conclusion: pleasure, health and speed 203
pursue more pleasant forms of treatment—observes that women have changed
obstetricians to deliver in hospitals with aesthetically-pleasing, hotel-like birth-
ing centers (Postrel 2008). Similar reforms deserve serious consideration in the
world of psychiatric care where dramatic procedures such as electroconvulsive
therapy continue to be experienced as unpleasant, even punitive, measures and
the aesthetic drabness of biomedical institutional environments does not add
to the morale of the mentally affl icted and depressed.
Patients in Kerala also alert us to the possibility of thinking of health as
constant improvement or “healing” as an opportunity to progress through an
illness to a state that is more enhanced than one’s pre-illness state. Meanwhile,
the Malayalam practice of referring to what is accomplished in therapy as
experiences of “change” attends to the subtle, incremental character of “healing”
a mental illness and may in fact be necessary for seeing the process of healing
as a balancing act between the goals of therapy and the quality of the process
of undergoing treatment. Th ese insights hopefully will infl uence mental health
practitioners to further attend to the visceral quality of the treatment process
while pursuing the goals of therapy. Th ey should also compel us to ask whether
our contemporary work and lifestyle regimens have been leading us to give up
pleasantness for the sake of speed and whether we forgo other orientations to
health because our late capitalist world resigns us to see health as being merely
functional. Th ese problems require remedies that go beyond suggestions for
the aesthetic design of healing centers and the avoidance of abrasive healing
techniques. For now, they will hopefully lead to further critical consideration
of how to balance productivity, health and well-being.
Notes
- On the level of education see National Family Health Survey-India (1995:53)
and on underemployment see Mathew (1997). - Th e politics of aesthetics and sensory experience in China are explored in more
detail in Farquhar (2002), although the focus is primarily on food and sexuality.
Nevertheless, as Farquhar observes, these realms link to the aesthetic engage-
ments of Chinese medicine. - Other than recent global outsourcing work (Poster 2007), which has little rela-
tion to the lives of most people I met in Kerala. - A review of more recent reports by the WHO (2007a, 2007b) did not reveal
explicit affi rmations of this orientation to health, which may be symptomatic of
an increasingly hegemonic view of health as a return to functionality.