Dr Imoisili Ehinomen (a medical doctor practicing in Lagos, Nigeria) provides his take on the unguided mental journey in a typical African society that pays little attention to mental health, aiming to raise awareness of the importance of psychological support for young persons.
Stress. That is very much a part of human existence; we all develop different mechanisms for coping with stress. Well, that’s the much I can remember from my psychology classes in medical school. I slept through the rest of the lectures or missed them altogether. I was always surprised about how much interest some of my classmates had during these lectures; they seemed to relate to the concepts spoken about. For me, these lectures and concepts were all foreign. Africans, and Nigerians in particular, had their own ways of dealing with our many stressors, that was my belief. If I was wrong, why wasn’t I hearing of stories of people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PSTD) despite all the horrors of kidnappings, armed robberies, bomb blasts, the deaths of loved ones because medicines were either unavailable or doctors were on strike. Even though more than half of my nightmares bothered on armed robbery related events, I still didn’t consciously accept that PTSD was something real for us.
I grew up in a family which is, on paper, a middle-class family. The frequent inflation and unstable economy of my country however often meant that the middle class sometimes became poor. So as a young child, I sometimes had to pray for funds to pay school fees early. We also prayed for electricity and for the rain to fill our buckets. Looking at all the financial stresses we often had to go through and how that shook the love between my parents, I soon became resolute in my mind that ‘love’ wasn’t important. I felt from such an early age that only success was really important. In high school, I decided to select a singular mission and that was to be not just successful but to be number one. I didn’t really care if I had friends, or at least so I told myself. The truth, however, was that I was revered for my apparent success but I was lonely. When I wasn’t reading, I was writing adverts of imaginary academic contests and then writing imagined results showing I had won them. These were the only things left in my imagination. My parents were casually happy that I was sound academically, but I don’t think they ever wondered why I didn’t have friends, why I didn’t make visiting rounds during the holidays like my brothers. I had really loving parents by the way, but that is the pervasive ignorance of psychological issues in this part of the world.
If you ever had an emotionally stressful situation, people would generally tell you to just pray; the kinder ones would offer to pray with you but then many forgot to keep their promise. In truth, it was faith that had kept many strong, but it wouldn’t hurt to talk with someone who had done some good learning about why we sometimes act the way we do. If one took a look at the Nigerian society, you would see a lot of resilience and the manifestation of a can-do spirit. You also would see a lot of bitterness, paranoia and fear. With a society facing so many challenges, these things should not be unexpected. However, whether we have psychologists in the country to support us as a people is a question that I cannot answer just yet. I am yet to see a private shrink. I have seen the offices labelled ‘CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST’ in a few tertiary hospitals but I have no idea what they do there or whether at all people do walk into those offices. I think I’m going to walk in and ask next time. People go through traumatic experiences and the country expects them to heal without any attention to their mental wholeness thereafter. People are displaced by violence and the military is called in, they restore peace and the displaced are asked to return often only with a little physical rehabilitation. It is no wonder why we have a broken society.
Well, it is important for us to agree that Nigerians, like other human beings, sometimes do have mentally stressful situations and families and public health authorities need to be more aware of this fact. We need more psychologists to wake up to the responsibilities of their training; they need more visibility. Schools should watch out for the mental health status of their students, not just the failing ones but also the highly successful ones. Religious houses must keep emphasising prayers but must also encourage support groups and counselling sessions with trained psychologists for those dealing with peculiar situations. A wholesome life, it must be emphasised is the ability to combine work, achievements, love, fun, philanthropy and faith. We sometimes need to reminded of this fact.
Disclaimer: The views, opinions, positions or strategies expressed by the author are his/hers alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, positions or strategies of Pride Magazine Nigeria.
1 Comment
Well said Doc, it’s about time we started to look in this direction, as some of the actions and inactions of our youths today, were in influenced in most situations by their experiences earlier in life, and this has come to shape their lives positively but in most cases negatively.
I hope this gets to the alot of people and acts as an eye opener, because we can’t continue to kid ourselves that all can be taken care of by faith alone. As even the holy book insists that “faith without work is dead”