Keeping it together: Idioms of resilience and distress in Thai Buddhist mindlessness

Abstract

Mindfulness is increasingly lauded as a mark of well-being around the world, but less often is its opposite, mindlessness, articulated in discussions of mental health. In Thailand, where people follow the kinds of Theravāda forms of Buddhism that have inspired today's global mindfulness movement, “mindlessness” is understood as a culturally salient mark of distress. In this article I address what mindlessness looks like for people in and around the Northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, where mindlessness can be thought of as ephemeral and passing as a fleeting forgetfulness that necessitates re-reading a page in a book, or as long lasting and powerful as a destabilizing condition to be treated in the in-patient ward of a psychiatric hospital. I emphasize local meanings and contexts of mindlessness, and their entanglement with broader discourses in the mindfulness movement, in order to point to mindlessness as a type of local and potentially international idiom of distress. I do this to argue for both the continued importance of cultural concepts of distress in our psychiatric nosology, and for further study into the slippages that can occur when local idioms like mindfulness go global.