The book “Optimal Mental Health – An Everyday Guide”, was recently presented to the public in Ibadan and Lagos. The author is a psychiatrist who has been writing a weekly column in The Tribune, an Ibadan-based national newspaper.
Efforts to take Mental Health awareness to the general public through the medium of a weekly newspaper column started in Nigeria in the Sunday Concord – a newspaper under the stable of Chief MKO Abiola, in the period 1984 to 1985. The column ran under the title “A Life in the Day of a Psychiatrist”. Since then, there have been a number of other offerings through blogs, newspapers and social media.
In packaging material from his long-running dialogue with the public for presentation in book form, the author is taking the reach and penetration of his advocacy effort to a new level.
Nigeria is a country in need of an urgent wake-up call concerning its mental health. As the author shares with his readers, the statistics are frightening.
One in four of the Nigerian population may expect to suffer a mental illness at some time in their lives. One in every ten suffer from an illness even as we speak. In hard numbers, an estimated twenty million are suffering illness currently. The specialist boots on the ground, depleted by “brain drain”, are ridiculously few. In spite of that, many of that number are unemployed! His reference point for comparison is Brazil, a middle-income country with about the same population. Brazil has seven thousand “home-based” psychiatrists. Nigeria has two hundred.
Abdulmalik’s 358-page book opens with a preface which provides human angle insight into how he came to attend medical school in Ibadan and become a doctor after originally securing admission to University to study Engineering. His passion for Mental Health as a specialisation was ignited when he was deployed to the Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital, Maiduguri for his National Youth Service posting. Those were pre-Boko Haram days, but, even then, the difficulties the young doctor perceived working in the hospital were gargantuan. The facility was the only one serving the six states of the North East.
In addition, it was deluged with patients from neighbouring countries of Chad, Niger and Cameroun. He could see that many of the patients he treated had suffered extreme human rights abuse before they got to the hospital. Much of that was due to widely prevalent ignorance and misconceptions about the causation of mental illness and the appropriate way to manage it.
One in four of the Nigerian population may expect to suffer a mental illness at some time in their lives. One in every ten suffer from an illness even as we speak. In hard numbers, an estimated twenty million are suffering illness currently
Before the NYSC year was out, he had made up his mind to become a Psychiatrist.
The book has two Forewords. The conventions of writing may consider that to be one “Foreword” too many. Many of the ensuing pages are filled with goodwill messages and commendations – a feature normally reserved for the blurb.
“Optimal Mental Health” is broken into thirteen parts or themes, each of which subsumes a number of chapters. A broad range of topics are covered; Common Myths and Misconceptions about Mental Illness, Emotional Wellbeing, Harmonious and Peaceful Living, Depression, Bipolar and Anxiety Disorders, Adverse Childhood Experiences, Drug Abuse and Youths, Mental Health of Children and Young Persons, Mental Health of the Elderly, Women’s Mental Health, Intimate Partner Violence, Human Right, Mental Health, Suicide and the Law, Mental Health in the Workplace and Brain Drain in Mental Health.
It is an ambitious tableau. The author is clearly expanding his remit beyond the confines of “Man as a unit” to “Man in Society” – a holistic, sociological approach to the definition of mental health. No man, after all, is an island. Everyone lives, ails, and ultimately dies in relation to other people, influencing them and being influenced by them.
The language of the book is simple and easily accessible to readers of even the most basic education. The author employs illustrative case vignettes which read like short stories. In a box, he would then explain the nature of the problem, without recourse to technical language. The general air he conveys is that each problem has a label, and a prescribed management.
He does not spare himself the most awkward questions. Is mental illness curable? What is the role of the media? What is dignity in mental health? Why does one individual respond catastrophically to setback, and another, shrugs it off? How does substance abuse cause mental illness? How should the Chibok girls and other victims of trauma and kidnapping be cared for? What does failure to do to self-esteem? What about hatred – interpersonal, interethnic? What has the Boko Haram experience done to Nigerians? What about children who are malnourished and uncared for early in life, and who don’t go to school?
Abdulmalik paints a disturbing picture of the socio-psychological environment in which Nigerians live and bring up their children. His equivalences may be trite sometimes, and some of his prescribed actions may raise an eyebrow. On out-of-school children, there is an implication that the child from Aba taken out of school to start an apprenticeship to his “trader” uncle is in the same straits as an almajiri in Kano who is “dis-parented” and thrown on the street to beg. He emphatically is not! The almajiri issue is a specific, clear and present danger to Nigeria in its scale and the depth of sociological – not just educational, intervention that would be required to repair it.
The author has done a useful service to Nigerians by publishing this unique book. It de-mystifies mental illness and helps people to understand themselves and others better. It points a way to how, not just as individuals, but also as groups, Nigerians may be healthier and happier together. It is commended to the public for general readership, and to libraries in all educational institutions – from primary school to University.
FEMI OLUGBILE
Optimal Mental Health is published by Inspiration House, Ibadan. It is available in bookshops or direct from the publishers (08099207874)
