Promoting mental health and well-being in EcCoWell2 communities | Stimulus paper

COVID-19 and before it, global economic challenges have come to fragilise many communities the world over. This is why it is not difficult to agree with WHO that by 2030, mental health issues would have become an unavoidable global challenge.

In a general sense, WHO recommends 'the provision of comprehensive and integrated mental health and social care services rendered in community based settings'. The terminology 'community based settings' is familiar to African communities and it would suggest that WHO recommendation may be easily carried out with minimal obstruction. However, the terminologies comprehensive and integrated  come to insert a bit of complication in the ability of many African communities to promote mental health following WHO guidelines. Both financial resources and knowledge capital are needed to roll out a comprehensive and integrated network. These two properties (financial resources and knowledge capital) many African communities lack. 

However, close observations have revealed that African communities have been pulling through these difficult situations relying on their own sense of HAPPINESS and inner fortitude. A scrutiny of the building blocks of African communities' Happiness, unlike those of the Scandinavian countries, revolve around reliance on communality and a deep immersing into endogenous religious beliefs. Communality is a process of living within which family ties, village ties and even friendship relationships are so reliable that they are taken for granted. Relying on these various typologies of ties and contracts, members of African communities have been able to get by and even to survive the most calamitous situations in recent times. These are the sort of human ties that abhor SOCIAL DISTANCING but accommodate PHYSICAL DISTANCING and encourage a permanent concept and practice of SOCIAL SOLIDARITY even when, compelled by the disastrous nature of COVID-19, members of the same family and same village are practising PHYSICAL DISTANCING.

In 1992, at the return of civilian rule after 20 years of Marxist-Leninist style governance, the government of President Soglo officialised the practice of endogenous religions. Before the officialisation of these religions, neither Christianity nor Islam has been able to displace them from the heart of Africans as many of them would return from Church and Mosque and pour libation and do their endogenous things. The power of a comforting dream interpreted by a Voodoo (Vodun) priest, the prayer of an old benevolent person, the good prediction of a soothsayer exude a psychological potency ten times more powerful than money or material comfort can provide. The moral support that family and/or village members supply during times of adversity are are potent psychological healing that very few unfortunate conditions would not positively respond to.