Paper short abstract:

This paper explores links between masculinity, madness and economic and social precarity, drawing on ethnographic research in urban Tanzania and Kenya. Medical anthropology provides alternative frames for understanding how psychic wounds among diverse men are made--and healed in social contexts.

Paper long abstract:

In our field sites and clinical practice in East Africa, we regularly encounter men who have become overwhelmed by "thinking too many thoughts" and "gone crazy from confusion" about the problems of life that are created by various kinds of social, economic, and political precarity. While differently inflected by age and class, these kinds of psychic afflictions affect men across the life course and socioeconomic strata. For those in the socioeconomic margins, the source of troublesome and confusing thoughts is often the daily struggle to meet basic needs. For the middle classes, it may be the struggle to continually embody this "aspirational category" (Heiman, et al. 2012) by making lucrative economic and social investments across time (Livingston 2009). Regardless of class position and age, many African men find themselves balancing on the edge of a knife between success and failure, between maintaining an affective sense of forward momentum in their everyday lives, and sinking into a sense of stagnation. While these afflictions and their solutions can be glossed using the language of stress, depression, anxiety, and suicide, such medicalizing frames may obscure more nuanced social diagnoses of what is happening to men across Africa and globally (Mains 2016; Vaughan 2012). Medical anthropology provides us with "alternative frames" (Ralph 2014) through which to understand how psychic wounds are made —and healed—among men across diverse African settings. In this paper, we explore the relationship between mental health masculinity, economic and social precarity, drawing on extended ethnographic research in urban Tanzania and Kenya.