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This article takes a case study approach to the predominance of Pentecostalism, a Christian movement emphasizing conversion and testimony to divine grace, among patients at Sommeil Psychiatric Hospital in Yaoundé, Republic of Cameroon. I argue that certain patients' desire to serve as témoignage (French) or "testimony" (English) to life before and after Sommeil-to the efficacy of biomedical psychiatry-indicates a pattern in which patients drew on their Pentecostal affiliation to navigate psychiatric treatment. Grounded in 24 months of fieldwork with patients and families and hospital staff, I contend that patient experiences of treatment imperfectly paralleled prior and ongoing experiences of Pentecostalism, including cultivation of the desire to convert and testify. Taking this cultivation of desire as a form of subject-making, I conceptualize the entanglement of religious and therapeutic subjectivities at Sommeil as a patient-driven "Pentecostalization" of psychiatry, which offers patients plural possibilities and timeframes of health. [psychiatry, health, Pentecostalism, subjectivity, time]

Medical Necessity is a thoughtful, crisply-written analysis of the political theater of US healthcare since the expansion of access to formal health insurance in the early twentieth century. Weaving across popular, clinical, and policy texts, Daniel Skinner traces how the idea of medical necessity has changed from a given provider's assessment of the most appropriate treatment for a patient to become a dizzying bureaucracy in which multiple stakeholders assess the therapeutic, social, and economic justification for this treatment. Illustrating how this bureaucratic expansion has often failed the very people it is meant to serve-people seeking medical care-Skinner argues that the convoluted politics of US healthcare cannot be addressed by a better definition or stronger consensus as to what constitutes medical need. Rather, he suggests, "the problem is not the politicization of medical care, but the depoliticizing tendency to treat medical necessity decision making as a matter of facts to be found rather than a set of values to be defended." This leads him to propose, as a solution, "a more inclusive and openly normative political process… a contest over the terms of discourse, where the result of such contests is, above all, the right to define" (p. 20).