AND THEN THEY SAID THAT I WAS MAD.... EPISODE 3

AND THEN THEY SAID THAT I WAS MAD…

By Njonjo Mue

PART THREE

[In PART ONE of the Memoir, I told of the first time that I came face to face with the demon of mental illness as I descended into the hell of depression while trying to settle down for my studies at Jesus College Oxford in the early 1990's.

In PART TWO, After finally coming to terms with my utter failure as a human being, I return home to the love of family at the start my journey of healing that leads to the discovery that it is only when we hit rock bottom that we find the Rock of Ages waiting to receive us, restore us and re-commission us for the good works that God prepared in advance for us to do.]

PART THREE

WHERE DO SICK PEOPLE GO TO GET BETTER?

The months of July to September passed in a blur. After returning home in late June, I lived with my sister, Rosemary. She was a single mother, having been widowed just before I left for Oxford. She lived a modest life with her baby daughter and a nanny in a one bedroom flat in Umoja. Her monthly earnings were a pittance and barely sufficient to meet her own needs, and yet she took me in and ensured that I was as comfortable as possible. I was even afforded the luxury of getting my bath water heated by gas every morning. I knew this was a luxury she could ill afford and yet many are the times that I skipped the bath and the hot water stayed in the basin until it got cold, which only added to my guilt at causing such waste.

My routine in Nairobi remained as it had been in Oxford and London. I remained trapped in the fog of depression. Never being able to properly fall asleep at night and not being fully awake by day, I was lost in my own twilight zone and was exhausted by the burden of living. I would still wander aimlessly daily, covering unimaginable distances by foot in the Eastlands estates of Umoja, Kayole, Komarock, Donholm, Buruburu, Harambee, Jericho, Uhuru, Jerusalem, Kimathi and as far away as Bahati. This was in the vain attempt to get away from this painful reality of my ugly self and in the futile hope that this meaningless existence that was such a poor excuse for a life could somehow just fizzle away into nothingness.

I have mentioned how, early during my journey to the abyss, before I abandoned my room and my studies at Jesus College, I had made elaborate plans to take my own life. I had bought a packet of painkillers off the counter at the Boots drug store on Cornmarket Street with the intention of taking them all at once. However, my courage had failed me when I got back to my room and sat staring at the glass of water and the medicine in front of me. I just could not bring myself to pop the pills. And so I broke open all the twenty four capsules and emptied their powder into the glass of water and stirred it, thinking that drinking the mixture would be easier than swallowing the pills.

But as I took the first sip, I thought about my family back home – how my dad and my late mum had struggled and sacrificed to raise me and my ten siblings and give us an education in the midst of so much poverty, how, among all my siblings, and being the last born, I had benefited from the fact that there was a little more money available for me than for my older siblings who never quite made it as far as they could have gone in their own education had there been enough resources. I imagined how my suicide would affect my aging father when he got the news.

Eventually, I abandoned the attempt, leaving the concoction in the glass on the table when I later abandoned my room and became a wandering stranger for two and a half months before finally returning to Nairobi. I have often wondered what, if anything, the room cleaners made of that concoction when they eventually accessed my room to clean it and prepare it for the next occupant.

Although I abandoned this first attempt at suicide, the thoughts of taking my life never really left me but were a constant companion even upon my return to Nairobi. But there was a difference between these latter thoughts and the former ones I had while in England. The first attempt was just a cry for someone to notice my pain and come to my help. I suppose I abandoned the plan when I realised that all the people who could have answered that call were thousands of kilometres away in Nairobi. They would have been helpless to come to my aid once I overdosed and all they would receive was my body for burial. Even in my depressed state, I had the strong sense of justice to consider it terribly unfair to condemn my family to this fate while they had no physical ability to intervene.

The thoughts of suicide while in Nairobi were of a different kind. Suicide was no longer a way to draw attention to my pain but it seemed to be the only way to deal with the pain. For by this time, the depression had become so severe that I literally felt like I had become two different people in one, the outer shell going through the motions of living, and a distinct inner ‘thing’ that was the repository of all my anguish, my failures, and my regrets. The ‘thing’ was the source of such unimaginable pain and I hated ‘it’ so much for that, that I wanted to destroy ‘it’, be forever rid of ‘it’ and at last find rest. The only problem was that the ‘it’ was actually me and the only way of destroying ‘it’ would be to destroy me. The two of us came as a package.

