Sociocultural Anthropology Colloquium | “Running Wild: Psychiatry, Citizenship, and Horizons of Escape in/from the Republic of Cameroon”

“In this talk, I tell two stories. One concerns a young man who refuses treatment at a public psychiatric hospital in the Republic of Cameroon, preferring instead to run away from clinic and home. The other story follows resonances between public psychiatry and the ‘Anglophone Crisis,’ an armed conflict between the Republic and secessionist factions in Northwest and Southwest Cameroon. I show how public psychiatry aims to teach patients to be mobile in ways and on timeframes deemed not only socially correct but mentally healthful--to produce what I call the political figure of the ‘patient citizen.’ This figure accepts both the temporal responsibility for staying within the everyday as a timeframe of healthy living and state intervention; and citizenship itself as a chronic condition in this period of unprecedented threat to state legitimacy and national integrity. To follow the ostensibly subversive mobility of the runaway, as embodied by this young man, is thus to ask how notions of health and citizenship may come to critique--to move against--the clinic and the state. The act of running away, I argue, makes visible how the state may fail to move in ways and on timeframes valued by patients, and gestures to the radical possibility that escape may be healthful.”

Elizabeth Durham is a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Princeton University. Her most recent writing appears or is forthcoming in Anthropological Quarterly, Social Science & Medicine - Mental Health, and Medical Anthropology Quarterly.