‘A soul killer’: what’s behind the US’s critical veterinarian shortage?
A longstanding shortage of veterinarians in areas across the US has caused crises for some pet owners; contributed to mental health issues among veterinary staff; and could leave the country at risk in terms of food safety and public health, experts have warned.
The lack of veterinarians and veterinary professionals has been attributed to the high cost of entry, long hours and the stress of dealing with animal owners in life and death situations.
The warning comes as Not One More Vet, a veterinarian mental health charity said it received reports of vets facing cyberbullying from clients – a troubling trend in a profession that has long had a high risk of suicide.
Laura Molgaard, dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Minnesota, said the shortage can be traced back over four decades.
“Starting in about 1980, we saw an increased demand for veterinary services with an increased ownership of pets, and also an increased demand from those owners for more services for those pets,” she said.
“And then, over that amount of time, at least in the US, there was not a commensurate increase in veterinary schools or seats in those veterinary schools for a very, very long time.”
The shortages are being felt most in rural areas. Part of the reason is that veterinary school graduates have to go where the money is – given the student debt they are often lumbered with – and jobs in cities pay more. This has led to pet owners and other animal owners struggling to find care in some parts of the country – but there are risks beyond pets not receiving adequate care, Molgaard said.
“There’s a risk to things like food safety and public health. Veterinarians are an important role in protecting the health of individual animals, but also protecting the health of populations of animals. And we take an oath to protect the public health as well,” Molgaard said.
“When we don’t have veterinarians in the community, we do risk the health of animals, people and the environment they share.”
Veterinarians serve as “early detectors of animal disease”, Molgaard said, including of diseases that can be transmitted to humans. It was a vet who first identified the West Nile virus, while professionals have also been responsible for reporting outbreaks of avian influenza, African swine fever and bovine spongiform encephalopathy – better known as “mad cow disease”.
“Veterinarians are on the frontlines of detection and surveillance for those kinds of diseases. And when we don’t have veterinarians in a community, those diseases can go undetected until it’s too late,” Molgaard said.
The pressure of the job, and the relatively low pay in comparison to careers, such as human medicine and dentistry, which require a similar level of training, can be intense. Support staff, including veterinary technicians, are often underpaid and overworked, said Liz Hughston, a veterinary technician specialist and president of the National Veterinary Professionals Union.
“We have a major problem with people leaving this profession,” Hughston said.
“The pay is not great [for veterinary technicians], and for veterinarians, it isn’t great in relation to their debt load. A lot of the veterinarians are coming out of school with huge amounts of debt: $400,000 in student debt, and then they’re getting paid somewhere between $85,000 and $105,000 a year
to start.
“Most people would look at that and say: ‘Oh, that’s a good wage.’ But when you look at the amount of time that they spend in school, the amount of debt that they’re coming out with, and then to come out and not be paid all that well, in relation to their professional degree and training, I think that is one piece.”
Meanwhile, veterinary technicians, who have to complete studies in an educational program and pass the veterinary technician national exam to practice, “are not paid a living wage”, Hughston said. She said technicians and veterinarian assistants frequently find they can earn more in entry level retail or fast-food jobs.
“Fast food sucks, but also: you’re making money. And you’re not expected to work overtime, you’re not making life and death decisions. You’re not getting bit and scratched,” she continued. “You’re not dealing with zoonotic diseases: you’re not going to get a disease from a hamburger.”
There’s also “sticker shock”, Hughston said, when pet owners find out how much certain treatments will cost. Pet insurance is not widely adopted in the US, so when a cat or dog or tortoise gets sick, the owners sometimes have to pay eye-watering bills. They frequently are not happy about the price.
“All we want to do is help animals. And then we’re faced with people that we have to deal with who are telling us how terrible we are, what terrible people we are, that we’re only after the money,” she said.
“Oftentimes, because we have the option of euthanasia in veterinary medicine, people make life and death decisions based on finances, and that is a soul killer for veterinary professionals. Because we look at that and we say: ‘We can fix this. It’s fixable.’ But the people can’t pay to fix it.”
Against this backdrop, suicide rates are high. A 2018 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that female veterinarians are 3.5 times more likely to die from suicide compared with the rest of the general population, while male veterinarians were 2.1 times as likely to die from suicide.
Gigi Tsontos, executive director of Not One More Vet, founded in response to the death of a veterinarian in 2014, said there are different reasons for the number of deaths.
