Elizabeth Durham

The ethical project of a good life is central to human existence. Yet the framework of “mental health,” as a particular articulation of a good life, is increasingly controversial, with one prominent line of critique viewing this framework as a hollow product of contemporary emphasis on personal responsibility. By contrast, my book, whose completion this Fellowship will support, rethinks mental health through the lens of emancipatory politics and beyond the ostensibly neoliberal Global North. Entitled State-Sanctioned Sanity: Public Psychiatry and the Therapeutic Politics of Escape in the Republic of Cameroon, my book is grounded in 25 months of fieldwork with clinicians and patients at Cameroon’s flagship state psychiatric hospital. My ethnography traces how clinicians became implicated in the state’s project of making what I theorize as “patient citizens.” The patient citizen accepts both brain-based mental illness and citizenship as chronic conditions amid Cameroon’s secessionist war; and also accepts the temporal duty to inhabit “the everyday” as a timeframe of healthy life and state care. Moving with psychiatric patients as they embodied, evaded, and negotiated this patient citizenship, I argue for a new understanding of mental health as engendered by the ability to escape, even partially or temporarily, state-sanctioned everyday life.