This understanding of suicide was by no means as clear to me at the time as it is now, and as I have explained it here. The clarity has only come with time in the process of healing. At the time, the only reality I knew was such numbing pain that the finality of death was so much more preferable to the struggle to live.

In the years after my recovery and in the course of my healing, I have lost at least two friends to suicide. I have often heard ‘normal people’ speak so insensitively, if not out rightly judgmentally, about the victims of suicide. In the first place, it is archaic that our law still regards suicide as a crime and actually prosecutes people for attempted suicide where one is fortunate enough to survive the attempt. Those who succeed, our society classifies them as having ‘committed suicide’ in the same way that it classifies people as having committed a bank robbery or an assault. This is obviously ridiculous. Depression is a deadly illness, and as with all other deadly illnesses, there are those who unfortunately do not survive it. To say that someone committed suicide is akin to saying that someone committed diabetes or that they are guilty of committing a heart attack. This has to change.

Back in Umoja, my meaningless ritual of spending my days as an involuntary tourist of Eastlands only came to an end on the first day of October 1992. It was a Thursday. Early that morning, before I set off for an unknown destination, my father arrived unexpectedly at my sister’s house accompanied by my brother-in-law, Mike.

“We are here to take you to see a doctor,” my dad did not waste time getting to the point after greeting me.

“But I am not unwell,” I protested, hoping that they would just leave me alone. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the idea of accepting that I was seriously ill and in need of medical intervention did not appeal to me. This is not unusual in a society where mental illness is still the subject of so much stigma. However, my dad and brother-in-law seemed to have come on a mission and were not so easily deterred.

“Let the doctor be the judge of that,” said Mike, gently but firmly. “Please get ready so that we can go.” He left no room for negotiation. I took a quick shower, got dressed and soon, we drove off in my brother-in-law’s car towards Aga Khan Hospital. Once we arrived at the Doctors Plaza, we headed for the office of the famous psychiatrist, Dr Frank Njenga on the second floor. He welcomed us into his spacious office and after a quick chat, he referred us to his associate, Dr Anna Nguithi.

Dr Nguithi greeted us and then asked me to step out briefly so that she could speak to my dad and brother-in-law, Mike. After ten minutes, I was called in to re-join them in her office. I sat quietly on a seat next to my dad as she tried to engage me in conversation.

“Njonjo, my name is Dr Nguithi,” she introduced herself in a gentle voice full of genuine concern. “How are you feeling?”

“I am OK,” I forced myself to say, as usual labouring to make my voice heard above a weak whisper. My thoughts of self-condemnation continued to race. I wished she could just leave me alone and send us on our way home where it was easier for me to continue trying to be invisible.

“Your dad tells me that you are a very intelligent young man,” she told me. “Is it true that you recently won a scholarship to Oxford after getting your law degree and becoming an advocate?” she asked. She clearly had received a thorough briefing in the short time I had been waiting outside, but it sounded to me like she was describing someone else whom I vaguely remembered as having been a part of my existence a long, long time ago. I did not have the energy to answer her.

“But the person sitting before me is not the Njonjo everyone knows,” she continued, sounding more like a concerned elder sister than a psychiatrist. “You are very sick, Njonjo, and do you know where sick people go to get better?” she asked gently.

“To the hospital,” I heard myself whisper.

“Yes, to the hospital,” she repeated. “And that is where you are going now.”

I learned later that my father had initially tried to persuade Dr Nguithi to let us go home to prepare for admission and return the following day (no doubt he needed the time to look for money to pay the deposit), but she had said that I was so depressed that it would have been gross professional negligence on her part to allow me to go anywhere else apart from directly to a hospital ward. And so, as soon as we left the Doctors’ Plaza, we drove to Avenue Hospital on First Parklands Avenue where I was admitted under Dr Nguithi’s care.

As soon as I changed into hospital clothes and got into bed, I was given an injection. It must have been a powerful drug, for no sooner had I been injected than I started to pass out. Just as I was falling into a deep sleep, my father’s voice came to me as if in an echo from a distant place, although he was standing by my bedside.

“I love you, Njonjo,” he managed to say.

Now, my dad was one of those old-school fathers who never verbalised their love for their children. We were supposed to figure out that he loved us by what he did for us, especially by providing for the family.

The fact that I was hearing these four words, that other children took for granted, from him for the very first time in my 25 years of life had me alarmed. It finally led me to admit that I must have been very sick, and that my poor dad was desperately trying reach his son through the deafening silence of the desolate midnight of depression that had enveloped me ever since I returned from Oxford at the end of June.