“Some are the workload, some are the connection with the different things that happen in a clinic. You don’t get to go into a veterinary clinic and just pet dogs and cats all day. There’s a lot of decisions that are made that are difficult. There’s a lot of people involved. Let’s say a family comes in and they have a pet who needs a high level of care, but they can’t afford it – there’s discussing that with them,” Tsontos said.
The CDC study found that the rate of suicide among veterinarians had been high for the past three decades. A new issue that veterinary professionals face, however, is cyberbullying.
“I’ve heard stories of people claiming something happened with their pet – and they took them to a vet. And they just vilify the vet or the vet tech on social media,” Tsontos said.
“Veterinarians are trying to do the best that they can. And they care about animals, and they come into this industry because of that.”
• In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
All we want to do is help animals
Liz Hughston
prison since age 19. Local news reported he was arrested several times in the months leading up to the crash and was on parole for a 2015 robbery with a toy gun. That case could have seen him locked up for 25 years to life, but the office of the San Francisco district attorney (DA), Chesa Boudin, a former public defender elected on a pledge to reduce mass incarceration, agreed to his release after five years in jail.
Boudin, critics charged, “should have done more to keep Troy McAlister off the streets”.
The crash went on to become the most politically consequential criminal matter in recent years in San Francisco: Boudin was already facing backlash from police groups opposed to his reforms and residents and business leaders who argued his efforts were exacerbating crime. The New Year’s Eve deaths helped jumpstart a successful campaign to recall him from office and shepherd in a return to more punitive policies.
The events raise fundamental questions about the interplay of politics, public safety and the criminal legal system, highlighting how individual, exceptional tragedies can shift the trajectory of a city and its policies.
For McAlister’s defense team,as he faces trial for vehicular manslaughter, the politicization of his record has raised major questions. For months, their client was held up as a symbol of out-of-control-crime. The new DA overseeing the case is Brooke Jenkins, a key proponent of Boudin’s recall. As an assistant DA under Boudin, she downloaded documents from McAlister’s files, including his confidential rap sheet, even though she wasn’t involved in his case – a move some experts said was unlawful. She then resigned and joined the recall, frequently citing McAlister while calling for Boudin’s ouster. After the recall, she was appointed his successor.
“There was a whole apparatus clearly waiting to find some case with a tragic outcome that they could make political,” said McAlister’s public defender, Scott Grant. “In a system where there are so many thousands of cases, you can always find a tragedy where some hypothetical action by police or a DA could have been different prior.”
As the victims’ families grapple with what justice and accountability might look like, McAlister, now 48, said he has felt helpless watching the media storm unfold from jail. He’d wake up in the middle of the night screaming and crying, grappling with intense grief as he envisioned what Abe and Platt’s families were enduring. At the same time, he said he was overwhelmed and scared seeing pundits project an image of him “as the worst person in America”. ***
Boudin’s critics argued McAlister presented a straightforward example of why San Francisco’s criminal justice system needed a change of course. But in fact, the circumstances that led up to the New Year’s Eve crash were years in the making, and complex.
McAlister grew up in BayviewHunters Point in San Francisco, an underresourced, historically Black neighborhood near the San Francisco Bay. At age four, he said, his mother fired a shot at his father when he was nearby, an incident he said normalized violence for him. His father was largely absent after that, and his mother worked two jobs to make ends meet, leaving him with little supervision.
McAlister started using drugs at 13, he said, beginning a lifelong struggle with substance use and incarceration. While battling addiction and using heroin as a young teenager, he repeatedly ended up in youth jails, where he remembers long periods of solitary confinement.
“When you start going to jail at a young age, it doesn’t seem like a big thing to go to jail. You don’t really care,” he said. “They don’t offer you no help to get your life together – no programs, no training, no nothing.” He attended several high schools and never graduated, and by age 19, in 1995, he was convicted of second-degree robbery.
McAlister was given two years in state prison and a “strike” under a newly passed “three strikes law” that established life sentences in many circumstances for people convicted of three felonies. The designation meant that if he racked up two more cases, including non-violent ones, he could be locked up indefinitely: “From that point on, no one ever took seriously the need to get him appropriate treatment,” said Grant, noting a teenage robbery today would probably be diverted out of adult court.
Over the next two decades, McAlister repeatedly returned to prison for drug and robbery offenses. He had no access to treatment for addiction, and each time he was incarcerated anew, his life further unraveled: “San Francisco is supposed to be a place where everyone has chances and alternatives, but that never happened for me, not once. It was always prison, prison, prison,” McAlister said. He had four children and says he did his best to stay in contact with them while imprisoned.
