The scene opens with me on a bathroom floor in the first days of 2016, cradling a knife and threatening to kill myself, but it starts much earlier, months and months before, when I moved from North Carolina to the Bay Area and felt my small-town axis shift with the violence of an earthquake. Sometimes it takes a radical re-configuring of the landscape — the sorts of tremors that expose our tenderest parts — to show us what was really dormant all along. For those, like me, who have mental-health issues and work or worked in the Bay Area’s service industry, those fault lines are everywhere, ubiquitous as cracks in the sidewalk.
In a 2015 study sponsored by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Association, substance use disorder among “accommodations and food services” ranked number one; retail trade came seventh after professions like mining and construction. In 2007, the Associated Press reportedthat “people who tend to the elderly, change diapers, and serve food and drinks have the highest rates of depression among U.S. workers,” with 7 percent of full-time workers battling the noonday demon (compare that to a national average of 6.7 percent in 2015, according to the National Association for Mental Health).
[For more of this story, written by Linnie W. Greene, go to https://psmag.com/the-burdens-...5278a60d0#.7vc216824]
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