Stasis disguised as motion: Waiting, endurance and the camouflaging of austerity in mental health services

Abstract

This paper develops an account of the camouflaging of austerity as an institutional strategy. In doing so it brings together and advances geographical literatures on mental health, waiting, and austerity. Where geographers have tended to focus on moments when austerity surfaces in everyday life, this paper addresses those moments where austerity is made to recede. Presenting evidence from interviews with mental health service users/survivors, I argue that stasis is a central feature of encounters with the austere state. Such periods of durative waiting can make austerity apparent, so institutions are incentivised to camouflage them, in order to legitimate their claims of providing care. I advance the concept of the "holding pattern" to capture the mobile cycles of waiting that service users/survivors endure, arguing that these circulations inculcate cruelly optimistic affects by exploiting the immanent potentiality of waiting. These affects engender a belief that the time of care and of progress is imminent. For those held within it, the holding pattern is experienced as a form of stasis disguised as motion. The paper then analyses how people endure this travel without a destination. I demonstrate that, like the holding pattern, these practices of endurance make use of potentiality. Some cast themselves as responsibilised neoliberal subjects, to blame for the lack of meaningful care they receive; others reclaim the potentiality that fuels the holding pattern, engaging in ongoing practices that are sustaining despite their seeming uneventfulness. The paper highlights the centrality of austerity to contemporary mental health geographies; develops a critical account of the politics of stasis and waiting; and argues that the camouflaging of austerity will prove increasingly important to the legitimation of beleaguered "universalist" social services. I conclude with some reflections on the potentiality of a grinding politics of resistance to austerity.

Gaming the System: Tactical Workarounds and the Production of Antagonistic Subjectivities among Migrant Platform Workers in Italy

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“…In a context of austerity‐hit health and social care provision, commentators have argued that waiting and delays are intentionally punitive; a knowing ploy to remind those reliant upon support of their powerlessness and low temporal worth (e.g. Kiely, 2021 ). In our study, waiting was an almost universally shared aspect of accessing formal support that produced a visceral awareness of time passing.…”

Family Hubs and the vulnerable care ecologies of child and family welfare in austerity

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