In July 2015, McAlister was jailed after robbing cashiers at a market, threatening them with a toy “airsoft” gun. By December, he was approved to be placed in a residential treatment program to tackle his addiction, but a judge denied his release, and he spent the next four years waiting in jail for a trial.
When Boudin took over the DA’s office in 2020, a prosecutor on the case followed Boudin’s new policy of generally not pursuing three strikes or other sentencing enhancements based on a defendant’s past, but rather prosecuting only the offense at hand. The directive, Boudin said in a recent interview with the Guardian, was based on evidence showing the three-strikes law greatly worsened racial disparities, led to many life sentences for minor offenses at a great economic cost to the state, and had little to no public safety benefit.
Boudin’s policy allowed for strikes to be considered in exceptional cases, but, Boudin recently noted, McAlister had a positive jail record after working in the laundry room, earning a high school diploma while incarcerated and securing letters of recommendation from jail staff. The maximum sentence for McAlister’s robbery charge was five years, the length of time he’d been in jail without a trial. So the DA’s office negotiated a plea agreement for the time he’d already served. A judge approved it, and McAlister walked free in March 2020 as the country was going into lockdown and as there was a push across the state to reduce jail populations due to Covid-19 risks.
He was placed in a re-entry home and he repeatedly asked his parole officer for access to drug treatment. But amid pandemic shutdowns, no help materialized, McAlister said.
Daroya McAlister, his daughter, said she and her grandmother had tried to help him get a job but he hadn’t had professional support. “He kept applying and went to interviews, but he had no experience. He felt like the world was against him,” she said. “He was trying really hard to get clean.”
Then in August, McAlister was shot in the leg while out on the street – he says he doesn’t know by whom, or why. He looked into applying for victim’s compensation – state financial aid for survivors of violence – but gave up once he learned he couldn’t receive assistance while on parole. His substance use worsened in the aftermath, he said. He was arrested several times in the succeeding months on suspicion of thefts and drug possession.
What would follow was a series of communication breakdowns and law enforcement missteps that saw McAlister fall through the cracks. Boudin’s office repeatedly referred his cases to parole agents, who could have revoked parole and sent him to jail or instituted restrictions such as an ankle monitor. But it’s unclear if the parole department followed up. The DA did not file new charges after those arrests because, his office determined at the time, there was not enough evidence in those cases. Parole, it said, was better positioned to handle the situation.
A week before the crash, an assistant DA asked a San Francisco police official to alert the California department of corrections and rehabilitation (CDCR) to McAlister’s most recent arrest, presumably to consider revoking his parole. But the San Francisco police department official was on vacation, the San FranciscoChronicle later reported. On 29 December, McAlister was identified as a suspect in vehicle theft in Daly City, just outside San Francisco. Officers contacted the parole department and attempted to locate him over the next two days but were unsuccessful, a Daly City police spokesperson said. SFPD did not respond to inquiries.
On New Year’s Eve, police say, McAlister robbed a bakery before driving across the city in the stolen vehicle.
***
Hanako Abe grew up in Fukushima, Japan, and came to the US to go to college in Kentucky. During a vacation to San Francisco, she fell in love with the city, said her mother, Hiroko Abe. “She was left with a strong impression that people in San Francisco seemed to be really enjoying life,” Hiroko said in a recent interview, speaking through an interpreter.
“In Japan, people are all work, but I really wanted my daughter to have that opportunity to find a balance between work and having fun, so I was very supportive.”
Hanako relocated to San Francisco in 2018. In college, she had avoided befriending Japanese people to force herself to learn English, her mother said, but once in San Francisco, where she worked at commercial real estate firm JLL, she found a community of Japanese American friends. Highly athletic, she joined a running club, went on hikes and did horseback riding. During the pandemic, she took to weightlifting, often showing her mom her ab muscles on Zoom calls: “She was so full of joyful exuberance, often quite hilarious, too,” Hiroko laughed. She was very driven, too. When her mother entered her daughter’s apartment after her death, she found that she kept an essay she’d written in elementary school on her desk that said, “‘I want to be loved by everyone.’”
Elizabeth Platt, the older victim in the crash, too, was drawn to San Francisco at a young age, said her sister, Alison Platt, in an interview. Liz, who grew up on a farm in rural Michigan, loved the movies The Love Bug and What’s Up, Doc?, both set in the city. She moved to San Francisco in the late 1970s when she was about 18 and never looked back.
