There is a particular kind of exhaustion that sleep cannot fix. The kind that leaves the body in bed while the mind continues, worrying, stressing, replaying conversations and imagining outcomes that may or may not happen.
My body, my mind, my spirit and all the other constituents of who I am can be stretched to what I believe to be their respective limits. The mind, especially, can become a strange place to live when it refuses to rest.
For many young Africans, conversations about mental health can begin in surprisingly ordinary ways. I once heard someone say they needed a shrink. By “shrink,” she meant a therapist, but until then, I thought a shrink was a shaman. I’d thought she meant the heavily gold-clad woman who sits in pink and purple fabric tents, waving her palms in exaggerated fashion over a mystical ball.
We got into the idea of who a therapist is and what they’re actually supposed to do. Essentially, a therapist is a professional stranger to whom you tell your darkest secrets. They’re supposed to help you work through your yarn ball of feelings, buried thoughts and most horrifying experiences. A therapist helps you understand your mind the way a doctor helps you understand your body.
The prevailing idea was that she’d have to wait till she was old and financially independent enough to see a shrink without controversy. I couldn’t help but wonder:
Why? Why would a twenty-something-year-old getting a therapist be controversial?
Because in many African spaces, therapy is not seen as care; it is seen as confession, failure or rebellion. It is treated as something you resort to only when you have “lost control”, when your suffering has become loud enough to inconvenience others. Anything short of visible collapse is dismissed as an exaggeration of a slightly difficult situation. The mind, unlike the body, is expected to endure in silence.
Seeking a therapist at twenty is therefore read as a weakness; as an unnecessary adoption of Western ideology. You are told to wait, to grow tougher skin, to pray harder and that “the idle hand is the devil’s workshop.” The irony, of course, is that this waiting often allows small wounds to fester into lifelong scars.
What makes the choice so controversial is not the therapist, but what the therapist represents: vulnerability, and the refusal to suffer in silence, but in a culture that romanticises endurance and equates silence with strength, choosing to be mentally well before being visibly broken feels like a taboo.
The discussion on mental health in Africa can go on for ages. Mental health is still spoken of in hushed tones, if spoken of at all. It is either dramatised into madness or minimised into nothingness. You are either “fine” or “crazy” with no in-between.
The problem is not ignorance alone, but the approach. Mental health is often framed as a moral issue rather than a medical one; a test of character, faith or resilience. Struggle is praised as strength and as a result, pain is managed through silence, denial and endurance.
Nigerian singer-songwriter Fela Kuti captured this cultural reflex perfectly in his song "Suffering and Smiling": the art of enduring pain quietly, laughing through what should be questioned. It is the same reflex that teaches people to joke about emotional distress instead of addressing it, to smile through anxiety, depression and burnout.
How many times have you laughed through something that was actually hurting you? How many times have you made light of your suffering because admitting that you were struggling felt harder? For young people in particular, this can become complicated. Navigating school, careers, relationships, family expectations, money and the uncertainty of figuring out who we are becoming, often while being told that growing up means learning to handle it all.
The traditionalists have a point: people will definitely hide laziness under the guise of emotional distress - this is simply a reflection of human nature. But to discard a solution with broader potential simply because it disagrees with the things we have been taught to value: character, faith and resilience?
A person’s mental health is delicate, not because they are weak, but because the mind is the seat of decision-making. It is the source from which every choice flows: what to respond to, what to endure and what to walk away from. When the mind is burdened or left ignored, even small decisions become heavy and much harder to make. Mental health shapes perception, judgment, and reaction. It governs not just productivity or social interaction, but how a person experiences life itself.
Instead of waiting for suffering to become visible, we as Africans must normalise conversations about emotions, stress and mental well-being. Families and communities can listen without rushing to fix, without branding distress as weakness or laziness and can learn to identify the line between the two. Humour can remain, but it must coexist with honesty and acknowledgement. By creating spaces where emotions are validated and counselled rather than silenced, our culture shifts from a quietly broken people to a self-aware and intentional one.
And perhaps the goal should not be to raise a generation that can endure everything, but one that knows when endurance is no longer the answer.