuinely hard but need not result in hardness. Understanding consciousness as ongoing process rather than completable project allows more humane approaches to political struggle.
The gap between theory and practice cannot be closed but need not become a void swallowing both ideals and efforts. Movements that accept imperfection, make space for healing alongside struggle, tolerate differences and delays, and commit to long-term work without demanding immediate purity prove more sustainable than those requiring impossible standards.
Without social reckoning and collective acknowledgement of historical injustice, mourning remains impeded. This connects psychological healing inextricably to political struggle. Finding ways, methods and practices capable of attending to psychological wounds whilst maintaining commitment to transformation becomes itself a vital political question.
Healing begins with revolution and continues through it. It requires ongoing attention, effort, time and care even as new worlds are built. The revolution must be here, in practices of mutual care and collective struggle.