Nigerians perspective on Mental illness

Not everyone that don’t talk, greet, associate, play with everyone is doing that because they are proud. Most people are struggling with low self-esteem, anxiety attack and depression, insecurity mindset and many other mental related problem.
In Nigeria where I come from, the only mental illness that we acknowledge is madness [Ara, Kolomenta, craze, were]
But mental illness is just more than that.
In Nigeria if you’re behaving in a different way, you’re a bad child, no one would care to know why you do what you do, instead the people close to you will try to push you to act as they want, without knowing that they are killing you.
Most of us remember not wanting to go to school because one of our classmate/teacher was picking on us, but very few of remember our parents trying to know why we don’t feel like going to school.

Cultism, Alcoholism, smoking, drug addiction, etc in Nigeria can be traced back to this. Many of us turned into beast so that we can stand the pressure that we face on a daily basis, but nobody cares though.

At a point in my life, rashes started appearing on my body. If you know me before then, you will understand that I cherish my skin because it had the perfect color and looked smooth as if I was using one highly priced cream. But out of no where I started seeing this funny rashes on my skin. But this rash that started appearing on my body changed many things, my bought antibiotics/antifungal/antibacterial drugs and cream for me [you know in Nigeria, the only cause of rashes are infection, nobody thinks that your body can ever be allergic to some soap, food, whether condition and the rest 🤣🤣🤣]
The cream worked but the drugs didn’t work, you know most things we see on our body can be traced to an internal problem. The cream can only clean the rashes on my body. You know I can’t continue using cream all the time. And the creams had this offensive odour, most of them bleach my skin. you can imagine what I was going through. Right inside my mind I was thinking that I was suffering from one incurable disease so most of the times I wore long sleeve shirts.
At that point, my self-esteem dropped to the lowest point,I can’t come out to greet visitors unless I was not smelling and with longsleev. No matter how much you shout, I won’t go on an errand unless I feel good, I won’t raise my hand to greet, I won’t go out to the crowd, I won’t allow anyone to see my body you’re a close family member. To everyone around I was stubborn, disrespectful, proud, cold and any bad qualification you can think of. Butt to me, I was very shy bcus I felt I wasn’t like everyone else.
Being open to certain degree, I was able to tell my family how I feel and them being understanding type, they understood to a point, but what of the people that don’t know me that well? I was a monster to them.
The struggle continued until I was able to grow beyond my fear, and a major booster to my self-esteem came when I know that I can’t make people to have the rashes even by sharing any kind of thing with them. I totally became free when the doctor told me that my body was allergic to some food, that I was not infected with any bacteria or fungal.
So before you call that child rude, stubborn, daft, cold try and know what he/she is passing through.
Not all people that look bad are bad.

Good morning this afternoon
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