Burnout - book review
- anne
- Sep 11
- 5 min read
A little while ago, I read Hannah Proctor’s excellent and highly recommended book: ‘Burnout - The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat’ - a must read for anyone who has ever been involved activism, cares about social change and is losing sleep over the crumbling shitshow of a world we live in, where everything we hold dear is being rapidly obliterated and we are left with an unshakable feeling of hopelessness.
While book reviewing is not something I usually do, I feel compelled to share some highlights - it's too important not to. Reading it coincided with a course I attended earlier this year. I was one of the lucky participants in ULEX’s ‘Regenerative Activism’ workshop / retreat, high up in the Catalan Pyrenees, with little access to my phone or wifi, I was able to reconnect with myself and the ‘living’, a beautiful way the ULEX* team call ‘nature’. In that setting, Hannah Proctor’s book took on a deeper meaning.
Many of us have experienced burnout, are experiencing it or on the verge of it, either personally or supporting others going through it. And it’s gruelling.
You will likely be familiar with a common definition of burnout, this hard to identify or acknowledge, but devastating, affliction predominately caused by mental, physical and emotional exhaustion, usually due to work and stress, pressure from work colleagues, or even excessive exercise. Burnout is ubiquitous in late capitalism because we are constantly pushed to to do more, better, faster … until we inevitably fall off the edge. When we do, we often are or feel lost and alone.
Reading Burnout, made me realise that, actually, we aren’t.
Like much else, burnout has been coopted by neoliberalism - think of the ever expanding ‘wellness’ industry and vast collections of self help books and apps! In fact, and for me this was an important revelation: the concept of ’burnout’ emerged from an activist context.
The term first came up in the US in 1970’s, coined by the psychologist Freudenberger, after spending time volunteering in a free clinic in San Francisco. Free clinics aimed to provide healthcare to local communities and minoritised groups, offering an alternative, non-hierarchical model of care in sharp contrast to mainstream, profit-driven and exclusionary medical institutions.
He observed “cases of physical or mental collapse as the result of overwork” in activist circles, predominantly among those who were “the dedicated and committed”. Essentially, his work explored how social justice initiatives would wear (burn) people out.
Similar observations had been made earlier, by psychiatrist Robert Coles, in ‘Social Struggle and Weariness’ (1964). Drawing on his work with ‘veteran activists of the civil rights movement in America’ to describe the ‘exhaustion and despair’ produced by sustained political organising.’
The book’s chapters are structured around the eight emotions that activists commonly feel in the wake of defeat: melancholia, nostalgia, depression, burnout, exhaustion, bitterness, trauma, and mourning. All are contextualised in historical episodes and relevant readings from the classics of psychology, feminism, left political thought, literature and history.
Hannah Proctor pays close attention to vast array of political histories - the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, the Paris Commune of 1871 and the UK miners’ strike of 1984-85, second ‘wave’ feminism and the Black Panthers - and geographies - stretching from Indonesia, Palestine and Chile to the Democratic Republic of Congo and beyond. She covers a lot of ground, bringing together movements over time and space.
The paradox of revolutionary healing
While Freudenberger identified movement burnout as a ‘thing’ - what was missing from his analysis was the recognition that ‘collective action can be an antidote to the grinding burnout of living under capitalism’. Hannah Proctor references the ‘Black Panther Party’s survival programmes and free health clinics that were set up in the context of the broader racial health movement at a moment when the US health-care system was in crisis’.
This holistic approach extends to other contexts and is a recurring theme in the book, drawn from various sources, including Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, which inspired bell hooks’s Sister of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, “a space where black women could name their pain an find ways of healing”, which unlike liberal, depoliticised notions of ‘self-help’ that advocate for personal change, naming pain entails identifying external causes.
Such practices continue today. ‘Caring for the carers’ is how individuals, groups and movements survive - and importantly regenerate. S.A.F.E., the European abortion fund, holds regular training sessions on burnout prevention and community care sessions, where abortion activists, working on the front line, come together, find some relief and build resilience.
‘A slower urgency'
This phrase, borrowed from Bayo Akamolafe, became one of my key take aways from ULEX - and a notion I have always struggled with as an activist. Everything had to happen yesterday … or maybe it didn’t. In the face of gargantuan challenges, it can seem careless to put the breaks on … but maybe it isn’t. And that’s a hell of a shift.
Hannah Proctor also refers to this concept in her book, calling it ‘patient urgency’ - ‘the balance between political urgency and interpersonal patience’.
Half way through the course, we spent 36 hours in silence, and I got a real taste of slowing down. Without specific tasks to do, I walked and explored our beautiful surroundings. I observed intentionally and listened - to the world around me, to my own breath. I smelt the wind and the earth … and tasted something quite unusual: serenity.
Several days later, as we came down from the mountain, after those insightful and inspiring ten days, and I resumed reading Burnout, and these words jumped up at me: “healing is urgent because healed people are needed to fight injustice, but healing like the fight for justice itself, takes time.”
Mourn and organise
Recently, upon losing the vote for her abortion amendment, British member of parliament, Stella Creasy, posted on instagram: ‘We don’t mourn, we organise’. She couldn’t be more wrong. This is precisely the approach we need to shun and Hannah Proctor makes a compelling case for the notion of ‘mournful militancy’ in the final chapter of her book.
She draws on influential texts, such as Douglas Crimp’s Mourning and Militancy, in which he insists that activists should be able to acknowledge feelings of ‘frustration, anger, rage, and outrage, anxiety, fear, terror, shame and guilt, sadness and despair’. She refers to powerful events, such as Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba’s funeral in 1961, when his widow, activist Pauline Opango Lulumba, led a procession through the capital Kinshasa, bare-chested and barefoot. Reported as a ‘return to traditional African funeral rites', it was in fact an act ‘mournful militancy’, grief turned into defiance against the colonialists who assassinated her husband.
There are many such events, and while they might not be engraved in the public psyche, they are pivotal in shaping our understanding that ‘mournful militancy is oriented to both the past and the future: calling for an acknowledgement of loss and demanding a world in which the same injustices cannot be repeated. Anyone who’s been to a Palestine solidarity march in the last two years will be familiar with this feeling.
Burnout is not a leisurely read by any means. It is a dense, thorough catalogue of loss and despair that is enlightening, strangely energising and incredibly comforting. It makes you feel seen, heard and it makes you realise that you are not alone in feeling this intense sense of dread. But far from bringing more anguish, it opens the door to transformative possibilities.
*Ulex is the latin name for gorse.
Register here for S.A.F.E. community care session. Thursday 11th Sept. at 6.00 pm (BST).
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