I have a friend, a young man with a psychosocial disability, who spent a considerable amount of his life in a prayer center. (You may call it a detention center because often time when families take their loved ones there, the expectation is that they are staying there for an unknown period.). My friend is quite open about these experiences. He was once seen in a video documentary, his feet in chains while inside the center. I remember one time I was moderating a session and I was inviting my friend to speak to the audience, and I found myself feeling so emotional and shedding a tear, because all the time I think about the difficulties my friend faces, as a young man with a psychosocial disability.
I have seen a video online, of a famous personality in Kenya. He is in a rehab center and in this video, he is calling upon whoever is ‘responsible for his freedom in the centre, to let him go.’ The personality, well known publicly in Kenya, has previously admitted to having a mental health diagnosis. When I read through the comments, many of those writing think the young man is ungrateful, that he should rather be grateful instead of demanding to be released from the rehabilitation center.
In my rural home, I heard of a lady within the community, who, after experiencing a mental crisis, was not allowed to leave the homestead. I believe the fear of the family was that she would wander around and possibly miss her way home.
Why do I bring up these real-life scenarios of people, who are facing difficult situations by virtue that they experience mental distress. When I reflect on TCI’s 2024 WhatWENeed campaign, Our Rights Our Lives, I think about these three people and millions of other people world over with real or perceived psychosocial disabilities, deprived of their rights, denied their personhood. I write these reflections, aware that people with psychosocial disabilities, those whose stories have been told, and those whose stories have not been told, continue to face numerous rights violations, within their communities, and within institutions.
The young man in the rehabilitation center says, “I just want to go back to building my business…I did nothing wrong by being sick…I handle my illness in the best way I know to, sometimes I fail, and sometimes I succeed…”
Looking at these three instances, there is an aspect of people with real or perceived psychosocial disabilities being curtailed on their decision making. So, they will be chained, they will be locked up, and they will be dismissed when they make requests because others say, ‘that is the illness speaking’, ‘there is no way we can let that person free because they will harm themselves, or they will harm others.’And I remember in 2019 I wrote an article about the then World Psychiatry (official journal of the World Psychiatric Association- Volume 18 Issue 1, February 2019) that had considerable discussions on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Its editorial was titled Saving the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities – from itself and among others suggested amending the CRPD or at least those portions of it that are particularly problematic, with the major bone of contention being the Article 12 on legal capacity.