Ignorant Attitudes To mental Disabilities.

By Arthur Katabalwa

Over the last few days I have been involved in a conversation with several close friends of mine about personal conceptions of the world around us. The conversation got quite heated up with me sort of caught up in the middle. The main issue at hand was that many of us, I included, do not really understand the complexities of mental health problems.

Personally, I must say that having lived abroad for a considerable length of time made me more aware of mental health issues. A long time ago, a friend of mine, Joseph Atukunda started suffering from mental problems. And even though our lives parted for a while, he was the first person that I was in close proximity to who we unfairly referred to as “mad”.

The experience with Joseph at high school partially prepared me for other encounters in my travels and work. Eventually, I received extensive training in disability awareness. I learnt that one needs to be very patient with such disabilities. Indeed I also realized that I am numerically dyslexic which adversely affected my formal education. As it was then, dyslexia wasn't understood and anyone who could not phantom a long figure like 7189309466 without mixing the numbers up was thought of as stupid.

But what I saw this past week was a collective failure by many of us to understand such disabilities. We have people who have disorders like bipolar disorders. When other people are confronted with such a disorder,they can’t understand. In many times, people with such a disorder are incapable of actually knowing of the impact of their actions. They can be forcefully offensive yet not recognize that their actions are pretty vile. Yet we who are close to them also fail to recognize that our contemporaries have swung into a different world.

It is that general attitude that is failing us. Not because we are prejudiced in a negative way but because we don’t know that we don’t know. The famed actor Robin Williams allegedly took his own life due to depression and addiction to alcohol. And yesterday, my maternal aunt, who is one of his greatest fans summarized her ignorance of depression with a crass remark; “A man that rich, famous and funny? Why would he kill himself?” I attempted to educate her in the complexities of depression but she was not having it. Her summation? “Ogwo Muzimu” (that’s an evil spirit). I couldn't blame her. In her world only the down and out people from my village in Kalamba should commit suicide.

We have a long way to go in educating ourselves in these areas. Society here in Uganda is so disconcerting that we at times refer to the mentally retarded as “bakasiru”. (The stupid ones). My day long conversation (with others) in the face of someone with a mental issue, which by the way many of us were aware of, but failed to accommodate in our conversation, was a collective failure of all of us. On a national level, it is a scandal that we let some of our brothers and sisters roam out hot dusty streets, sometimes in various stages of undress, in violet grips of madness. We don’t do anything too help.  We have also left swathes of the population completely unaware of how to deal with disabilities like mental health.