In this presentation, I argue for a language of wellness found in Ghada al-Samman’s Lebanese civil war trilogy, predicated not on the language of trauma and mental health, but on an interwoven cosmology of the supernatural (or spiritual), the moral and psychological. Through close-readings of Bayrut 75 (1975) [Beirut 75], Kawabis Bayrut (1976) [Beirut Nightmares] and Laylat al-milyar (1986) [The Night of the First Billion], I plot these themes by attending to the intersections of the figure of the sorcerer/sorceress, a humanist-nationalist discourse of guilt, and the figure of the mad(wo)man. As the trilogy unfolds (simultaneous to the ongoing wars), these themes (and their corresponding figures) assume an ever greater portion of al-Samman’s content as she establishes the crucible in which her characters dwell in a series of wars whose end remains far from certain. I find that the choice to present the experience of Syrians and Lebanese (including those in the diaspora) in these terms is significant for two reasons. First, it remains faithful (albeit with some literary license) to the centrality of the roles of religious faith; cosmologies of magic and spirits; notions of kinship; and the post-independence formulation of madness that were intrinsic to Lebanese culture. As such it offers a vernacular understanding of the impact of political strife on collective wellbeing—one that gives color, depth and dimension to human experience in ways that have been overshadowed by the subsequent popularization and globalization of discourses of trauma and mental health. Secondly (and relatedly) I hold that this narrative choice is significant in that it suggests an intentional strategy by the author. While writing and publishing some of her trilogy, al-Samman was an expatriate living in Paris—an arena in which the discourses of psychoanalysis and psychological trauma had a long history, and which would have been ready-made frameworks for discussing the situation in Lebanon. That al-Samman chose not only to elevate the vernacular over the European metropolitan model of wellness in her fiction, but also actively questioned the explanatory power of European psychiatry and psychology in her writing, is a powerful ethical stake that demands our closer attention.