There are only four illnesses in Nigeria, depression is not one of them

depressed man

Raise your hands if you watched Crime Fighters growing up.

I did. Somehow, even before I fully appreciated the full extent of what those guys did. There was something that felt good about seeing armed robbers, kidnappers and petty thieves cower under the glare of the camera. Their guns and assorted charms looking like they had lost their self esteem.

It was, also, where I first learnt that in Nigeria, the devil is responsible for everything. Every Sunday, there was a good chance someone would say ‘Oga, na devil work’, “Na Satan push me” or some other variant of charges levelled against the ruler of the underworld (insert evil laugh here).

In 2012, in the latter stages of a very private battle with addiction, I plunged into a brief and relatively intense low point. One minute, I was chatty, my regular random self. The next, I was in my head, suicidal at times. With help from a friend, I used online tests at Healthy Place and Psych Central that diagnosed me with acute depression.

Big English. Scary words. I decided to talk to the one person who would understand – my mother. She who understands when I take pointless cross-country trips, who gets my unusual band of friends, who will get her own show when I get my first TV station. She told me “Shut up, stop wishing yourself evil”. I almost went looking for my birth certificate.

You see, Nigeria is not a place for the faint-hearted. Sure, there are a million ways to die in the West; here, there are 4 million ways to die, 1 million ways to go unconscious and roughly, 2000 ways to go insane unexpectedly. You can get it all in a second and lose all you worked for in a minute. That, perhaps, is why we are more interested in the tangible than the not-so-tangible, the things we readily see, like money, bomb sites and bags of rice. We don’t have time for American diseases.

In this country, anything that does not give you a headache, make you throw up, increase your blood pressure or put you in the hospital with water making its way into your system is not an illness. You can’t possibly be homophobic if you’re averse to human contact, you’re just proud… or abnormal, and please, what on earth is dyslexia? If you don’t ‘know book’, you don’t know. Simple. To us, bipolar disorder is big English. If you feel like two different people, the other person is an evil spirit. Blame Satan. Pray.

Our general ignorance of psychological issues is most evident in the way we treat addiction; as a mixture of greed and laziness. The civil servant who ‘needs’ gin shots during office breaks and gives a chunk of his monthly tithe to Nigerian Breweries after hours is not sick; its just ojukokoro or maybe he likes flexing too much. And God forbid you try to justify suicide. That, right there, is the devil at his destructive best.

The full range of any psychological distress in the average Nigerian’s eyes begins and ends with insanity. Even then, there is a 60% chance that ‘o lowo aye ninu’ (Unseen terrestrial forces, fondly referred to as ‘Aye’) have a hand in the matter. It was the origin of my reluctance to share the news of my ‘situation’. Speaking from experience, when your closest friends ask what you have to get worried about, they’re telling you in the nicest way possible that you are Nigerian, we don’t get depressed. Anyone else could well call you insane.

Sometimes I almost pity the devil; you can only wonder how many life sentences he would serve if he could be nabbed.

Comments (8)

  1. Really funny but true. Great piece.

  2. Can’t be truer. I’ve been suffering anxiety for years but still not close to relating it to either of my parents. If wishes were sufficient I’d wished day and night that Nigerians become more civil and less shallow. If only we could laugh and joke less and drop more cavemen instincts…

  3. I love this piece, God bless you..you are writing my mind!

  4. HOW I SLAYED DEPRESSION (True life story)https://zoemelodieblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/17/the-thief-tried-but-we-won/

  5. i enjoyed it to a large extent.. then got tired…. overall hmmmm

  6. Funny but true. Mental health and issues surrounding it aren’t just thought to be existent here and if you unfortunately find yourself with a psychological distress, you will get appointments with your pastor or priest instead of a psychologist.

  7. Great stuff. I really like this story.

  8. YNaija: “tell us what you think”

    Me: love it!

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