“What she liked about San Francisco was that it was probably more Marxist than other places – she loved the hippy lifestyle,” Alison said. “She had a romantic notion of San Francisco in the 60s.”
Platt lived in communal housing for years, her sister said, and was active in peace protests and efforts to support civil rights in Ireland, a commitment that grew out of her love for Irish punk music. She worked as a typist for Wells Fargo in the 80s, but rarely had steady or stable housing or employment after that, Alison said. As a DJ for the community radio station KXSF, she was known as the Battleaxe. In her final years, she had been partially living on the street, at times sleeping at the airport or in booths at all-night coffee places. She was angry about the tech boom, Alison said, and the gentrification of some of the city’s neighborhoods.
***
Days after the crash, Boudin charged McAlister with vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated, leaving the scene of an accident, unlawfully taking a car and other counts.
“Although of course no one predicted this tragedy, it is true that the Daly City police, the San Francisco police, parole and my office all could have done things differently, which might have avoided this terrible outcome,” he said in a statement at the time.
Meanwhile, Boudin’s opponents sprang into action. The San Francisco
police union, which had fiercely opposed Boudin’s election, directly faulted him for the tragedy: “Two people were killed on New Year’s Eve because Chesa Boudin refused to do his job, which is to hold criminals and victimizers accountable,” the union president said in a 4 January press release. The union’s “Boudin Blunders” website, which it had launched in Boudin’s first month in office, featured McAlister at the top, saying the DA allowed him to “keep terrorizing our city”.
Some prominent tech leaders who had been advocating for more aggressive and punitive responses to homelessness and crime in the city mobilized, too. On 2 January, Jason Calacanis, a prominent Silicon Valley investor, launched a GoFundMe to “Hold the DA of SF accountable” and “hire an investigative journalist to cover Chesa’s office”. On 5 January, David Sacks, a venture capitalist and Elon Musk ally, published a blogpost titled “The Killer DA”, which said Boudin had given McAlister a “sweetheart deal” in 2020.
That week, Richie Greenberg, a former GOP candidate for mayor, launched an online petition to recall Boudin from office. He soon launched a formal committee to get a recall measure on the ballot.
Greenberg’s recall failed to gather enough signatures, but a second recall group launched in April 2021, calling itself San Franciscans for Public Safety and featuring some Democratic leaders. The group, which cited McAlister’s case in its filing notice, argued that Boudin had the “wrong priorities”, did not care about victims and that his policies were contributing to burglaries, violence and the overdose crisis.
A year into his tenure, it was impossible to draw any reliableempirical conclusions about the impact of his policies on crime rates, said Kimberly Richman, chair of the sociology department at the University of San Francisco. But Boudin, the son of two leftist radicals who spent decades in prison, had worked years as a public defender and unlike many district attorneys, had no ties to law enforcement and had faced fierce critics from the start.
Meanwhile, the mood in San Francisco was grim. Businesses were struggling amid the pandemic, and homelessness and the crises of mental illness and substance use were becoming increasingly visible on the streets. As was the case elsewhere in the country, the city saw an increase in gun violence, homicides and other offenses in 2021. It was plagued in particular by reports of car break-ins, growing concerns over anti-Asian violence, and viral incidents of seemingly random assaults and “brazen” thefts. The narrative that the liberal city was out of control was repeatedly amplified by rightwing media. Critics increasingly pointed at
the DA. The New Year’s tragedy became a flashpoint for resentment.
“It was the perfect storm,” Richman said. “He was a former public defender. He had sympathies for people with incarcerated parents … For some of us, that’s what made him a breath of fresh air – that he had a different background and perspective. But for others, it was an automatic source of distrust, and it didn’t take much to tip that balance even more.”
The randomness of the New Year’s collision aligned with people’s fears in a powerful way, added Anjuli Verma, a University of California, Santa Cruz, politics professor. “The imagery of this car crashing played into this idea of chaos in the city. It’s not as if Troy McAlister meant to run over these women, but it was like: here is a person who is out of control in an out-of-control city, with an out-of-control DA.”
***
In October 2021, six months after the recall effort was filed, Brooke Jenkins, a former homicide prosecutor and then an assistant DA under Boudin, accessed documents from McAlister’s files, including his rap sheet, according to the local news site Mission Local. She sent them to the personal email account of Don du Bain, another prosecutor in the office. Neither was involved in the case.
