While the language of “languishing” may prove helpful to some, its individual-level focus risks distracting us from another urgent need: to confront the root causes of today's profound and wide-reaching mental health burden-a burden that may not have been precipitated, but certainly has been exacerbated, by the ongoing pandemic. The field’s emphasis on individual-level behavior change tends to neglect the structural factors, ideological contexts, and relations of power that predispose some people to languish, and others to flourish, in the first place. Yet the popular appeal of “languishing” also raises urgent questions-in particular, about the growing role of positive psychology in both public and policy discussions about health and well-being. The journals show how a “psy” concept, once unmoored from its origins as a research construct, can become (re)invented as a cultural resource available to help people narrativize distress and, in some cases, name and confront injustice. Analysis focuses on a set of weekly journals created as part of the Pandemic Journaling Project, an online journaling platform and research study launched in May 2020.

I also examine key gaps and discrepancies between operationalized and vernacular usages of the term. popular discourse and consider the term’s emerging cultural valences and interpretive dynamics. In this article, I examine how the concept of “languishing” traveled into U.S. The column struck so strong a chord with readers that it was designated the most-read NY Times story of 2021. In closing, I reflect on what distinguishes 'psychosocialisation' from medicalisation and highlight the limitations of the latter as a critical paradigm for the anthropology of global mental health.Īs the COVID-19 pandemic entered its second year, the New York Times published a column offering readers a name for its negative impact on mental health and well-being: “languishing.” Originally developed by positive psychologists, the term was designed to capture a sense of distress involving feelings of emptiness, stagnation, and lack of motivation that fall short of clinical significance. I suggest that psychosocial interventions may be gaining popularity not despite but precisely because of the lack of a unitary vision of the problems psychosocial care sets out to alleviate. Drawing from 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork among community-based psychosocial counsellors, I consider how the broad and flexible notion of the 'psychosocial problem' operates as a 'boundary object' in transnational mental health initiatives-that is, how it facilitates the collaboration of service users, clinicians, donors, and policymakers in shared therapeutic projects without necessarily producing agreement among these parties regarding the nature of the suffering they address. In this article, I recast this ill-defined quality as interpretive flexibility and explore its role in processes of translation occurring at the frontlines of care in rural Nepal. From this courageous ethnography emerges a geography of trauma and the ways it shapes the lives of those who give and receive care in postwar Liberia.Īs 'psychosocial interventions' continue to gain traction in the field of global mental health, a growing critical literature problematises their vague definition and attendant susceptibility to appropriation. Sharon Alane Abramowitz draws on extensive fieldwork among the government officials, humanitarian leaders, and an often-overlooked population of Liberian NGO employees to examine the structure and impact of the mental health care interventions, in particular the ways they were promised to work with peacekeeping and reconstruction, and how the reach and effectiveness of these promises can be measured.

Searching for Normal in the Wake of the Liberian War explores the human experience of the massive apparatus of trauma-healing and psychosocial interventions during the first five years of postwar reconstruction. But the implementation of these programs was not always suited to the specific mental health needs of the population or easily reconciled with the broader aims of reconstruction and humanitarian peacekeeping, and psychiatric treatment was sometimes ignored or unevenly integrated into postconflict humanitarian health care delivery. During the first decade of postwar reconstruction, hundreds of humanitarian organizations created programs that were intended to heal trauma, prevent gendered violence, rehabilitate former soldiers, and provide psychosocial care to the transitioning populace. At the end of Liberia's thirteen-year civil war, the devastated population struggled to rebuild their country and come to terms with their experiences of violence.

Liberian pidgin english interpreter