You are depressed keh? How can you be depressed? In a Nigerian home? Who you epp? You better goan carry your food in the kitchen, abi you are sick ni? Is it malaria? It sure is malaria, you can’t be depressed.

According to NIMH, Depression (major depressive disorder or clinical depression) is a common but serious mood disorder. It causes severe symptoms that affect how you feel, think, and handle daily activities, such as sleeping, eating, or working. It symptoms are feeling of hopelessness, pessimism, guilt, irritability, sadness, lack of interest in fun activities, headaches, pains and cramps, sleeping disorder, suicidal thoughts and so on.

Depression is a mental disorder that is often overlooked and termed white man’s disease, different factors often lead to depression.

Many youths battling depression resort to suicide at the end of the day, depression is really ugly and it leaves you shattered, confused, empty. You desperately cling to life and search for answers.

Most parents are often insensitive towards their ward in this period, they fail to notice withdrawal and the symptoms that accompanies depression, to some of them you are being rude or lazy or growing wings, they would attack you with barrage of words, insults and say things that would further make you drown. They would ignore you when you need them the most or force you out of your room when you need to be alone, most parents do not think they have to respect their wards, they think they have done us a favour by birthing us, they chose to neglect the saying respect is reciprocal, they may even batter you in the process and try to beat the demons toying with your head out of you.

Lots of youths have turned to drugs to escape from the feeling of depression, unfortunately the feeling is temporal and they continuously go back to drugs to feel high and fly which makes some of them get hooked on the drug, and of course our parents fail to see the signs, “you look somehow, are you hungry? Your food is in the kitchen”.

When was the last you had a heart to heart conversation with your parents? Some are unlucky to have parents, some that do have parents see them as a major enemy, why? Because they do more harm than good in the process of showing you how superior they are to you. They would rather discuss the suicidal feelings you told them you have been having with their friends, rather than talk to you. You would get dragged from one Aladura house to the other who would blame the witches and wizards in your village for it.

I wouldn’t want to blame the fact that there hasn’t been enough awareness on Depression for the insensitivity of parents toward their wards battling depression. I believe there is need for enough awareness on the disorder. Some of us would wonder why a well to do person or a brilliant teenager would decide to take their own life and we would ignorantly ascribe it to the works of witches and people with evil eyes. If only we knew.

Whoever knows what the Dentist who jumped into the sea was going through, some people would be baffled a man like that would decide to commit suicide. Some one even said his people from the village are doing him because a man with that type of car cannot just commit suicide like that except under the influence of juju.

Like I said we still have a long way to go, but we can make things easier by being a shoulder to lean when our loved ones or friends become suicidal. We shouldn’t also keep to ourselves when we are depressed, we should endeavour to be around people who understands us and those we trust.

We are stronger than depression.

source https://kanzahsays.com