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.

中文翻译：

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伪装成运动的停滞：心理健康服务中的等待、忍耐和紧缩伪装

本文阐述了将紧缩伪装成一种制度策略的过程。在这样做的过程中，它汇集并推进了有关心理健康、等待和紧缩的地理文献。地理学家倾向于关注日常生活中紧缩浮出水面的时刻，而本文则讨论了紧缩即将消退的时刻。通过与精神卫生服务使用者/幸存者的访谈提供证据，我认为停滞是遇到严峻状态的一个核心特征。这种持续等待的时期会使紧缩措施变得明显，因此激励机构对其进行伪装，以使其提供护理的主张合法化。我提出了“保持模式”的概念来捕捉服务用户/幸存者忍受的等待的移动周期，认为这些循环通过利用等待的内在潜力来灌输残酷的乐观情绪。这些影响产生了一种信念，即护理和进步的时间迫在眉睫。对于其中持有的人来说，持有模式被体验为一种伪装成运动的停滞形式。然后，本文分析了人们如何忍受没有目的地的旅行。我证明，就像保持模式一样，这些耐力练习利用了潜力。有些人将自己塑造成有责任感的新自由主义主体，将他们缺乏有意义的关怀归咎于；其他人则重新利用推动持有模式的潜力，参与持续的实践，尽管它们看似平静。这篇论文强调了紧缩对当代心理健康地理学的中心作用；对停滞和等待的政治进行批判性解释；并认为，对陷入困境的“普遍主义”社会服务的合法化而言，紧缩的伪装将证明越来越重要。最后，我对抵制紧缩的残酷政治的潜力进行了一些反思。