The imaginarium of self-care: Speculative futures of hope for student mental health

Abstract

Recent ethnographies have investigated self-care as a socially driven configuration of care. This analysis engages theorizing on the imagination to expose new social dimensions of self-care in cases of mental health as embodied and communal. Based on fieldwork across Canadian universities and in conversation with students, campus wellness providers, and a group of psychiatric epidemiologists seeking to understand the mental health treatment choices of students, this article examines how these different subjects activate what I call an imaginarium of self-care. Among young adults in Canada, mounting social ills that go therapeutically unaccounted for have relocated forms of self-care into the imagination through play and world-building in ways that challenge the distinction between material and speculative healing. Attending to the imaginative dimensions of self-care makes coherent the ways that young people are grasping for hope in a world that—when embodied—resists recovery.