A few months ago, a university student went missing. Naturally, her friends and family took to social media as part of their efforts to find her. Later, we were all shocked when the story ran about how her own brother had allegedly murdered her, cut up her body, and stuffed parts of her in the ceiling of a house. Even worse were suspicions that he had done it over a bowl of breakfast cereal.
All over the country stories arise of people murdering one another over small things—airtime, ugali, a piece of chicken… It’s horrifying. Things like these don’t just happen. People don’t normally explode so violently over nothing. Closer home, people are losing their jobs and families, their abilities to function, over ‘demons’ that eat at them every day, sometimes very quietly, sometimes in the most embarrassing ways.
Oddly, in the face of issues that demand so much of our emotional functions (murder, families being pulled apart), we remain unmoved, unchanging. There is a problem, and no matter how much we try to ignore it, it will likely continue to get worse until we are forced to deal with it. While we give so much attention to every other problem we are facing in our country, perhaps a more focused attention on what is going on in our minds is overdue.
We live in a country where one in four people will suffer a mental health issue in their lives, and yet in which there are less than 100 psychiatrists to help them. Nobody is tripping over themselves to study courses in mental health, and with good reason. Who will come to you for help, when you’re done with your studies and want to work? The unfortunate truth is that the majority of us do not understand even the term ‘mental health’. Our understanding of it is rife with misconceptions, even among the most educated of us.
One of the most irritating ones: Hizo ni vitu za wazungu. Those issues belong to white people; they are unafrican. We still believe that mental issues are not legitimate medical issues. That they do not warrant a hospital visit. We will tell a person suffering a mental health issue that if they tried hard enough, they would get over it. We feed our contempt of western norms by elevating ourselves above such things, believing ourselves to be ‘hardy’, to have no time to indulge such shallowness. ‘We have real problems to deal with.’
But the fact is this: illness does not discriminate. A mental illness is still an illness. Just because you don’t have green discharge coming out of your ears doesn’t mean there is no problem to bother a health professional with. Many psychological problems cause people to exist under impossible conditions. Because of them, some people can’t work, some can’t give their families the love and support they need, some can’t maintain friendships, some can’t take hold of opportunities… and all the while they are labeled and stigmatized for being ‘weird’, ‘crazy’, ‘an attention-seeker’.
With the launch of the Mental Health Policy, things are looking up. Still, we have a long, long way to go. There are issues so deeply rooted in us that it will be years before we can begin to say that we are more aware. For instance, when people have psychological issues, they go to pastors. These are people who, more often than not, are not trained to handle such problems, and many times they only aggravate the problem. As far as we are concerned psychological problems are spiritual problems. It is either the devil or it is witchcraft. The number of people who end up dead because they believed special water given by a religious leader would heal them is overwhelming.
Other people are forced to ignore their mental health problems because where will they go anyway? There are 14 health facilities in this country which handle mental health, Mathare being only one of them. And yet few of us are aware of this. We don’t know where to find psychologists, psychiatrists and counselors should we need them. Many times, even when we do know, we often cannot afford it because as earlier stated, there is a serious shortage of mental health professionals in the country.
So where do we start? How do we begin to deal with this issue? My head teacher in primary school used to tell us that the first step in solving any social problem is education. People need to know about an issue before they can begin to handle it. We need to talk about it. We need to put our experiences out there. We need to avail this information and let people know that mental health is a thing. The more we know, the less the stigma will prevail, and the more readily we will seek professional help for our psychological wellbeing.
And we need to check ourselves. We need to stop telling people to ‘man up’, to ‘get over it’. We need to stop telling people with mental health issues that it is enough to just pray about it and we need to stop treating them as though they are less than human. Let’s be clear, the same way you cannot break your leg and just get over it, you cannot have a mental problem and just get over it. These things tend to pervade a person’s entire life. That’s the thing about mental illness—if your mind controls everything you do and it fails to function as expected, there’s bound to be some major effects.
We need to change the way we think about mental health, and we need to do it now. It’s about time we accepted that there is a problem and that we are the only ones who can deal with it.
