Other people three

I had an unexpected tender moment with my old dad the other day. Hurtling back to my teen-age, I gave my dad the heads-up that I’m about to be broke-by-strike again and to steady himself for the request for some cash. The last time we went on strike I faced three months of living on 40% of my income while still working full time and while this time it’s a simple calculation of nothing I’m still unable to explain to him the maths.

Like a lot of the conversations between generations if you’re not living it right now you probably don’t understand it and none of what is happening in higher education adds up for him. My working class dad of a higher intellectual order – who did a PhD late in life at Queen Mary with Bruno Bettelheim –still believes in the power of adult education and learning as the key to social capitalism. Even when I make him flick through my power point slides on the marketization of public service, he still can’t reconcile it in his mind why we collectively ruined something so precious. A Higher Education.

Resorting to a more simple explanation he asked me a familiar question which in an earlier time would trigger chest pains.

“Is this happening to you because you’re too outspoken?”

Heard as a child as it’s-all-your-fault for being smart and out of context. Heard now in the heat of cyclical industrial conflict as a working class dad asking me whether I can protect myself in a system that does not value what I am.

One of the most difficult and philosophical questions during industrial conflict is how to sustain yourself and the people who stand with you. These disputes are marathons. Rarely a complete resolution, always compromised and littered with micro-betrayals and bigger ones, wading through the mansplaining and posturing that try to seduce us to cross the picket line and to relegate others to a parallel universe called people-I-can’t-talk-to-again.

This might look like a tangent but I want to tell you a story about what happens when parallel universes collide and how important our conversations now are to cross the ‘transcontextual’ abyss between us (an idea, like many ideas, I learned from friends at unpsychology).

Universe 1: Organizing in Thailand

For those of you who have been reading this blog since it began in 2012 you might remember the story of S a Thai democracy activist, who was arrested by the military in 2012 and, after an initial release from a military prison he was charged and found guilty of treason under Thailand’s infamous Lese Majeste law. Despite a sustained international campaign involving regional and international human rights networks, Amnesty, INGOs and trade unions, he was denied bail fifteen times and went on to serve seven years in prison, working as the prison librarian.

I worked with S and Li, possibly the smartest activist I have ever known, when they were trade union organisers and me a trade union educator for a global union federation. In the hot industrial zones around Bangkok, offering English lessons and friendship at the shrimp stands outside factory gates to the young workers of the largest multinational corporations in the world. A grim fairy tale landscape shaped by the global shift where I learned about the small important attempts to survive it.

Universe 2: The politics of psychotherapy

Li texted me when Somyot was arrested to ask if I could help with a campaign to get him out on the basis if you can raise a disappeared person’s profile you raise their chances of staying alive. At the time I was coming to the end of my training as a psychotherapist at a venerable psychotherapeutic institution. I was due to submit my dissertation based on working in a psychiatric intensive care unit in a few weeks and I requested an extension which was denied. Apparently they did not recognise this as a legitimate request as it was a political issue and deemed completely unconnected to psychotherapeutic work. I subsequently left the institution, having submitted a half arsed thesis about envy and the spoiling nature of mental health institutions.

Universe 3: The UK Psychiatric System

Last year Li texted me to say she was coming over from Thailand to try to get her sister Zu out of a psychiatric unit in the UK and a section 2 (then 3) order. Each night into the late we talked, long texts just trying to download and digest the mechanics of the UK’s psychiatric system. Zu, who was finishing her PhD and teaching in Higher Education, was still florid and hallucinating but within a reality that still made sense. Concerned and paranoid about digital surveillance, unable to understand her incarceration or hide her rage, institutional reassurances no longer holding any weight in this terrifying maze of paradoxical rules and agendas in a place with no doors on the lavs. A system held together by Bank staff and disconnected moments of care.

We strategize each night about medication and how to understand Zu’s reality. To filter facts, to check dosages and do it all while presenting a veneer of compliance. We whisper sadly about maintaining stereotypical appearances of gentle Thai folk, no dissent or PhDs here, move along now. I hear in Li’s voice the patient breathing of a warrior embarking on a long battle.

We laughed hysterically at the necessity of combining our experiences of political and psychological battle. Of negotiations with MNCs on hot Bangkok nights. Of evading and navigating military rule, some small preparation for navigating the NHS. It is the connection between these parallel universes that was required to hold the chaos of Zu’s internal and external realities, psychedelically aligned through drugs and intense explosive irony.

As we turned the corner into exhaustion from holding Zu’s fear for two weeks suddenly and unexpectedly the white male middle-class psychiatrist innocently asks if there are psychiatrists in Thailand and then confirms that Zu can return home in a few weeks.  If she voluntarily keeps taking the pills.

Unwritten universe 4: The marathon of direct political action

As our institutions lose moral ground to an increasingly organised disestablished, most of the people I meet these days I would describe as involved in direct political action. Far from the safe lands of cybercampaigning and online petitions millions of us are taking direct political action every day in response to a deepening free speech crisis. For some of us this comes at a small cost of lost Sunday evenings and awkward family dinners but increasingly the financial and employability hit of strike action bleeds into once protected sectors and on infinitely into the future of work. We will not go back to a comfortable parallel professional universe again.

Our quietly-kind solidarity in the everyday is overlooked by design because it challenges established views on what political power amounts to. The ordinary relational work that we do for each other in times of crisis absorbed by those parallel universes where the political careers of people-we’ve-never-met are made.

Talking quietly late into the night trying to solve a problem with other people is a reminder that we can only ever work small in a crisis. That every day we need to say thank you to every person putting themselves forward to take action. To thank our families and friends who carry the costs of our actions. To thank ourselves, out loud and in capitals, for our unseen and unpaid actions.

You’re welcome.

Surviving Work will be on strike over the next few weeks.

Surviving Work has moved socially to @survivingwork.bsky.social @survivingwk

@UberTherapy.bsky.social @ubertherapies

UberTherapy: The Business of Mental Health October 2025 Bristol University Press. Pre-order here.