Mr Eniola Adeola (not real name) is battling with mental health challenges. His ordeal was said to have begun when he lost his job. At first, he was said to have started hearing strange voices, which he eventually started responding to.
While at work, Adeola’s colleagues said he complained that some “unseen” forces were hitting the underneath of his seat. Then his attitude was said to have changed as he began to regard everybody as an enemy. He was also said to have stopped shaking hands with others and when he needed to shake hands at all, he would wrap his hand with a handkerchief.
Adeola was said to have displayed this strange attitude at home too. He would put a glass of water he wanted to drink outside in the open and tell everyone that the water needed ventilation. His wife and children said, when displaying strange behaviours Adeola fell one day and got injured while trying to stand on a bottle.
To some of his neighbours, his attitude was of serious concern. They said he would, on occasions trek barefooted to the market and when asked why he would say: “You don’t know anything”. But what many around did not notice on time was that he had come down with the disease of the mind-otherwise known as mental illness.
A similar victim of the condition is Mrs Aderonke Adu, who started talking to herself shortly after she was sacked. She was the bread winner for the family of nine including her husband, who is jobless. Her world came crashing when she was sacked after putting 23 years into the public service. She had wanted to clock 25 years on the job before she was fired two years before her envisaged time.
Her husband said she refused to sleep for many nights as she got highly irritable. At every slightest opportunity, according to her husband, Mrs Adu would flare up and curse endlessly, contrary to her meek nature and pleasant disposition. Like Mr Adeola, she started walking barefooted and chose to isolate herself from people around her.
These two scenarios paint a grim picture of the state of mental illness in the country. But the mindboggling question is tracking how many are afflicted with this seemingly debilitating illness.
According to a consultant Psychiatrist, Dr Olugbenga Owoeye of Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital (FNPH), Yaba, Lagos about 20 per cent of world’s population is living with one form of mental illness or the other. “By this, 20 per cent of Nigeria’s population of 160 million may be mentally sick,” he said.
He said not all mental illness was noticeable, as only close relative usually know that the individual is experiencing such ailment.
Owoeye said patients who present at general out-patient department of hospitals for mental illnesses were about 30 per cent.
Why mental ailment? He said it is common because of culture, social economic background and neglect of mental illness, its manifestation and treatment. Owoeye said: “People who have mental illness don’t receive treatment as they should.
“Mental illness is any clinical condition characterised with psychological disturbance, such as disturbances in thinking, emotion, memory and behaviour. That is, it’s severe enough to cause pain or distress either to the person who is having the condition or to those around him; also severe enough and associated with impairment in the ability of the person to function socially and occupationally.”
He said there are three factors responsible for the ailment. They are the predisposing, precipitating and perpetrating factors but one or two may be operating at a time. Pre-disposing factors, he said are factors that operate earlier in life of an individual and appear to cause mental illness later in life.
This, he said can happen during pregnancy, especially when the mother is malnourished or suffer from infection or traumatised due to a fall during pregnancy.