As workers struggle with isolation, depression, and anxiety magnified by the bosses’ disregard during Covid-19, students and workers at the City University of New York (CUNY) have demanded better mental health services. The student-led CUNY Rising Alliance demands, among other things, more counselors and advisors.  Problems like illness, death, and job loss shared by so many working-class youth have created a collective trauma that is endemic to the structural racism, poverty, and fractured social system these students—and their class sisters and brothers worldwide—were already facing. In other words, students are suffering from capitalism. The best therapy for our mental health is building connection in the midst of class struggle.
Capitalist Education: A Collective Trauma for All Youth
The stress is apparent when students struggle to show up or participate. And these are the students who have managed to enroll. All the trauma talk can sometimes feel like a competition to see “who has it the worst.” Then there are those who say, “just get over it.” Both reactions are symptoms of individualism that makes our collective trauma so much more damaging. During the pandemic, while educators were encouraged to “check in” with students, the overwhelming expectation from the capitalist education system was to go to “business as usual,” essentially ignoring the horrid conditions such as poor internet access, insufficient computer supply, and crowded living conditions that working-class youth had to endure. Trauma is a product of a violent system based on exploitation and profit. As long as capitalism exists, we will continue to feel alienated.
Capitalist conditions create trauma
 For decades, doctors and psychologists resisted the idea that war caused trauma, but too many soldiers returning from World War II were unable to integrate back into their lives. The diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was finally accepted by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in 1980. Since then, there’s been a growing recognition that war was not the only cause of PTSD—our capitalist-created living conditions also contribute to trauma. The CDC has supported research that shows long-term health consequences for anyone with four or more “adverse childhood experiences” (ACEs), and 61 percent of U.S. adults have experienced at least one ACE. These advances help us understand mental illness as not an individual problem,  but one that has a social basis. This is apparent in the idea of collective trauma. When an event disrupts the foundations of society, a collective trauma occurs that impacts all in the affected community, albeit individuals will impact individuals vary. The Covid-19 pandemic—along with climate change, nuclear war, racist police terror, and attack on reproductive health—have created a disruption that reveals the many ways capitalism creates trauma. Of course, capitalism in and of itself is a trauma-inducing system, and a profit system in decay only exacerbates mental illness. That’s because an unhealthy system creates unhealthy behaviors.
Trust Our Class: let’s struggle for communism
The ruling class offers false solutions that further isolate and pacify our class through just individual practices. One of the capitalist myths that keeps us trapped is the idea that if we work hard enough, we can achieve happiness. That happiness is impossible, and it’s worsened by leading us to blame ourselves and give into the individualism that isolates us from the very people we need for the creation of a better world. It is in the effort to create a better world together that can also make our lives better now: in our efforts to solve the immediate problems and our progress toward bringing about a communist revolution.
This collective trauma demands a collective solution. By struggling together, we can overcome the isolation that breeds suffering.  We need to get better at inviting those around us to share difficult emotions. We need to create space for talking about pain, anger, and hopelessness because we often think we are protecting one another by not naming these bouts of darkness, yet it is in naming them that we can begin to see we are not alone in these feelings and find our way back to the collective.
More therapists might help CUNY students, but if they are left to struggle alone in a world that threatens their very existence, one therapist for one hour can’t compete with a trauma that’s 24/7. PLP is fighting alongside students and countless others worldwide to remind all working-class youth that a communist world is a goal we can all believe in and build—together!