Overcoming Mental Health Challenges as Movement Leaders and Activists

From Minds of the Movement, published by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict

Two protesters the author treated for hypothermia after they swam across the Cannonball River, near Cannonball, North Dakota, USA, to confront Morton County Sheriff’s Department deputies during the Standing Rock protests. November 2, 2016.

Two protesters the author treated for hypothermia after they swam across the Cannonball River, near Cannonball, North Dakota, USA, to confront Morton County Sheriff’s Department deputies during the Standing Rock protests. November 2, 2016.

Human rights activist Beatrice Karore was five months pregnant when she was shot twice in the hips with rubber bullets and beaten by police Oct. 14, 2012, after a protest against lawlessness in Mathare, a shantytown in Nairobi, Kenya.

Two hours earlier, Karore stood on a dirt road that transects the slum, staring at the bodies of two young men who’d been knocked off their motorcycle and clubbed to death. A crowd was gathering—angry, vocal, demanding that police take action. Karore, who was known as a social justice organizer and had made something of a name for herself by running for (but losing) a seat on the Nairobi County Assembly the preceding December, led the procession to the Humura Police Station in Nairobi.

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