Project 9ja Mag The Revolution. 1st Edition | Page 45

therevolution
WE ARE
NOT FINE

When I talk about mental illness, probably
what comes to your mind is the haggard looking
man at the end of your street who keeps plunging
into the dirt gathered by the entire residents on
that street searching for an unseen gold buried
deep within its core, but today we will look at it
from a different angle.

Mental illness could be your colleague
working away on his desktop or the one who
keeps calling in sick for a week which is quite
unusual or the one that keeps forgetting that the
boss had told him to work on a client’s file for
the last one week although he has been remind-
ed repeatedly for the past one week.
It’s al-
most like a monster that lives amongst us unap-
prehended, robbing a nation of its mental capital
which is sacrosanct to its growth and develop-
ment.

A typical Nigerian would have never come
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across list of illnesses like;
o Alzheimer
o
Depression
o Schizophrenia
o Post-traumatic stress disorder (PSTD)
o Anxiety disorders
These are amongst a vast number of others
which although don’t throw people to the street,
are subtle killers of men. So we would nev-
er associate his constant state of forgetfulness
with Alzheimer instead it would be termed as
“carelessness” or the lethargic feeling that have
plagued him for weeks unending as depression;
it is be because he is lazy, that of course explains
why he would rather spend the whole day in bed
rather than go out and do anything productive or
the voices in his head cannot be associated with
schizophrenia; the ones that keep telling him he
is worthless and should definitely hang himself to
save the world around him the stress of keeping
him alive.
The country’s only existing Mental Health Poli-
cy document was formulated in 1991. Although a