It is a grim confession. There is no priest, rosaries or burning incense. The mother still blurts out, not because she is seeking atonement but as a matter of fact, wearing a face devoid of emotions.
“I wanted to commit suicide. I wanted to end my misery and that of my unborn child,” Jane Anyango, a mother of two, pours her heart out.
Anyango does not have a house. She lives in the alleys of Pipeline estate in Nairobi but at the time of the interview she was putting up with a friend.
Dressed in a white blouse and black skirt and dropping the deadpan look, she packs some emotions and anguish in her voice.
“Life has been so hard, I can’t afford rent. I have no money to buy food for my children. I do not have support, it’s just me, my children and well-wishers. I currently live with my friend but I do not want to overstay my welcome because my friend has her own family and responsibilities,” says Anyango.
She says she fell out with her husband last year when she was six months pregnant with their second child.
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“After my husband left, I thought of getting rid of the pregnancy, but I was already six months in so I couldn’t abort it. I just couldn’t,” she says as tears well in her dreary eyes.
It appears when it rains in Anyango’s life, it pours. Early this year after delivering, she was evicted from her house.
“After breaking up with my husband I rented my own place. Hell broke loose when I lost my job due to the pandemic. So I was evicted. I was devastated and I wanted to kill myself,” she confesses as she looks away.
The Kenya Red Cross Society tele-counselling helpline 1199 came in handy for Anyango as she desperately reached out for help.
“I saw the help number on TV. I decided to call because I knew I had reached a breaking point and I was falling apart. All I wanted was to end my life. I just wanted to leave this world. And I was going to take my newborn with me, but the counselling worked,” she says.
Anyango says the counselling made her realise that she was not the only one going through challenges, better days are coming and there’s always a silver lining in every situation.
For seven years, she had worked in several companies, rising through the ranks to become a supervisor. However, that was shattered within a month after the pandemic struck.
Kenya Red Cross data mined from the counselling and support centres shows key emerging issues as mental health, stigma, gender-based violence, anxiety, fear and depression, unplanned pregnancies and relationship problems.
Majority of victims, like Anyango, are female aged 12–18. Kenya Red Cross reports that women accounted for 61 per cent of all sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) cases reported between April and October last year. The statistics indicate that 51 per cent of the callers were women, compared to 41 per cent men.
For Anyango, just like millions of other Kenyans, domestic violence coupled with stress pushed her to the edge.
Sunday relief
All through, her pallid voice was competing with the uproarious noise from the vehicles and churches around. She has had to learn to swim against the current.
Since it was Sunday, she says, she had attended a church service in Pipeline. Sundays bring some temporary relief as she immerses herself in a promise of a better, painless afterlife advanced by the preachers.
Several kilometres away, we meet a 23-year-old man. Same problems, different circumstances.
He has requested anonymity. Until the pandemic struck, he was a university student pursuing a degree in statistics. However, numbers seem not to add up for him.
For about two months now, his family does not know where he is. Life literally pushed him over the cliff.
“I ran from home after we had a quarrel with my family members. I spent about a week in some bush before I moved to Murang’a,” he says.
Although he was lucky to get some casual work at a construction site, he says it has been a difficult life away from home. He has had to devise new ways to survive.
“I work during the day in a construction site. At night, I work as a guard for the same construction site. Through that, I get a place to sleep and an extra coin,” he explains.
He now hopes to change his course of life and go home someday. But before that, he would like to make some amends and tighten some loose ends on his side.
“I am still working on myself. I am also saving some money to go back to school and pursue a counselling and psychology course. Through that I believe I will be able to help someone else in my position,” he adds.
Psychologists say there has been a steady rise in mental health cases since the early days of the pandemic.
In May 2020, two months after the pandemic hit Kenya, the World Health Organisation (WHO) predicted a global mental health crisis triggered by the coronavirus. The announcement prompted the Ministry of Health to urge Kenyans to take reasonable steps to avoid getting caught up in the crisis.
The uncertainty brought on Kenyans by the Covid-19 pandemic, unable to fully participate in social life, compounded by the loss of jobs and anxiety about the future, exacerbated the already poor mental health state of the nation.
On April 22, Health Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe announced a toll-free line that would help people battling depression. The Kenya Red Cross Society also established the Tele Counselling helpline, 1199.
A psychologist working with the Kenya Red Cross, Hannah Ndegwa, explains: “The relationship issues came out strongly. Most victims were youth between the ages of 20 and 30. Issues that arose were relationships, separation and unwanted pregnancies that led to suicidal thoughts.”
Ndegwa says most youth ended up with unhealthy coping mechanisms like drug abuse due to depression. In January, they experienced a huge number of cases from the youth who wanted to die by suicide.
“Due to the immediate measures put in place to contain the virus, many had to be accustomed to the new environment. As a result, fear of the unknown and confusion was on the rise,” says Ndegwa.
She narrates how some of the cases were “hard nuts to crack” while dealing with callers who sought help.
“A client once called our line crying, saying she had bought some poison and was ready to take it once we were done talking. At some point, I could hear some clatter as if she was trying to open the substance. However, we managed to cool down the client,” she says.
However, Ndegwa says people are embracing counselling, especially Tele-counselling, but a lot of sensitisation still needs to be done.
“With support and funding the mental health battle can be won,” she says.
Alex Ayoo, Kenya Red Cross National Youth Programmes Coordinator, explains how the digital platform played a big role in ensuring the youth coped with the pandemics’ uncertainty.
“When schools were closed and people were at home and looking for ways to cope, we were able to think through this and leverage on digital capacities. So we were able to create digital platforms and brought the Red Cross club online, where young people from primary and secondary schools could come and interact at the same time learn from each other as well as have a counsellor on call,” says Ayoo.
He says the counsellors were able to pick what the children were going through and what stood out was anxiety, gender-based violence, rejection and others going through tough economic situations at home.
One in five of those infected with Covid-19 is either battling stress or depression or both. In the US, for instance, the pandemic has tripled the share of people who reported symptoms of anxiety or depression.
The pandemic has exerted considerable pressure on public mental health, not just in Kenya but also globally. With proper attention to this simmering crisis, the worst can be avoided.
A report by the Ministry of Health has identified depression and suicide as the leading mental health illnesses. However, the report notes poor documentation of mental illnesses by health workers, as all neurological related conditions are lumped up together.
A report compiled by a task force led by Dr Frank Njenga found that globally, one person dies by suicide every 40 seconds. Other illnesses mentioned are substance use disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and other psychoses.
Unlike other illnesses, the greatest impact of mental ill-health does not lie solely in the number of persons who die from the disease, but from the number of years lived with the disability.
Ironically, Kenya’s penal code has criminalised mental illness, codifying that attempted suicide is a crime punishable by jail sentence. This means Kenyans who suffer the severe pain inflicted by depression are further traumatised by the society, which views them like criminals.
Section 226 of the Penal Code defines attempted suicide as a misdemeanour. Under Section 36 a misdemeanour is punishable with imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years, a fine or both.
In one of his articles on decriminalising suicide, Lukoye Atwoli, the Dean of the Medical College at Aga Khan University, says one of the biggest problems in Kenya is over-using legal solutions in all spheres of decision-making, and the under-involvement of other professionals in designing social and political interventions.
“By the time someone is overcoming the inbuilt survival imperative and making a serious attempt on their own life, they have reached the end of their coping ability and feel that suicide is the only available solution,” says Prof Atwoli.