18/10/2026
17 October has a long memory in France, and in my country of origin.
In 1961, Paris police drowned Algerians marching peacefully against a curfew imposed on them alone. In 2019, Lebanon rose up against a ruling class that had emptied the country.
Yesterday, hundreds of thousands marched across France against the cost of living, and by evening the government's story was written: broken windows, looting, the ultra-left.
That story asks you to look at a shattered shop front and forget a budget that freezes housing aid and makes students without a scholarship pay to enrol in BTS and prépa, while fuel, food and electricity cost more every month. It asks you to forget that in Saint-Étienne a 17-year-old lost his hand to a police gr***de.
That is the hypocrisy: condemning violence in the street while writing it into the budget. Systemic violence rarely breaks glass. It breaks people slowly, at the kitchen table at the end of the month.
Your mental health is political, and I mean that as a mechanism. Financial strain, insecure housing and debt are well-documented risk factors for anxiety and depression. That pressure keeps the nervous system on alert, and many people end up believing their exhaustion is a personal failure. It is not. A psychology that never looks at the rent, the wage or the police treats the consequences of a political decision as a flaw in your character.
For those of us from the Levant and the wider SWANA diaspora, our bodies learned early to read a police line or a "violent riots" banner, and to brace. That vigilance is not paranoia. It is a reasonable response to a real threat.
If this week you feel angry, numb or strangely ashamed of caring this much, you are not too sensitive. You are paying attention. And if what you feel is grief for the futures being cut line by line, that grief is political too.
Send this to someone who has been told their anger is the problem.
💜 I am Dania, 🇫🇷 🇱🇧 🇹🇳 grief counselor and transgenerational analyst.
France protests, cost of living, police violence, systemic violence, mental health, political anxiety, collective grief, decolonial therapy, SWANA diaspora, Lebanese diaspora, Alger
