Living Through Back-to-Back Public Health Crises in Samoa: Mutual Narrative Creation and Research Practices

This chapter is about the role of mutual mental health in sustaining wellbeing during back-to-back public health crises—the measles outbreak and the COVID-19 pandemic—in Samoa. We write this chapter as an exercise in mutual narrative creation, which we approached through a combination of Zoom-based conversations, individual reflections, informal conversations, and writing and rewriting together. We draw out the ways that wellbeing is created through mutual commitment to family, co-workers, and church as various, often overlapping spheres of community. Ultimately, our exploration together revealed something long known by Pacific scholars and practitioners—biomedical notions of wellbeing at the intersection of mental health tend to be individualised, which negates the role of family and community that are so crucial in terms of what shapes and constrains wellbeing in Samoa. We refer to this as mutual mental health.