Imani Tafari-Ama | Mental well-being is a human right

Mental health is one of the most important aspects of well-being. Yet this arena of safety and identity comfort is as fragile as it is maligned. The minute that someone is diagnosed as deficient in the arena of psychosocial health, the stigma of “madness” is infused into the very fabric they use in the construction of their character narratives. Their whole genealogy and significant others are at risk and deeply implicated in this dilemma.

The continuum of diagnoses of mental health is not like diseases of the body that you can have without being it. No, any chip to the cranium system colours how family and community respond, how “patients” are perceived and treated in the health care system. Consequently, having any mental health impairment is likely to affect how such an individual’s behaviours and responses are contoured to cope with this condition.

From anecdotal evidence, it does not matter if the mental health ailments in question have to do with a chemical imbalance condition like manic depression, substance abuse or the use of violence as a power mechanism. The slur that a compromised mental health system embodies, mitigates the sufferer’s ability to heal. This results in a double- jeopardy situation: not only is the victim/survivor of mental ill-health having to cope with whatever ailment is at hand; the challenges are compounded by the extent to which they have options and choices to enable recovery.

Take the woman who has multiple mental wellness challenges stacked against her and minimum coping resources at her disposal. Unemployed, and although medicated, her trauma transcends the minimal therapy she receives at the clinic. From early life, she experienced multiple episodes of sexual abuse in the family. This cycle continued while she was in institutional care. She suffers from depression, which results in symptoms like panic attacks and suicidal impulses. Teetering on the brink of the abyss, she steps back in honour of her family responsibilities. As crazy as it seems, her compelling motherhood impetus has literally saved her life.

MISTS OF SILENCE

The everyday face of madness peers through the mists of silence to reveal that people who may be holding onto the last straw of sanity may be called on to make enormous sacrifices that can further strain their mental health equilibrium. As this survivor explained, the minute that her ability to maintain this straight and narrow would show any signs of slippage, her child, her umbilical connection to her psychosocial composure, could be taken away from her. She knows, only too well, the thin ice along which she skates.

So that is a granular scape of what the downward-spiralling alleyways of madness could look like. Being untreated for major trauma like incest, which is covered up as a norm, further erodes the capacity of such a wounded person to deliver the same outputs as someone who is not going through this hell.

What about mental health disorders on a global scale? Can we define leaders who use violence, in any shape and form, to rule their subjects, as suffering from compromised mental health capacities? The endless wars we see on the world stage today beg the question that we should. These are, surely, benchmarks of a world gone mad.

What is alarming at that level, is the inordinate power that such mad hatters wield when it comes to determining global human issues. Nowadays, people are, legitimately, terrified even of speaking. The capacity to speak has been politicised and read as resistance. In this part of the world, that is a familiar trope. During enslavement, criminal European colonisers invented an iron mask, which was used to restrain the tongues of African peoples on the plantations.

As part of a panorama of psychosocial violence, Europeans restrained enslaved Africans’ capacity to use their voice to rebel. The confidence to speak truth to power was further sabotaged by instilling the fear of the violent reprisals into every aspect of life. That is how we have been acculturated to operate to this day. We are kept in check by the knowledge that sure punishment will result from any inkling of non-compliance with the dominant order.

These days, we get déjà vu at every turn. Educators and other critical thinkers like artists, musicians, journalists, political dissidents, and ordinary citizens are in danger if they consider exercising the right to free speech about forbidden subjects. Refusal to be silent and safe could land you in jail or worse. Madness.

The intentional performance of madness is foolishness, recklessness, irrationality – you get my drift. Case in point, the world sucked in a collective gasp on June 4, 2025, when the United Nations’ Security Council (UNSC), the collective body that is the world’s court, failed to agree on a resolution for a ceasefire and the admission of urgent humanitarian assistance in Gaza. Why? Because the proposal was vetoed by the United States of America (USA). What do you call complicity with genocide if not a symptom of psychosis?

ACKNOWLEDGE HUMANITY

All that it would take to fix this problem is to acknowledge the humanity of each and every one. The inability to do so is admission of a gap in the mental health dossier.

What if madness does not happen by accident, chance, or happenstance? Suppose insanity is not, strictly speaking, involuntary? It can be constructed, routinely, as foreign policy. The dramatic irony is that we in the audience are all aware of the games played by those who control the political economy and manage systems of inequality. Inasmuch as there are winners, there are losers, and we are the pieces on the board. Crazy!?

The orchestration of violence as a means of achieving power is all too familiar to us here in Jamaica. The Kerr Report (1997), which details how tribal politics was conceived and nurtured in the bowels of an inherently divisive and antagonistic political model, also points out that partisan political investment in garrison-style leadership and the autonomous gangs the system spawned, has been an odyssey in derangement as far as a development agenda is concerned.

The Kerr Report called for the main political parties in Jamaica to renounce garrison associations. But who would vote if this system was dismantled? The last turnout of the electorate was a low 30s percent, signalling substantial disinterest in the current six-of-one-half-dozen-of-the-other saga.

To add insult to injury, we the people continue to endure the embarrassment, nay, the outright abuse, of Jamaica continuing to be a complicit member of the British Commonwealth (read common-poverty over yah so). The shameful ode to the enduring British colonisers, which is ritualised at the opening of Parliament, should be banished forever.

As for the ridiculous notion of a governor general – to this day! Is emancipation from mental enslavement in any of the forthcoming manifestos? If not, with consciousness of African identity politics on the rise, dem haffi wheel and come again. Mental well-being is a human right.

Imani Tafari-Ama, PhD, is a Pan-African advocate and gender and development specialist. Send feedback to i.tafariama@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com.