The move, several experts said, appeared to be illegal. “Improperly distributing a confidential rap sheet is not just a policy violation, it’s a misdemeanor … it is very serious,” said Steve Wagstaffe, the longtime DA of neighboring San Mateo. He said he couldn’t assess Jenkins’ liability without knowing her explanation for downloading the files, but Jenkins has declined to address why she took them.
One week after Jenkins emailed the records to Du Bain, however, they both resigned, and soon after announced they had joined the recall campaign.
In a local TV interview that month, they cited McAlister’s 2015 plea agreement. “Those women are not alive today because of that very abrupt and reckless decision that Chesa made to release Troy McAlister,” Du Bain said. Jenkins said: “Boudin lacks the desire and willingness to prosecute crime effectively in San Francisco.”
By November, recall organizers had earned enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. Jenkins had become one of the most prominent spokespeople for the recall. (She also made $153,000 consulting for a non-profit affiliated with the recall campaign while calling herself a “volunteer”.) And in subsequent months, she continued to bring up the McAlister case.
“[McAlister] should have never been out in the first place,” she said at a May 2022 recall rally a month before the vote. In a KQED radio interview that month, she and Du Bain argued again that releasing McAlister had been a mistake. “It’s not so much that Chesa decided to execute a plea deal. It’s what deal he executed,” Jenkins said. “It needs to be one that’s proportionate to your criminal history and your current crime, and it needs to also put you in a position not to reoffend.”
Weeks before the vote, the recall campaign released an emotional ad featuring Abe’s mother. “I know in my heart Hanako Abe would be alive today if Chesa Boudin properly handled the Troy McAlister case,” Hiroko said in the clip.
On 7 June, San Franciscans voted to recall Boudin, with 55% in favor of his ouster. Mayor London Breed appointed Jenkins as the interim DA. Jenkins promptly rehired Du Bain.
Jenkins continued to cite McAlister as she campaigned for a full term. “There’s been a spike in crimes committed by repeat offenders and a rise in violent crimes, sadly exemplified by [McAlister],” she said on her website. Her new bail policy was meant to avoid a similar tragedy, she told reporters.
On 8 November 2022, Jenkins was elected for a full term.
***
There is a long tradition of American politicians and law enforcement officials pointing at specific criminal cases in political campaigns or to push for an expansion of prisons and police powers. Some have called it the “Willie Horton effect” – the tactic that even if a reform is successful overall, one highprofile failure can undo it.
The dynamic was named for the politicization of the case of William Horton, an incarcerated man in Massachusetts, convicted of raping a white woman after failing to return to prison while on a furlough in 1987. The following year, the then presidential candidate George HW Bush repeatedly blamed the crime on his rival in the race, Michael Dukakis, the
Massachusetts governor at the time of Horton’s furlough.
In California, the 1993 kidnapping and murder of the 12-year-old Polly Klaas by a man with a violent criminal record fueled the passage of the “three strikes” law.
In 2015, the then candidate Donald Trump used the killing of Kate Steinle by an undocumented immigrant in San Francisco to advocate for a broad crackdown on immigrants.
As DA, Jenkins has undone many of Boudin’s reforms – rescinding the prosecutions in three police shooting cases, reversingefforts to overturn wrongful convictions and long sentences, and sending more people to jail and prison. It’s a trend opponents of reform-minded DAs in other California jurisdictions would like to see take place this year as well. Progressive district attorneys in Los Angeles and Oakland are facing major challenges from opponents pushing a similar message to Jenkins’.
Grant said he hadn’t been surprised to see McAlister’s criminal record being used by the recall campaign. But, he said, in his 15 years as a public defender, he knew of no other case in which a DA had staked a significant part of a political campaign on an individual case – and then took over prosecution of the matter: “She has made her career and has continued to fundraise and campaign on the back of Troy McAlister,” he said, noting that the story remains on her website where she solicits donations.
Jenkins’ frequent citations of McAlister’s case on the campaign trail have raised eyebrows among some legal observers as well. “Even if it’s legally allowed for a DA to stay on a case despite statements made on the campaign trail, the question is what happens to the credibility of the system and the credibility of the conviction?” said Mona Sahaf, director of reshaping prosecution at the Vera Institute of Justice, a non-profit that advocates for reforms.
In a system where DAs run for office, the risk of harmful political influence on their decisions is great, she added.
