Growing up in Rwanda, I had rarely ever seen a grown man cry or even show signs of vulnerability.\u00a0Such behaviours were left for women and children. I have this very vivid memory of attending one of my uncle\u2019s funeral and asking my dad why he wasn\u2019t crying since he was clearly sad and he answered in Kinyarwanda: \u201c Amarira y\u2019Umugabo atemba ajya mu nda.\u201d Which translates to: \u201c Manly tears flow within.\u201d As I grew up, I not only realized how sexist that saying is but it\u00a0 also made me wonder if men were allowed to show and talk about their feelings without having their manhood being questioned. In a community where we often repress vulnerability and emotional transparency, \u00a0we find ourselves stuck with a generation that \u201cmans up\u201d when confronted with depression.<\/p>\n
Depression within African communities has always been a controversial subject. Many believe that it\u2019s an illness that is slowly ravaging our homes and that we can no longer turn a blind eye to, and others are convinced that it\u2019s just another way for The West to metamorphose our values and cultures.<\/p>\n
Those who choose to turn a blind eye to depression \u00a0tend to tell the victim that it\u2019s just a phase and they should either get over it or pray about it. I once heard someone argue that depression \u201cis all in one\u2019s head and our colonizers might have left physically, but mentally we are still trying to adopt their ways of living.\u201d I\u2019m sorry but we need to stop dismissing mental illness. It is real, it is real, and we need to acknowledge it.<\/p>\n
So next time someone opens up to you about their \u201cinternal darkness\u201d, please do not ask them to snap out of it. Instead, point them in the right direction to get help and be as supportive as you can be. Mental illness is real it doesn\u2019t discriminate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Growing up in Rwanda, I had rarely ever seen a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":105499,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[275],"tags":[],"couleur":[],"etiquette-darchives":[283],"type-de-ressource":[],"class_list":["post-1925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-magazine-archives","etiquette-darchives-self-care-archives"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n