Lesson 3.3: Mental Health and Personal Consequences

2. Everyday hostility and accumulated stress

2.1. Everyday hostility - more examples

Trauma and compounded harm

Greece

In Greece, the language of exhaustion often reflected not only personal burnout but the fragmentation of struggles and the isolation of movements from one another. Activists who were women, migrants, or carers described feeling ‘isolated, trapped, suffocated, exhausted, burnt out’ as they faced what they experienced as multiple, disconnected fronts of struggle rather than a shared political space. Pati, a migrant woman activist, expressed this vividly:

The sites of struggle are so many, and taking care of ourselves and of each other is so necessary because exhaustion prevails. [...] Especially when you are a woman who is an immigrant who also cares about the environment and you want to approach them intersectionally, what do you address first? […] I feel that I am personally at a point of exhaustion. (Greece Report, p. 16)

Her testimony points to how the separation of political struggles into silos — feminist, migrant, environmental, anti-racist — places a disproportionate burden on those who live at their intersections. Rather than being supported by integrated movements, intersectional activists are often forced to navigate fragmented spaces alone. Exhaustion here emerges not simply as an individual condition, but as a structural effect of political isolation and movement fragmentation.

Germany

In another example of Germany, trauma was tied to fear of political regression and far-right normalisation that has been observed in the recent years.

Together with my partner I applied for a passport, because we thought that at some point we might need one. (Momo, Germany Report, p. 10)

It just hurts so much hearing about the passport thing […] that people talk more and more about how to liquidate property and their possessions. (SJB, Germany Report, p. 10)

Such statements reveal how anticipatory anxiety - preparing for possible repression - shapes life decisions even before any new laws are enacted.