According to the Hidden Voices Kenya lobby group which has embarked on creating awareness, enhancing knowledge and enabling communities to stop stigmatizing people facing mental health issues, awareness should be taken seriously due to the bizarre happenings being reported every day.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 [singing]
00:18 Our main focus is to create awareness, to enhance the knowledge on mental health
00:24 and enable our community to stop stigmatizing the people facing mental health
00:29 because it's an issue about our feelings, it's an issue about our actions,
00:33 it's an issue about our health and our space that we have in the community.
00:39 We need to share this knowledge to ensure that all people in the community
00:44 understand through their knowledge base from where they live
00:48 how mental health can impact their lives and their livelihoods,
00:52 not bearing in mind that it's not a sickness for a person that is rich or poor,
00:57 it's a sickness that affects our community.
00:59 As long as you're born into this earth, mental health is bound to be with you.
01:03 Just as we say, disability is bound to come with you
01:06 if perhaps you have not been able to get polio vaccines and all that.
01:10 So for us, mental health, we are using this space to create awareness in our schools.
01:15 Why schools? Because in schools we are able to impact our students
01:20 with this knowledge in a basic form.
01:22 Why the community? Because in the community we are able to reach out
01:25 through their own language, their own set up.
01:28 Why the church? We say that the church is about faith
01:31 and mental health is also impacted by the faith that we have.
01:34 It's driven by the mindset that we get to derive our faith.
01:38 And all this comes because mental space has been more and more neglected
01:44 by not just the community but even the government itself.
01:48 You find every year they give a budget but mental health will never get that space,
01:53 will never get that voice.
01:55 It is true, most people with mental illnesses are not taken seriously
02:01 and are not seen as people in our country, sorry to say.
02:05 And specifically for us, the ladies and the girl child, we go through a lot
02:11 because, like for example in the streets, these women who have that mental illness,
02:19 they are taken advantage of by men, most of them are even raped about
02:24 and it is so unfortunate that most of us and most of the people generally
02:29 don't understand what mental health is.
02:32 And for starters, it is basically like any other illness.
02:38 Mental illness doesn't really say that you can't be a mother,
02:41 you can't be whoever you want to be in life.
02:44 It's basically a condition and it's also getting treated
02:47 through medication and through a lot of understanding and counselling,
02:51 people are getting help and it is possible for a person with mental illness
02:56 to be a parent and a good one for that.
02:59 We are just volunteers that decide to walk and tell people
03:03 mental illness is a normal illness and people can go for help
03:09 because parents are sick, our total peer who are going to
03:14 and even when we tell the parents not to hide they are sick,
03:17 they themselves are sick because mental health affects one who is sick
03:21 and even the one who is related to the one that is sick.
03:24 That is why we are finding so many cases of domestic abuse,
03:28 people are killing one another, our young people are unable to
03:32 withstand hard food relationships because they have mental conditions.
03:38 So everyone is sick including our politicians.
03:44 The kind of things they do we know they are also sick.
03:47 I think it is time that we also put a requirement that our leadership
03:51 also before they stand for leadership positions in the country
03:55 they also get tested because some of the things they say
03:59 they are the first ones to stigmatise, they are also the first ones
04:02 to do acts that are causing mental suffering.
04:06 [No audio]