Recent years have come with an increasing acknowledgement of the significant role mental health plays in society.

With this in mind, Sandra Uwera, the CEO of the COMESA Business Council, followed suit when she started her MWell project.

Through this initiative, she has been keen on promoting a proactive and intentional approach to mental health—something that would uphold mind wellness within the African society.

The genesis of her interest began with the fact that about 12 per cent of people in Sub-Saharan Africa are actually living with mental illness.

Sandra Uwera is keen on promoting a proactive and intentional approach to mental health. Photos/Courtesy

The traditional narrative on mental health stigma prevails in everyday life, leading to a high number of stress, burnouts, depression-related problems, with no visible professional environment to support this challenge. 

As a result, there is less workplace productivity, family and home life imbalance, social disconnections, among other issues and Uwera sought to address this.

She says mind wellness is just as important as your physical and nutritional health. It can be an everyday lifestyle choice for a happier, healthier and more productive you.

The fact remains that while we talk about mental instability broadly, there is also another narrative to mental instability that looks at mind wellness. This is something that is significant for everyday people who are facing challenges such as anxiety, burnout, depression, and people who are facing physical disorders that create a certain stigma in society, she says.

"These people that I am targeting are you and me; you could be a career person growing or a young adult trying to break into the market. You could be single or married. A lot of these people in our society are silent, they are dealing as people who are achievers, well doers, they are fine generally but if you talk to them, you realise that they are going through significant challenges that are creating a lot of havoc mentally. And they don’t have channels to engage, collaborate or discuss them,” Uwera says.

The lack of space is because mind health is shrouded in a lot of stigma. This limits people to engage with the professional help to deal with this. 

Uwera observes that in society, we are really driven by cultural dynamics; our African culture frowns on anything that is outside our ethics.

But mind wellness should be an everyday subject, something accepted in society, and it should be known that an unhealthy mind is a foundation to cause a lot of problems.

Mind health as a trendy lifestyle

The nature of her campaign is trying to achieve the ways people can make this priority. She is raising awareness about mental health, stigma and creating an environment where mind health is as trendy a lifestyle choice, just like physical health and nutrition. 

"Working out, eating the right food is trendy so why don’t we do the same for mind health? This campaign is trying to show that we give prioritisation to mind health and wellness for everyone. If we can normalise the narrative on this, we will be able to reduce a lot of these challenges and create a happier and more productive society, within the workplace, family setting,” the activist says.

Even in the workplace, her team is working towards encouraging employee assistance programmes, where people know that they can talk to the human resource department and have services where they can talk to a therapist and discuss issues such as burnout, and issues in their home places affecting them.

"That advice is talk therapy; its non-medical, that’s the difference between mental instability and mind wellness. Mind wellness is focusing on non-medical support services through talking and engaging with the counsellor,” she points out.

She is also working towards the aspect of building a pool of psychologists whose services would be affordable and accessible.

Practicing mind wellness 

Uwera points to the need of being acutely aware of what one is going through, and making extra effort to deal with it. 

She encourages people to allow themselves be vulnerable, adding that when we shun mind health, a lot of people shroud themselves in ‘we are happy, we are okay and are fine.’

During the pandemic, a lot of innovators came up with so many tools online that can help one practise mind wellness, for example, Headspace—it allows you to have a ten-minute meditation, and actually tells you if you are in a stress mode, overwhelmed, lack sleep, and it tells you what you can do, for example, lie down, take some time out, relax your muscles. People should make use of such tools, she commends.

Her project is also promoting tele therapy, where they encourage provision of hotline services and one can make a call and talk to a psychologist even if it’s for 30 minutes—to share how they feel, what they are going through and how they can be helped. 

"We are looking towards promoting this as a free service for the countries that can. And then of course overtime, there could be a small fee,” Uwera says. 

Bringing the idea closer to home 

Rwanda is one of the leading states in Africa promoting mental health. In 2018, the country updated its strategic plan for its health sectors, creating new ambitious targets for expanding mental health services in communities.

But more needs to be done to promote mind wellness for everyday people, says Uwera. The first thing we need is to break stigma, if there could be policy actions by relevant ministries. Let there be centres that allow everyday people to access these services so that society stops looking at mental health as a subject matter for those who have mental disorders that need clinical help, she adds.

"This project is being done in Rwanda and in Zambia, my hope is to raise awareness, which is what the project is doing now on social media platforms. The second part of the project is to register a centre that’s going to focus on promoting therapy services, and that’s going to deal with a lot of small group discussions, awareness and also pulling together a group of therapists that can support this,” Uwera says. 

The project is also going to look at courses and modules within centres of excellence even from the grassroots level. "I am happy to say that the course is there in Zambia, mind wellness for primary school kids. The kids sit and engage, they are taught about meditation, they talk about how they are feeling, their challenges. It’s possible to have this as a module at the primary school level, secondary and university level just to encourage this narrative to be normalised.”

What she sees going forward is a society that is able to have a clear understanding of how to manage things like suicide, for example, or depression.

"It would also probably encourage counselling between married couples who would need to understand their individual narratives before understanding interdependence between each other, it could help the teenager become acutely aware of their vulnerabilities, their strengths and weaknesses as they walk into a very competitive environment. I see a lot of social impact that is very significant towards the overall development of our countries,” Uwera says.

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