Friday, 3 February 2023

Of Upbringing and Mental Health

 It is yet another Friday and one on which we will all get to be treated to one of those not-so-regular write-ups on Richie Online. To be honest, this will be my third attempt at writing this article in as many months. I hope that this time I will be able to use the language that will allow me to go past the first three paragraphs without giving up and deleting the whole thing. Here is the idea. I do not want people to come at me for undermining their struggles and mental health issues when I convey my opinion. Here we go, then.

I have been living overseas for a greater part of the past year and few months. While here, I take an interest in following what goes on in Malawi contrary to what some people suggest. You may wonder how I keep up. The first way is following the news. I follow Malawi’s biggest media outlets on Facebook which means that I get most news updates before the average Malawian gets them. I also happen to be a member of two or three of those WhatsApp groups in which people are always itching to be the first to share breaking news despite the groups being for something else. Then there are those pages you must follow to know what’s going on beyond the mainstream news; Mikozi, Umatha Daily, JCK Cameras and their likes mean that I am always kept in the loop. I follow the government and the President’s pages too, so I hardly miss anything.

In late November, the President made a speech that attracted a bit of backlash. If it were not for the numerous scandals that keep our juices running, people would have been on their necks for some time. Luckily enough, something else came to his rescue. In the speech that he made at Katawa Assemblies of God; the President pointed out how Malawians are giving up easily. Ironically, he was speaking to address the issue of the rising incidence of suicide in the country. Mental health and consumer rights advocates were furious. The reasons were as obvious as you could imagine. The mental health camp appealed to the fact that being suicidal is often because of an underlying untreated mental illness while the consumer rights wondered who it was hat had put Malawians in the economic situation that was pushing them into suicide. I will park this for a minute.

Around the same time the President made his speech, I found myself contemplating on the effects of some of the role plays I did in my childhood. There was one game that we used to play in which the one who came last was called “dzira lobvunda”, Chichewa for a rotten egg. In another extreme case, we would place a stick of about 30 cm length in a mound of sand and play a game in which we would take turns to gradually take off the sand bit by bit while trying to keep the stick upright. The person who would drop the stick while taking out his share of the sand would get a beating until they completed a task which would be something like going around a tree some twenty meters away. I could give many examples, but my point is that there were consequences for losing the games, playing badly, or coming last. Even away from school, where I knew I obviously had to compete to maintain my favorite number one position, I understood that I needed to be on top of my game.

Lost in this reflection, I posted a question that divided opinion on my WhatsApp status. The question? Well. I asked people what they thought about the long-term effects of being called things like “dzira lovunda” on one’s mental health. On one hand, people said that such things helped us to toughen up and understand that this world is not fair to losers. The other people shared an opposing view, citing that the buildup of such things and all sorts of insults that some of family and friends heaped up on us could have negative impacts on self-esteem and mental health. Some of you may relate to the fact that there are parents and teachers who used to call their wards stupid or by the names of all manner of filthy animals whenever they were in the wrong. It would be fair to suggest that in some cases a buildup of such insulting words would have effects later in life.

Some of you may have gone to secondary schools where the hierarchy of students was more pronounced and where teasing and bullying was the norm. In such places, new students would always get all sorts of physical and verbal abuse. Some have argued that such abuse and trauma could also have negative effects on mental health eventually, and they make a fair point.

As I mentioned earlier, I found myself pondering on the reactions of the mental health advocates to the President’s speech and relating them to my own childhood experiences. While most of the reporting on cases of suicide is wrongly done (mostly by giving too much information on the identity, reasons for suicide and mode), one could establish a pattern from the cases. As the Malawi Police Service and literature had it, the average age at attempted or successful suicide is getting lower which means younger people are attempting to take their own lives as compared to the past. On the causes of suicide, people have cited financial problems, relationship issues and academic failure as the reasons for suicide among young people. Stay with me.

While I do not have the statistics on the ages of people who have been attempting or committing suicide, I would like to believe that some of them come from my generation while others are from Gen Z. Clearly, there are differences in the way millennials and Generation Z were raised as parents and peers were tougher on our kind than they are on the younger ones. Some who think like el presidente would argue that this may be the reason people in their teens or early twenties are giving up on life over things that the older generations could manage. While this reasoning may not go well with some quarters of the populace, others would find it to be the most plausible explanation for what is going on in this social media age. One could be forgiven for ignoring the complexities of the matter and entertaining the simplistic thinking that the younger generations’ easy early life has detrimental effects in later life.

When you think of our generation that grew up to the sound of the whip, you would wonder, then what the results of such may be. As I mentioned, some people suggest that we take the effects of our childhood physical and verbal trauma into adulthood. One person called ours “a generation of ticking bombs” with lots of unresolved mental health issues stemming from our childhood experiences. There are diverse ways in which people try to escape from such issues. Some would subconsciously try to seek approval from different networks and virtual friends on social media while others would resort to trolling others. A good proportion of our generation has anger management issues and react disproportionately to negative situations and that may arise from the trauma of our upbringing. You know those people who comment mean things on people they don’t know or call them idiots? I am talking about those.

There we are, then. To be fair, I think both the people who argue that a soft upbringing has potential negative effects have a point to make. On the other hand, those that highlight childhood traumas as a cause for long-term mental health issues are also not too far from the truth. At the end of the day, we should be asking ourselves about what’s best for the growing mind; whether it is the soft life that steers you clear of the “ticking bomb” status or the tough life that brings out the resilient future version of you. I am not sure if my own upbringing has brought in this bias, but I would like to think that the tough elements of my life shaped me into the person I am. I could say the same about my friends who have been withdrawn from college but somehow managed to find their footing through yet another tertiary institution, service provision or business. Then there are those who have somehow maintained their cool in the face of adversity; illness, relationship issues, losing jobs and all. While upbringing cannot explain it all, it surely does explain most of it.

I am not just trying to walk the fine line when I say that issues of mental health and how people respond and react to situations are complex. I will keep repeating this that no one can claim the monopoly of knowledge on how these things go because human minds are dynamic and how people respond to good and adverse situations is a product of many varied factors.

Half of the people who read these articles are raising children and I am in the other half that plans to raise some in future. I am always scared about the prospect of picking a parenting style that helps my child grow into a well-rounded human; not too soft but also not like the ticking bomb I grew up having been called a rotten egg or gotten a beating for being the one that dropped a useless stick. One thing is for sure, though. In this world we need to strive to raise a generation that understands that in this world we cannot always get what we want. The children that are coming need to know that this world is very unforgiving to losers and that in real life the medals are reserved for the winners, no participation medals.

I could go on and on, but this is enough to get us thinking about what is going on with our lives and those of the people around us. Are we carrying some emotional baggage from our childhood? How could we let that go? Do we have a utopian view of the world? How do we snap out of that into reality? More importantly, how will we strike the balance with the children we raise?

Not sure why I have been thinking about these things, but there goes nothing.

Have a wonderful weekend.