Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I draw on 24 months of fieldwork with 30 patients in a psychiatric hospital in Yaoundé, Cameroon, to argue for an ethnographic and theoretical association between patients’ experiences of wellbeing and their ability to manipulate the tempo of their lives.

Paper long abstract:

What is wellbeing? In this paper, I scale this vast-but-crucial question through an ethnographic focus on the medicalization of wellness as “mental health” at a psychiatric hospital in Cameroon. This hospital, called Jamot, is located in the capital city of Yaoundé and is the country’s chief public psychiatric institution. In this capacity, Jamot recently began an education program that seeks to teach patients and their families about biomedical frameworks and therapeutics of “mental illness” and “mental health.” Drawing on 24 months of fieldwork with 30 patients, I argue that this program presented patients with a view of mental health as a project of temporal responsibility: that is, as a long-term project of making a stable, sustainable everyday life through short-term, indeed daily, extraclinical choices and practices of what Jamot called “mental hygiene.” I then move with these 30 patients upon discharge back to their homes and communities within Yaoundé to ask: how did patients think with, against, or otherwise in relation to these hospital experiences of medicalization and education in their post-asylum projects of a life worth living? How did these life projects interpellate broader sociopolitical circumstances in Cameroon, including the rapid rise of Pentecostalism as well as the country’s unfolding secessionist conflict? I detail how patients navigated competing frameworks and timeframes of wellness in clinical, religious, and political settings in Yaoundé; then draw on this ethnographic detail to theorize that the ability to manipulate time is vital to medicalized and non-medicalized possibilities of “wellbeing” itself.