Culture, mental illness and conflict: Thoughts from Colombia
By Mayra Báez Jimeno, AJ+ Global Engager for Central and South America
This post is part of AJ+’s ongoing conversation about mental health, how different communities deal with it and who’s getting left out of the conversation.
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Culture really influences how we relate to illness. In the United States, you might cure a headache with a pill, whereas in my home country of Colombia, we’d probably reach for a traditional herbal tea, just like our grandmothers taught us. Culture influences our relationship with mental illness in the same way: what Americans might easily identify as depression or anxiety we may not perceive as illness.
The concept of mental illness is not embedded in Latin American cultures as deeply as it is in the U.S., and public health policies for mental illness are relatively new in some of our countries. For most of us, it’s not a mental illness unless you end up in the ER for it. And while studies show that 25% of U.S. citizens suffer from a mental illness, I can’t tell you what that number might be in Colombia, because we don’t have the data. But that doesn’t mean young Colombians don’t suffer from mental illnesses like young people everywhere else — we’re also afflicted by anxiety, depression and alcohol addiction.
To take a better look at these differences, I went to La Tadeo University in Bogotá, Colombia, to ask young people about their perspective. Do they view mental illness in the same way as young people in the United States?
When I asked students on campus questions about mental illness, I heard words like “failure,” “problem,” “weird” and “limitation.” Young Bogotanos described mental illness like something foreign that could never happen to them. Even if they were aware of the existence of mental illness, their knowledge seemed more anecdotal — “it happened to someone I know.” It’s not a widely-known concept like it is in the U.S.
Here are some of the things they told me:
“A mental illness is a limitation: when a person can’t do normal things by herself. We don’t speak about it here in Bogota that much, we’re not that interested in people with diseases, mental or physical, and I don’t think we have the resources to take care of them.” (Lorena Rosas, 19)
“I don’t think there’s a taboo surrounding mental illness, we just have other urgent things to worry and talk about.” (Patricia Cruz, 30)
“My uncle suffers from a mental illness, I don’t know its name. What I do know is that he can’t be out of his medicines or he would be a huge problem for my grandma, even [though] he’s about 40 years old.” (Salomón, 22)
“Does a person have to be medicated to classify as mentally ill? I have a friend who behaves really weird, I don’t know if he has an actual disease.” (Cristian, 26)
According to these young people, mental illness isn’t a top priority for the local and national government. They might have a point. Colombia is currently dealing with a peace process intended to end more than 50 years of internal conflict, drug trafficking and wide-spread criminality. It’s also one of the most unequal countries in the world, with more than 30% of its people living in poverty. Given those circumstances, mental illness isn’t a top concern for most people.
If the peace process ends with an agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC rebels, maybe young Bogotanos and Colombians will become more interested in thinking about healing their minds.
