Paper short abstract:

This paper examines different discourses and claims of precarity and politics that abound and continue to emerge in the space of psychiatry in Africa, focusing on a town in Kenya in the midst of ethnic tensions, violence and wealth disparities, to produce medical and political subjectivities

Paper long abstract:

Differing categories of mental health conditions (including illness) have served to embody manifestations of the intertwining and disruptiveness of politics, precarity and everyday living in Africa. This paper explores how psychiatry is leveraged by both state and citizen to make particular claims and examine the extent to which they are shaped by economic precarity and political desires obscuring disruptive inequalities. The paper is based on

twelve months of ethnographic field work at a hospital in a Kenyan town. The town has a large (local) immigrant and local (host) population pursuing widely diverse occupations in poorly paid labour and wealthy tourism and horticultural enterprises inherited from colonial occupants by the current multinationals and the wealthy local business community.

With my key interlocutors that included medical and mental health providers, through the lens of mental health, I examine the ideas and manifestations that arise around poverty and immigration, ethnicity and politics and how all these are contribute to, influence and are as a result of individual and group experiences, personal and state perspectives all further complicated by gendered, cultural v modern and global narratives.

I argue that precarity, politics and psychiatry are woven together in surprising and unexpected ways. I interrogate what psychiatric (medical) as well as political subjectivities are produced and in what contexts. I seek to understand how psychiatry is leveraged by both state and citizen to make particular claims and how these processes are shaped by economic precarity and political desires to obscure growing and potentially disruptive inequalities.