Lesson 3.3: Mental Health and Personal Consequences
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.
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.
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.
Such statements reveal how anticipatory anxiety - preparing for possible repression - shapes life decisions even before any new laws are enacted.