Migrant Hysteria
Mental health, resistance, and the scenic route to self-destruction.
My parents were dumbstruck when I, at a precocious eleven years, told them I wanted to kill myself. Neither my mother nor my father was equipped for that conversation. I didn’t have the language to adequately express what it was like to be depressed and anxious as a child, nor did I truly comprehend what a suicide meant or what death was. But, I craved it.
It was an outburst four years in the making. Since I was about age seven I had dreams and fantasies of self-immolating on the steps of state capitols, in front of my school, in front of the local sheriffs station. I felt it was the only way to crush the secret that had stolen my childhood and my family in México from me; not by suppressing it or by overcoming it, but rather by flagrantly, publicly, and literally letting it consume me. I wanted the Americans to see what they had done to me, force them to pick through my charred bones and force them to see me as a person at last with their same flamed-cracked femurs and succulent, crisp belly fat. I wanted their repentance and to spare others the experiences that had driven me to these thoughts.
As I grew older, as I became more like the Americans who despised me there were moments where it would have been convenient, but unkind to reveal this. As attacks on embassies and ships became more common, as the violence of terrorism came home, my desire to burn myself alive only deepened.
When talking about public suicides, it’s a cliché to refer to them as senseless or tragic. To me, even as a child, they could not be more comprehensible. When you are powerless and your foe is multitude times stronger than you, it is only understandable that your only weapon becomes your body. But, living as an illegal alien in the United States is in many ways to live without a body. Laws which limit our movement through space by, for example, denying us drivers licenses or laws which restrict our ability to feed or house ourselves aren’t just punitive measures disguised as attempts to deter clandestine migration. In reality they are attacks on us at the most essential, biological level. They deny us a body. They deny us an existence. The crime is alleged to be an unauthorized crossing or an overstay of a visa, but the law clearly targets our right to a life.
Hence the flames. The same body which marks you as a foreigner, as a leech, as a vestigial and unwanted menace in space becomes a place of resistance. The same body which makes you vulnerable to violence and the possibility of State kidnapping is reclaimed.
When we are so small and when we feel so alone, what else do we have? It is the logic of desperation. Illegal people largely survive day to day on the hope that we will soon hold our heads up high knowing we always held the high ground. Maybe. But, what I wanted was to have the last word by dying in spectacle.
It is the logic of a child who craved security and whose parents and community could not and cannot deliver it.
These fantasies continued late into my adolescence. They became unbearable in moments where I felt the most humiliated: when my mother’s car was towed for driving without a license and we were left stranded on the road; when the teller at my high school store would not let me sign up for the SATs without a social security number; when my first crush made jokes about my deportation; when the DREAM Act failed and my naïve hopes that I might be accepted were finally extinguished. Each time I could feel the paraffin wax on my skin and smell the gasoline on the rags around my body that would turn my mundane, unheard, unseen suffering into a message.
These days, somewhat ironically given the national climate, I no longer see myself resorting to such a protest.
Instead, for the last few years, a more mundane and persistent day-to-day desire to kill myself has taken over. My depression and anxiety, which made a hell of my childhood, has since been diagnosed as bipolar disorder my therapist believed to be a direct result of the trauma of fleeing México, family separation and living clandestinely in the United States for two decades. It is tolerable most days. I remain effusive and charismatic, which before writing this has mostly meant that the extent of my illness and its fallout has been knowledge shared with only a few people.
There have been many studies and many more think pieces about the challenges of addressing mental illness in immigrant communities. The reasons have been so often reported that they border on truisms: lack of cultural concepts around mental health, inability to access diagnosis or treatment, difficulty paying for care and/or mistrust in no-cost providers, etc..
Fewer articles specifically address the crisis of mental illness and trauma that exists in illegal peoples and our communities. Even under the best circumstances, clandestine migration is a life changing, traumatic experience that has generational repercussions. Studies show this.
But, what’s different for illegal peoples and where we differ from the general population, or even other migrants, is that the constant threat of deportation and other impediments to our quality of life mean that mental health treatment on its own will, for many, always be an incomplete treatment.
In my experience, even once I had access to therapy and medication, the day-to-day stress of being an illegal person exacerbated my symptoms beyond what mindfulness, breathing exercises or Lamictal could control for. With no resolution to my legal status possible, the primary trigger for my mental illness remained unaddressed. My mental health provider and I were simply trying to keep me out of a cycle of 72-hour observations and suicide attempts. We have not been very successful.
As the national climate continues to worsen, as illegal peoples continue to be the national scapegoat, as our sources of resiliency and support are taken from us, I see signs of stress spread among many people in the community.
Without an infrastructure that would help us address our health and lacking the words, space and time to discuss traumas that go back so far and those we experience daily, we’re standing on the cliff’s edge of a community-wide crisis whose impacts will be slow-moving and remain largely out of sight, but which will negatively alter the course of millions of lives if we aren’t sinvergüenzas no longer afraid to speak.
We need resources. We need culturally-informed, politically-sensitive care. We need it now.
