This talk will examine mental health and cultural notions of well-being in contemporary Buddhist Thailand. Drawing from ten years of fieldwork in a Northern Thai community I show how people perform rituals, interpret experience, and socially reinforce practices that are oriented around a Theravada Buddhist emphasis on change. A focus on the inevitable flow of time, and the importance of realizing the fact of change, are thought in the community to centrally connect to the concept of anicca, or ‘impermanence’, one of the Three Characteristics in Buddhism thought. Mindfulness (sati), karma (kam), spirit possession and more are interpreted through these logics of impermanence, and are understood to influence what it means to be well. The more one is able to recognize the inevitability of change, people tell me, the more one crafts subjectivities that aspire to non-attachment, calmness, and the letting go of robust emotion. Working with, and manipulating, these cultural logics allow people to gain personal control and agency in their lives. The talk will focus especially on the mental health of one man in the community, as he and his family struggle with his problems of addiction to alcohol; I trace the development of the issue and the ways that people make sense of it, from a local healer detaching the spirits of alcohol from the man’s body at the hospital to the proactive making of merit that connects giving to letting go. Based on my new book, Living Buddhism: Mind, Self and Emotion in a Thai Community (Cornell University Press, 2015) the talk informs the study of culturally-informed subjective experience as part of the psychology of everyday life in today’s Thailand.