Debunking and Demystifying Mental Health in the Context of African World View Today

Abstract

Mental Health as a condition has not been fully demystified and elaborated thoroughly.  In Africa, it is attributed to either curses, spiritual causes, witchcraft or some other cause due to their traditional worldview or belief systems, thus how they interpret phenomena, incidences, events and diseases included. This has led to rampant mental health cases as high as 25% of total population compared to other parts of the world. It could be factual that witchcraft and curses exist in Africa, but they are not the only causes of mental health. Proper understanding to expose the gaps is overdue. Therefore this study set out to debunk and demystify mental health by assessing reasons for limiting mental health to worldview causes and analyzing scientific and possible other causes/characteristics in Africa, prevention and healing of mental health. Mitigation of African world causes, interpretations and challenges provided multifaceted solutions to mental health today, such as clinical, psychological, cultural, and African worldview and beliefs notwithstanding. The purpose of this study is to establish why mental health is still attributed to curses and witchcraft despite modern scientific medical ways of treatment and why mental health is rampant and access to treatment not effective in Africa? The study used qualitative approaches to analyze library information: to collect and describe data, summarize, drew conclusions and recommendations made. The study found out that mental health is only skewed and shrouded in mystery and that it is a health condition like any other and not caused by curses or evil spirits, or witchcraft. It can be treated using conventional and other medical measures. Besides demystification and debunking, the revitalization of traditional methods alongside scientifically proven and conventional approaches to mental health is highly recommended in this paper.