Prosecutors risk prejudicing juries when they make a political story out of an ongoing case, said Kami Chavis, director of the Center for Criminal Justice Policy and Reform at William & Mary Law School: “She based her political career on this … but the ultimate goal should be for justice in a case. Anytime you have these other political considerations, that is in danger of being sacrificed.”
From jail in San Bruno, McAlister said he was saddened by Jenkins’ use of his story, and wondered what it meant for his fate: “How am I going to get a fair trial? She is going to do everything she can to make sure that she can use me as a ‘victory’, and that I never get out of jail.”
McAlister has pleaded not guilty. If convicted, he could face more than 20 years in prison.
Jenkins declined repeated interview requests and did not respond to detailed questions.
***
As McAlister’s case moves closer towards a trial, the families of the two victims are preparing for its resolution.
Alison Platt, who lives in New Mexico, said she had struggled to process the news of her sister’s death when she got a call from the coroner’s office. As reporters started calling, she also questioned the political narrative being pushed in her sister’s name.
“It was very overwhelming,” she said. Calls for three strikes or a “tough on crime” escalation did not seem to align with her sister’s progressive values, she said: “I think she’d really bristle at the idea of a crackdown or anything authoritarian or what she’d see as oppressors and the prison-industrial complex.”
Alison said she was significantly more concerned that the parole department seemed to have dropped the ball than with the decisions made by Boudin’s office, but that few seemed interested in accountability for that agency, which is not run by an elected official.
Mary Xjimenez, a CDCR spokesperson, said in an email that the parole division had made the “appropriate referrals” to ensure “resources” were available to help “McAlister’s reentry in the community”. Parole officials “followed all procedures including conducting investigations and holding Mr McAlister accountable by applying sanctions”, she said. She did not specify what resources had been offered or what sanctions had been applied.
Alison also said she was sympathetic to the claims of McAlister’s team that he should have gotten help earlier.
“Conservatives say: ‘These people have proven time and time again that they can’t reform their conduct, so why don’t we just lock them up for ever?’ But we’re not giving them any resources to change, so it seems like that’s where the focus should be.”
She believes Liz wouldn’t want McAlister to be locked up for life and would support him getting treatment.
When Hiroko, Hanako’s mother, got the call about her daughter’s death, she initially didn’t understand what had happened. “I thought this was just an ordinary unfortunate accident, that this was not preventable.” But she was disturbed to later learn of McAlister’s criminal record from a reporter, and she felt as if officials had not given her the full story: “It seemed Mr McAlister had been released a number of times without being reformed or having a chance to reflect on his life. It started to look more and more to me that, even though Mr McAlister did not have any premeditation or plan to kill Hanako, there was possibly prosecutorial error.”
The system, she felt, had not given him a chance to improve and fix his life each time he committed a minor offense: “I felt Boudin took away an opportunity for Mr McAlister to become a better and more productive person, and that’s why I was willing to cooperate with the recall efforts.”
Hiroko said she didn’t want to see “superficial solutions” but reforms that tackle the drug crisis, the influence of money on politics, and other social problems: “The way I see it is that McAlister is also the victim of the political system, and unless the people of San Francisco address the root cause of the problem, no change for good in public policy can happen.”
Two years later, she said, she still hopes McAlister gets help.
“Rehabilitation and reformation has to happen, and Mr McAlister cannot repeat his mistakes. There should be no more victims of Mr McAlister. If those conditions are met, I would support Mr McAlister returning to society.”
McAlister said he hoped to someday get an opportunity to prove that he is more than the person depicted in political ads. “Nothing I can say could change what happened or make things better. It’s impossible. I can’t blame society, my mom or anybody. If I could change it, I would, but I can’t. What I can do is try to get my life together and make an impact.”
being named. In the late 19th century, scientists, notably Francis Galton, wrote that some people were better able to picture objects in their minds than others. But it wasn’t until 2003 that the University of Exeter’s Adam Zeman published the first case report on aphantasia, after meeting a 65-yearold who lost the ability to mentally visualize familiar people and places after a surgery.
After hearing from those who had never been able to mentally visualize, Zeman published a paper on 21 people with “congenital aphantasia” in 2015. Since then, more and more people like me have come to realize that mental imagery is a spectrum, and we lie on the outer bounds of it, in the dark.
