What a week.

I’ve been glued to Twitter the past few days, watching the protests and riots happening across the US.

After months of trying to spend less time blasting my brain with news, I can’t look away. 

This time I don’t think switching off is the answer, for me at least. It’s too big for that. But I am trying to be mindful of how tuning into the biggest, most intense news stories can be a kind of substitute for action.

So, what do you do when you can’t look away?

Taking action can help you feel less helpless

I think it’s very easy to feel helpless at a time like this. To scroll through the Twitter feed and news headlines thinking ‘what else can I do but watch?’

In the face of overwhelming world events, we need to find ways to feel useful.

It doesn’t have to be big. If you’re still employed, there are financial ways to support local causes that relate to what's happening on the world stage.

Looking closer to home

For me, events in the US are a stark reminder to pay more attention to what happens here in Australia. So I’ve just given money to this GoFundMe run by David Dungay’s family. 

David Dungay, an Aboriginal man, died in custody when five guards stormed his cell and restrained him for refusing to eat a packet of biscuits. David had almost finished his sentence and was looking forward to coming home. 

Late last year it was decided that none of those guards would face disciplinary action.  

There's an overwhelming number of Indigenous Australians dying in custody in Australia. I’m sharing David’s story here because, like most of us in this club, he had a mental health diagnosis. He’d been diagnosed with Schizophrenia.

Racial bias and diagnosis

I sometimes think about how different my own mental health journey might have been if my circumstances were different.

My fruitier experiences could have been seen as psychosis, but I was never saddled with that label, or the curtailment of freedoms that often comes with it. I was never seen as being a threat for having big feelings, the way many with a diagnosis of schizophrenia often are.

Instead I got less-scary sounding labels, like depression and OCD, and at other times could avoid diagnosis altogether. 

It’s likely that my background affected the way the system responded to my distress. Multiple studies suggest there is a racial bias in the diagnosis of schizophrenia. One study in the US found that black people were 2.4 times more likely to get that diagnosis than white people, despite no differences in clinician symptom ratings.

Two very different paths

That study and others suggest that racial bias can affect whether your symptoms are read as signs of schizophrenia or depression. 

Depression and schizophrenia. Consider how different these two diagnoses seem. Consider how differently they’ll affect how you’re treated by employers, landlords, and the health system.

I wonder how different the response to my big feelings might have been, if the really fruity stuff had happened when I was younger, when my family couldn’t afford things like private health insurance. Or if those experiences had happened to my Granddad at my age, a young Fijian man freshly arrived in the country, instead of me. How would the response have been different?

One tiny way to be helpful

Many of us have experienced the ways the mental health system doesn’t always just try to ‘help’. The ways that, at the pointy end, it’s as much about control as it is about help. The ripple effects can be subtle - for instance, the way you learn not to share what you’re really thinking when a doctor asks you about suicidal thoughts. 

For some, though, the control is not subtle at all. It’s violent, and lethal. 

For Indigenous Australians, the dials are set for control and restraint right from the start - whether we’re talking about the health system, or law enforcement and the justice system (or all of the above).

I don’t know how we are supposed to process these harsh realities, let alone try to change them. It’s heartbreaking. It’s infuriating. It’s embarrassing. 

Today I’ve picked one tiny way I can be helpful.

I think the Dungay campaign is getting some much-needed attention today, so if they somehow happen to have reached their funding goal already by the time you read this, you might consider instead donating to The National Justice project, an organisation that has been helping them in their efforts.

Have thoughts and feelings? Send ‘em here

Click here if you want to share your thoughts on today’s issue with me.

Thanks to everyone who sent in comments last issue. The form thing worked really well for me - the response was huge, and most of you said you preferred it to emailing. So we’ll keep it up.

This whole club is really an ongoing experiment in how to share big, gooey stuff through the limited nodes of the internet. (And the limited nodes of, well, me.) I really appreciate the thoughtfulness and consideration I see in so many of your messages. So, thank you x