Depression And Mental Health: A Time To Speak Out

By Martha Etale

Depression is a serious condition that negatively affects how a person thinks, feels, or behaves. It is a prolonged sadness that tends to hide its victims from the world.

Depression can be classified as an illness since it has got signs and symptoms and also treatment. Major signs and symptoms of depression are emptiness accompanied by different life views, sadness, memory judgment, and reasoning, all this can lead to suicide.

Depression seems to have found a special place in men. According to a recent research, suicide cases in men have risen in numbers due to depression.

Depression can be brought by financial problems, abusive relationships, physical illness. However, genetics can be a contributing factor in a family’s history of mental illness can increase the chances of depression.

The fact is, the world expects so much from men. Sometimes this eats into them. In Kenya, we say “kufa ki mwanaume” meaning to act strong or die-hard like a man, no matter the circumstance. Display of traditional “masculine” traits such as strength and control has forced men not to share their problems but decide to deal with them silently on their own thus leading to delayed response getting help.

In Kenya, poverty and unemployment are the leading causes of depression for the population. According to statistics, most men that commit suicide due to depression are the breadwinners in their families in which they leave a note behind saying they do not want to bother their children.

In the recent past according to Patrick Lumumba the Central Police Boss, nine out of ten suicide cases in central Kenya are those of male victims.

Society is to be blamed for the depression cases in the country and turn its negative thinking, learn to treat both genders equally since we are all human beings and everyone deserves to be listened to since a problem shared is halfway solved and this will reduce the depression cases that cause the mortality rate to rise.