Post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD], mental health condition triggered by failure to recover from terrifying events by the virtue of having experienced or watch such event happened. While other countries, particularly the western world have mechanism in place to facilitate the healing process, in Africa there are massively low efforts to help the victims of PTSD, and very often it escalates to life threatening sickness, having been comatose by those events which cause such person to have post-traumatic stress disorder, this health conditions can last as long there is no help from a medical professional to administer the cure, and required medical diagnosis to work with the results.
In Nigeria, according to College of Medicine, University of Ibadan, more than 1.5 million cases recorded per year, these numbers are enough to disrupt a healthy society, excluding large part of the population who don’t even know what they are suffering. Post-traumatic stress disorder is serious mental health condition that comes with intense, disturbing thoughts and feelings related to their experience that last long after the traumatic event has ended, this can come through flashbacks and nightmares which can trigger sadness, anger and fear resulting from the reoccurring the events which have inflicted them mental scar, anybody can be a victim, but mostly soldiers, abusive relationships and loss of loved ones are the core events which very often trigger PTSD.
In Africa, countries need to establish PTSD Centre to help victims with the sickness, through the professional service of medical practitioner, which can come in a way of counselling and medication. Soldiers coming out of war zones having experienced terrifying events, for years can go on and live with big burdens which they will find it difficult to interpret to anyone, very often they form that thoughts of fear which can unsafely put their mental condition in jeopardize, abusive relationships pose a big threat to mental health those awful moments of beating and inflicting bruises when reoccurred in the mind of the victim will leave such victim into fear and creating delusional thoughts due to PTSD, loss of loved ones are always hard to deal especially a family that loss a member from childbearing severing the mother and the baby into two different worlds.
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Post-traumatic stress disorder is in extreme emergency, it needs urgent attention in Africa, victims need to be rehabilitated into the society again to live like any other person without fear, sadness and anger resulting from horrible events which keep their minds running from pillar to post, this is a big call to create awareness for the victims through that healthy society can be promulgated, PTSD has been a neglected mental illness, it gives people the sense to talk about these events with confidence and confining on medical practitioner with openness to heal.
Counselling takes a lot of strength in cure of post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD]. Maryna Manyevska, skilled at identifying patients who have engaged in combat in Ukraine close to a decade, provides with counselling on how to deal with such ugly experiencing after losing her son in a battleground. Speaking to Al Jazeera, on course of doing her work, she estimated that more than fifty percent of people with post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] have addiction issues and often show uncontrollable aggression.
Maryna, a psychologist at the Lviv Centre for the Provision of Services to Combatants in western Ukraine, offers free legal, psychological and social support to soldiers and their families. She has observed that those with this mental illness have properly seen themselves as having earned right to be angry, they believed to have seen something nobody has actually seen. The big issue that arises from this outcome is how to live with PTSD patients, when men come home from war feeling elated, forgetting other responsibilities to look after at home, this form of distress that results from sharing in the aftermath of another person’s trauma, there uneasiness in such person mental and social wellbeing, and they end up suffering secondary post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD].
The wife of President of Nigeria, Nigeria’s first lady, Aisha Buhari has recently come out on the effect Nigeria civil war had on her husband, who was one of the major actors in the war and she opened up how she had to deal with this mental issues as young as she was- 19 years old, then. She made this revelation at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Armed Forces Post Traumatic Stress Disorder [AFPTSD], she emphasized that, it is a big win for soldiers, military families and the nation, having been in the same position, her husband was not rehabilitated after the civil war, coup d’ etat and serial elections lost, she has to assumed the role of a psychologist to help him get through those moments.
