Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the production of ‘normal anxious subjects’ and ‘pathological anxious subjects’ by psycho-social support providers during the pandemic in the Maldives and the various ways locals respond to these diagnostic categories in a context of resource-scarcity and structural inequality.

Paper long abstract:

In the context of the Covid-19 crisis, a central focus of intervention in the South Asian republic of Maldives by both international health and humanitarian organizations and the state has been nafsānī ijtimāī ehī (psycho-social support or PSS). Drawing on conversations with volunteer PSS care providers and care seekers, I demonstrate how the provisioning of this form of care is based on a ‘grammar of crisis’ and a ‘grammar of chronicity,’ which, respectively, produce ‘normal anxious subjects’ and ‘pathological anxious subjects.’ These grammars and subjectivations are indexical of humanitarian and biomedical knowledge systems. I propose that, as ethnographers, we center the voices of the intended care recipients of global mental health projects in order to understand how such individuals navigate contexts of crisis rather than reproducing particular biomedical and humanitarian discourses of subjects as or in crisis. Drawing on person-centered narratives of individuals living in the capital city of Male’ who identify as experiencing nafsānī bali (lit. ‘self illness’), I illustrate the various ways my interlocutors engage with, depart from, or refuse the aforementioned diagnostic categories of ‘anxiety’ and the associated forms of care. These narratives show the emergent forms of self-making in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Furthermore, during a time when everyone is considered by international and state organizations to be susceptible to ‘anxiety’ by virtue of being a citizen, these narratives show the impact of humanitarian mental healthcare on individuals’ subjectivities in a local setting that is resource-scarce and marked by multiple forms of structural inequality.