The
Rwandan prescription for Depression:
Sun,
drum, dance, community.
“We
had a lot of trouble with western mental health workers who came
here immediately after the genocide and we had
to ask some of them to leave.
They
came and their practice did not involve being outside in the sun where you
begin to feel better, there was no music or drumming to get your blood flowing
again, there was no sense that everyone had taken the day off so that the
entire community could come together to try to lift you up and bring you back
to joy,
there was no acknowledgement of the depression
as something invasive and external that could actually be cast out again.
Instead they would take people one at a time
into these dingy little rooms and have them sit around for an hour or so and
talk about bad things that had happened to them. We had to ask them to leave.”
~A
Rwandan talking to a western writer, Andrew Solomon,
about
his experience with western mental health and depression.
August
18, 2014
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