Paper short abstract:

This paper critically examines the stretched times of resting, slowing and waiting, and how they persist within the ‘non-stop inertia’ of late liberal time. It focuses on the problematics of 'waiting times' in mental health services and the therapeutic clinical encounter.

Paper long abstract:

This co-authored paper works across psychosocial studies and medical humanities to critically examine the temporality of a range of practices of resting, slowing and waiting, in order to address the question of what happens to time in the contradictory 'non-stop inertia' of late liberalism (Southwood, 2011). It focuses both on theoretical articulations of 'stuck' or 'suspended' time, and on the problematics of 'waiting times' in relation to both the provision of mental health services and the psychotherapy clinical encounter. Using an emerging scholarship that reformulates the speed and mobility commonly associated with modernity through emphases on slowness and stilled, impeded or suspended time, the paper examines contemporary experiences of waiting for and within the therapeutic encounter. It aims to situate waiting in relation to new truncated imaginaries of the future, brought about by the realities of climate change, resource scarcity and austerity, and contemporary cultural narratives of the 'end times'. Our overall concerns are with tracking waiting and practices of care in socioeconomic conditions in which the post-war settlement and its promise of access to basic resources for all has collapsed, in order to develop conceptual and affective resources for re-evaluating waiting in relation to treatment and care.