***
When I was going on dates after a breakup in 2022, my friends would often ask how people looked, compared with their profile photos. I would describe their mannerisms, how they made me feel, how they behaved in certain situations; a friend might say, frustrated, “Yes, but what do they look like?” This was a clue that something was off in my visual representation of others. In a journal entry from July 2022, I wrote about a man I was seeing, “Why can’t I hold what [he] looks like in my mind?”
There’s been a surge of research on how aphantasia affects our lives. There are probably different subtypes of aphantasia, as Pearson and his colleagues showed in a recent paper: for some it affects images alone; some can’t imagine other sensory information, like sounds. Some people with aphantasia have visualizations when they dream (I do), and others don’t. There’s evidence that it can make it harder for people to recall visual details, though other studies show that aphants perform better on some memory tests unrelated to imagery. “I remember stories, facts and trivia about my own life, but I can’t experience it in any way,” said Tom Ebeyer, the founder of the Aphantasia Network. “It also makes it difficult to properly sequence and remember lots of specific details.”
But overall, people with aphantasia don’t seem to have serious problems navigating their day-to-day lives, unlike those with more severe memory conditions like episodic amnesia.
The ways it affects me have been more understated. In therapy, I struggled with therapeutic techniques that relied heavily on visualization. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) manuals are full of such techniques, said Reshanne Reeder, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Liverpool. For example, one exercise asks people to practice responding to different situations by “imagin[ing] a scene as if it were a photograph”, followed by “imagin[ing] the action starting as if it were a movie”.
People who know me would agree that I have a very strong memory, but I have noticed that my memory works a bit differently. I can remember visual details, just not visually. I can rattle off what a person was wearing or what a scene looked like by remembering a list of what was there, not by seeing it. Mostly, I remember how experiences felt – emotionally and physically. I’m best at remembering concepts and themes from books or conversations.
I don’t have face blindness. I’m very good at recognizing people, often remembering people from long ago who don’t remember me: people I’ve served in restaurants, went to college with, or reported on many years ago. But when I am not physically with someone, I can’t call up their face. As a result, I also have a somewhat unusual relationship with my own looks – it’s not that I forget what I look like, but I am sometimes a little surprised, and don’t feel connected to my outward appearance as a matter of identity. It’s not what makes me who I am.
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What I find most striking is how much variety there is in people who have aphantasia. Andrea Blomkvist, a researcher in philosophy of cognitive science at the London School of Economics, said that her group had met aphants who are not just skilled at nonvisual jobs and hobbies, but are artists, writers, animators. “Aphantasics have no problem producing highly creative work,” Ebeyer said. “Our process can be very different.”
For instance, visualizers might imagine their work before they begin. “Aphantasics, myself included, tend to have a general ‘sense’ or idea of what they want to create,” Ebeyer said. Ebeyer begins working, then edits and refines until he is satisfied. He often hears from other artists with aphantasia when they’re in the process of making art: I know it when I see it.This teaches us that imagination extends beyond mental imagery.
Zeman has written that people with aphantasia may have more of an interest in the visual arts, because their minds are devoid of it.
I love visual art – I originally majored in art history alongside journalism – but it makes sense to me that my medium is words. They suit my internal sense-making best, as well as the concepts and monologue that constitute my daily experience. In October, the writer John Green tweeted about the red apple test, revealing that he can’t see mental imagery either. “I always thought ‘visualize’ meant thinking of the words/ideas/feelings associated with a thing, not actual visuals,” he wrote, adding that his choice of profession aligned with this. “For me everything has always been made out of language, so language is a natural fit.”
This has revealed itself in other preferences too: I seem like someone who would love science fiction novels, but growing up I found books with lengthy visual descriptions of scenery or characters boring. As a journalist, when reporting, I have to make sure to take photographs of everything I’m seeing so that I can refer back to it later. It’s not my instinct to describe physical details in my writing – it’s something editors often have to remind me to do. What someone looks like, what they are wearing – it’s not as interesting to me as what they are feeling, or the ideas that they have.
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Some people consider aphantasia to be a deficit and wish they could reverse it. People have claimed they can train their way out of aphantasia, or use psychedelics to regain some sense of mental imagery (the jury is out on whether that works). I have no desire for this – my mind is plenty busy without a stream of imagery. If I was born with imagery, it would be commonplace for me, and I’m sure I’d enjoy it. But I already can find myself overwhelmed with thoughts and feelings that have no visual aspects to them.
