Mental Health in the Age of Disconnection
On Mental Health Awareness Week, Poise observes that despite material progress, suicide rates exceed war deaths globally, while social media amplifies young people's dissatisfaction. In Cameroon specifically, stigma and cultural taboos prevent open conversation about mental illness, leaving sufferers isolated.
This week is Mental Health Awareness Week. We are living in a world where although technology and new discoveries in science are making some of the previous worries of mankind (like large-scale famine, pandemics, and natural disasters) less and less disastrous, an increasing number of people are suffering from the scourge of bad mental health.
Today, more people die from suicides every year than they do from all the global conflicts in the same year. And social media is exacerbating the incidence as many young people, especially, are dissatisfied with their lives when they compare that with what their peers are living or showing off on social media.
We, Cameroonians, also live in a society where there is a taboo on this issue and people have not learned to openly talk about their mental health problems. Talking to a therapist is seen as thing for white people and people will openly shun you for appearing weak.
We are also living in a plastic and material world where society is breaking apart and we are becoming isolated beings and that human touch and presence is beginning to go away.
Luckily, the conversations around mental health are changing and we are beginning to talk more and more about it. We at PoiseSocial are joining our voice and our platform to all those using theirs to create awareness around this issue.
We are joining some pictures to this post that could help you tackle these issues whenever you feel confronted by them. Take care of yourselves
- Team Poise.
The post speaks to a moment—mid-2019—when mental health conversations were beginning to shift globally, yet remained deeply constrained in Cameroon by shame, medicalization as a Western concern, and the isolation of rapid modernization. Social media was intensifying comparison and anxiety, particularly among youth.
The piece names a real tension: material and technological progress do not guarantee emotional or psychological wellbeing. Its local specificity—the Cameroonian resistance to therapy, the equation of mental health care with Western weakness—captures a cultural barrier that many in the region still navigate. The call to create space for conversation remains urgent, as stigma persists.