Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
It is Mental Health Awareness Month and it will not be fair not to look at the mental health of Nigerian women. Mental illness affects six out of ten women in Nigeria. Meeting of Minds reports that depression and anxiety disorders occur twice as often in women than women. What does a Nigerian woman face? Why is her mental health at stake?
Photo Credit:- everypixel.com
A Nigerian woman is on average likely to suffer gender oppression in the course of her life. They say she is fragile but that does not stop them from assaulting her verbally, sexually, and even physically. Come to think of it, they do not believe she deserves a recuperation period after childbirth, menstruation, and even the scenes her reproductive abilities give her.
A woman is strong, we know but her mind has its limit. You cannot inflict any human mentally and not expect them to break. They are going to break at some point. Some women suffer mentally from different ends- their family, work, cultural and religious institutions.
What is affecting the mental health of Nigerian women
Most of the problems affecting the mental health of Nigerian women are tied to the issue of gender inequality. A typical Nigerian woman has home-keeping responsibilities. There are instances where new mothers still tend to do housekeeping duties without recovering from the gestational period. At that point, her whole world is crumbling.
Her body has witnessed some changes and her husband is not giving her the positive affirmations she needs. She has to take care of her newborn and his cries ring in her ears and she questions why she got into the whole mess. This woman tries to explain this feeling to older women but they discard it as nothing. That feeling is a sign of post-partum depression.
Postpartum depression puts the mental health of Nigerian women at stake
A Nigerian woman is not immune to post-partum depression, the environment favors it. Her mental health should be valued. She witnesses her body change, her firm glittering skin begins to have signatures of her reproductive abilities all over it. In that same vein, she has to be a supportive wife in bed too, and an available mother to her previous children. See-through her lens.
Societal pressure on marriage hurts the mental health of Nigerian women
The mental health of a spinster is gradually dwindling because society would not let her be. She is 30, her only crime is she is accomplished and not married. No one cares about their derogatory remarks do to her mental health. If she rushes to marry and she marries wrong, she bears the burden as one of the woes of marriage.
READ ALSO:-
Physical and verbal assault
A lot of women are silent sufferers of violence. A man imposes his authority over a woman and is sometimes accepted as normal because the woman is the weaker gender. Women’s rights get trampled on. In addition, thousands of women face all kinds of assault but few of them report it. Because society just naturally builds these constrictions that choke them as victims.
Young ladies face verbal assaults such as aggressive catcalling from men. This is a trivial issue but it affects the self-esteem of some ladies. They cannot comfortably pass some routes because there is a group of men who would give sexualizing remarks about their looks and dress. Society tells her to grow a thick skin. Grow a thick skin to men hurling insulting remarks about how they look? Unbelievable.
Domestic and sexual violence
No form of assault should be accepted but the extreme case is domestic violence. Women suffer from physical abuse from their spouses even those who see physical abuse as a way to exert control over them. This act is very dehumanizing. Cases of women who have lost their lives in this act are countless. Sexual assault is a grave offense that exposes one of the misconceptions men have about women- that they are sex objects meant to please men.
I do not think the Nigerian law has recognized rape between married spouses. Yes, a married wife can rape his wife. The difference between sex and rape is consent. We are not denying that consent can be relative. But forcing yourself on your wife even when she is not consenting to sex is rape. You are taking a toll on her- you do not care about her feelings because you want to satisfy your desires.
The gender preference in the Labour Market
A woman has to work twice as hard as a woman to bag some roles. She has to prove she is fit for the job- her gender seems to be a disqualifying factor. The Nigerian women’s mental health is at stake because of this lot. You hear sayings like this position is for men alone. Women are not capable of carrying out this job effectively.
Another factor that puts the average woman at a seeming disadvantage is the time a woman is supposed to be building a career is her fertile period. She should be making kids according to her biological clock. She bears the burden of raising children more such that she puts her career to do so. A regular woman might be too jaded to get back to her career at this stage
Regardless of this stronghold that sometimes weighs a Nigerian woman down, she manages to stay afloat. It is our responsibility to make life easier for humans, particularly women in this case. No one should be left out of the inclusivity game. Let us not wage war against ourselves but chokehold of life they may not let us breathe.
Discover more from News Round The Clock
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
