1. A lot has been written about mental health in Antigua and Barbuda. I have a keen interest in mental health because my mother was seriously mentally ill. As a child, I had many different views about her illness, its causes, her treatment, and the response of my villagers to her, including my response to someone of high intellect referring to her as the “melancholy lady”, a description that sounded strangely beautiful to me at the time.
2. I suspected there were others in my family who were alsomentally challenged; therefore, it seemed to be the sensible thing in medical school for me to become a psychiatrist, until a voicein my head, or was it two voices, asked the question, and provided the answer: Is mad, you mad?
3. I want to suggest to you that there is a madness that is occupying our country. It demands understanding, otherwise it will worsen and reach a point where there will be more mentally ill people outside mental homes than inside. Some claim we have reached that point already.
4. The strange thing about this national madness is that all of us know the cause of it, but it seems we are running away from the effects of the madness. We know that the national madness that is tearing up apart is the deep political divide plaguing us.
5. Let’s for the sake of argument suspend our thoughts about the cause of this national madness while we take a look of the effects of it. Maybe after doing so, we can then go back to the cause and, armed with the negative effects, we may be able to stem the tide that is facing us as we charge ahead blindly intothis valley of the shadow of madness.
6. I put it to you that the main effect of our rabid political divideis our inability to have frank, honest, open discussions in public. In private yes, in parliament yes, but we close down or we refuse to open up in public in concert in any meaningful way, even to agree civilly to disagree.
7. So what, you may ask. I don’t really like to discuss politics in public anyway. I prefer to talk about other matters. Matters like what? What about healthcare or music, for example. Again, for the sake of argument, let us strip away the political aspects of healthcare or music and see where the madness takes us.
8. In healthcare, one of the biggest challenges facing us ischronic noncommunicable diseases, the NCDs. What are these NCDs? Some of them are cardiovascular diseases, cancers, diabetes, and chronic respiratory diseases. Others include Alzheimer’s disease, chronic kidney disease, and, you guessed it, mental health conditions.
9. NCDs are difficult to manage, for manifold reasons. A glimpse at the causes may help. The World Health Organization notes that NCDs are the result of a combination of genetic, physiological, environmental and behavioural factors.
10. Let us take a peek at the behavioural factors. I want to put it to you that it is impossible to accept and rationalize the need for behavioural changes to affect your health, and at the same time deny or hide the need for frank, open, discourses on politics. The only way you can do this is to split your mind into two; one mind keeps the politics buried, and the other mind is wide open to changing your behaviour so as to change your health. This double-minded approach is schizophrenic. It is not that you have to openly support a political party and hammer its virtues, or lambaste the other party, in public, but the civil atmosphere must be there whether you want to breathe it in our not.
11. Music. Our attention to the arts says a lot about us. Yes, we get the historic chance to let off at Carnival and sing and say what we want and “talk as we like”. But virtually all our music has words. Where are our songs without words? These types of music without words can lead to extended, symphonic forms, getting away from the customary verse and chorus. For this to happen, the mind of the composer and the ears of the listener have to be liberated and elastic enough to stretch the boundaries of our thoughts. It is very difficult to do this for one aspect of our life and conveniently close off elsewhere, all the time, not by choice but by national convenience and necessity.
12. It’s as if we are living in a closet. And yes, this dichotomy of the mind does affect our private sexuality as well, but that’s for another time; a second coming, if we have the stamina to raise the topic again.
13. With all that said, we now have to answer the obvious question: What do we need to do to change our ways to avoid the abyss of this national madness? What do we do to sing our true native song, in this strange land, by the rivers of Babylon?
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