Aphants often ask Pearson what imagery is like. It’s not quite as simple as seeing an apple floating in front of you, he said, as someone who can mentally visualize. “I have a conscious experience, often fleeting, but I do experience something in my mind’s eye of what an apple looks like,” he said.
Blomkvist has heard that some aphants find it hard that they can’t visually remember loved ones that might have died or moved away. This rings true for me: a best friend of mine, who died in 2020, had an infectious smile, and to see it – really see it – I have to look at photos of him, which I do often. An ex-boyfriend who I haven’t seen since we split up is often in my memories, but not in visual form. He can feel like a ghost.
But my memories of people I’ve loved are visceral to me in other ways. My favorite description of aphantasia comes from an essay by Mette Leonard Høeg in Psyche. She wrote that her imagination and memories have a strong spatial component. When Høeg remembers the house she grew up in as a child, “I can feel it, almost physically, when I think of it,” she wrote. My memories are very physical too, and these sensations map on to concepts and emotions. Recently, when remembering something that my current boyfriend and I discussed last spring in London, I recalled that we were on an escalator while talking; I could sense the memory of the movement of my body going up the moving stairs.
I like to experience my memories of people and places this way, just as I enjoy knowing that people can really “see” me in their minds. Conditions like aphantasia remind me how distinct our view of the world is compared with the person standing next to us on the street, or even our closest friends – we’re all perceiving each other in our own ways. “Aphantasia is part of the range of neural diversity,” Pearson said. “Some people think in pictures and some don’t.”
I wrote about a man I was seeing, ‘Why can’t I hold what he looks like in my mind?’
attend cabinet, had warned that prejudice against Muslims had become normalised, “passing the dinner table test”.
The former deputy chairman of the Conservative party Lee Anderson lost the Tory whip this week, not for the substance of his comments but for failing to apologise for “wrongly” claiming that the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim leader of the capital, was under the power of Islamists.
With cabinet ministers refusing to describe his comments as racist, Anderson doubled down on his claims on Monday, telling GB News “when you think you are right, you should never apologise because to do so would be a sign of weakness”.
The war between Israel and Gaza is said by those experiencing the abuse to have only further legitimised, in the eyes of some, the espousing of longheld views about the Muslim community.
On Monday, a coalition of civil society organisations, including Islamic Relief UK, the Fawcett Society and Hope Not Hate, known as the AntiIslamophobia Working Group, wrote to the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, to express their alarm at the lack of response to the claim from Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, in the Daily Telegraph that the “Islamists, the extremists and the antisemites are in charge now”.
“As prime minister it is your duty to safeguard all communities, no matter their race or religion”, they demanded.
Majid Iqbal, chief executive of the the Islamophobia Response Unit (IRU), which seeks to help victims bring cases to the police, said they had recorded a 365% increase in cases crossing their desk since October with “lots of incidents of Islamophobia on public transport [directed at] individuals who’ve attended protests, just generally in the street, and in their everyday life”.
On Monday morning, the charity received an email typical of its sort. “I’m sick and tired of you lot moaning about racism when YOU are the problem,” wrote ‘Marie Conway’. “This war has NOTHING to do with the UK, OUR country, you are racist against Jewish people who’ve lived here peacefully until you came here. You are NOT welcome or wanted here. We will pay for your airfare home. So instead of being cowards, you can go and fight for your beliefs. If not shut up. As the true English people like myself don’t care about you.”
Mohammed Kozbar, general secretary of the Finsbury Park mosque, which was subject to a terrorist attack on 2017, which killed one man and left 12 injured, said he had reported a number of incidents to the police since October.
He said: “We’ve seen people standing outside the mosque shouting in an Islamophobic and racist way, attacking the community. We’ve seen offensive emails as well attacking the community, talking about the faith itself, the prophet, the Qur’an. So it’s about dehumanising the Muslim community.
“We hope that the police get to the bottom of it but from our experience, to be honest, most of the cases, I’m talking about probably 99% of the cases, nothing has been done about it and that’s an issue which the police needs to deal with.”
Kamran Hussain, chief executive of the British Muslim Heritage Centre in Manchester, said he was concerned by the rhetoric used by some media outlets and by prominent politicians. His organisation is now training up staff to provide a “hate crime” reporting service.
Mohammed Saeed, chair of trustees at the Green Lane mosque, in Birmingham, the country’s largest, said they were also in regular contact with West Midlands police but that leadership from Downing Street was now required. “We continuously receive Islamophobic hate,” Saeed said. “Support is needed from our government in these challenging times.”