Lesson 3.3: Mental Health and Personal Consequences

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This lesson examines the emotional, psychological, and intersectional effects of ‘anti-gender’ politics. It explores how chronic hostility, stigma, and erasure produce exhaustion, trauma, demobilization, self-censorship, and loss of community. It also considers how individuals navigate burnout, fear, and isolation while continuing forms of everyday resistance and mutual care.

 

5. Isolation and loss of community

Isolation emerged as one of the most painful and recurring effects. Being visible enough to be attacked but not enough to be defended produces deep loneliness. But isolation is not only emotional — it is produced structurally when institutions fail to defend those targeted.

France

I felt quite alone, because nobody defended me. I didn’t have that thing on the networks of having accomplices or allies or people defending me. (Lucie, France Report, p. 17)

For migrant women like Oumaima, isolation intersected with racialisation:

My mother keeps telling me that I’ve been westernised […]these experiences lead to a kind of isolation from a social group to which I belong. (France Report, p. 17)

 

Belarus

After the 2020 repressions, collective networks that once provided mental health support in Belarus largely collapsed:

These groups used to be a huge source of mental health support […] but individual therapy does not compensate for the loss of collective support. (Belarus Report, p. 21)

Isolation thus functions as a form of structural violence, fragmenting movements and eroding the social fabric that sustains resistance.
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