 It is me, and in me it is considered the mental awareness month. So we have a psychologist in the building, she goes by the name Wilkista Juma, and she'll be telling us, we'll be talking about mental awareness, mental health, and just getting into it a bit and making sure that we are fine and checking out for our friends. Are we together? Wilkista, how are you? I'm okay. Welcome to the show. Thank you. So kindly introduce yourself, maybe tell us what it is that you do and where you work maybe. Okay, I'm Wilkista Juma, a counselling psychologist. Yeah. I work at Zittuck University as the student affairs officer in charge of placement and counselling of course. Yes, I'm so happy to be here today. We're happy to have you as well. So before we even get to mental health, I know you've had our discussion over here, and we're just asking young people out there, because it is young people who are watching this station, how would they want to start their marriages? Maybe the legal way or come with me. What are your thoughts about that and being a counsellor dealing with students, what have you encountered? Of course the legal way. Thank you. You want to be sure about what you're doing. There's courtship, friendship, and which leads to marriage. You just can't go stay with someone that you don't know whether you're friends, whether you're... I mean you have to be sure of what you're doing in that relationship. Yeah. Yes, of course it's a process, but legal way. The legal way. All right. Okay, okay. Meskia kutoka kwa psychologist mania. So let's get into mental health. Maybe what is being mentally well or being mentally healthy? When you talk about mental wellness, it's about you being able to do your stuff, run your life, do the things you usually do in the normal way without people feeling like you're going out of the normal. Yeah. It's about you feeling okay like psychologically, emotionally, and your behavior. It's about your thoughts and your thinking, the way you are behaving. The thoughts makes you feel something, then you feel your feelings and then behavior. Yeah. So it's a three thing. Three things. So it's the thoughts, the behavior, and... Your thoughts first. Your thoughts. Then you feel. Then you feel. Then you act. Then you behave. So it's about how do you think, how do you feel, and how do you act? I don't know. All right. So how would you support someone who is mentally well? Or how would we know them if they may be amongst us? You know them? Sometimes when you're having mental problems, the people who are close to you are able to tell you that the friends talk about it, family talk maybe about it. You feel it. You think. Okay. Today maybe I'll be able to explain to you how your thoughts are supposed to process things and how to know when they are distorted and the way you are feeling. Is it right to feel this way? When is it wrong? Or when are you having mental problems? And is it right to behave this way? Especially behavior. Most people will look at the behavior. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. They will look at your behavior and say kuna kitumbaya is something wrong with this person. But before the behavior, what are you thinking? What are you feeling? Yeah. Okay. When it comes to men, you've said that people will notice and we will get to see that. Maybe what are some of the conditions that mentally unwell people have? For conditions like symptoms? Mentally, kognitive. You will start thinking in a way that is not maybe okay. There are extremes. Extremes are when you start hearing voices. Yeah. Okay. You start hearing voices, people talking to you, telling you things or you start thinking in a way that other people will tell you that you are not okay. We call them delusions. Yeah. Delusions. We have different types of delusions. I don't want to use the kong terminology. Maybe if I give like two examples. Yeah, please. We have delusions of glanda whereby you start imagining you have power. You know, you start... Superpowers. Superpowers to your superman somehow. When you start thinking, you start believing maybe you are the president of the republic, people know that you are not. You start some kind of power. You imagine that you have that power that you don't have. Suddenly you become that. Very rich. You become Bill Gates. Yeah. So... And you have delusions of persecution. But you feel like people... Are you seeing this? People feel like people are following them. Yes. They are following you. You are working at a place and people are like... Someone just start believing weird. People are after me. You know what you want. It's okay. Mazuri. Okay. Yeah, maybe there is something wrong with you. So the thought process is changing. Yes. So you start talking about things that are not real. That is maybe on the extreme side. But you can also feel very, very stressed. Very stressed. We have stress. We have depression. That's on another level. Sometimes if you are so stressed to the extent you cannot do your normal things well, maybe you are moving from this stage to a more mental situation. Feelings when you start feeling like you don't want to has a shit with people completely. You want to lock yourself in your room. Maybe you are at home. You don't want to talk to your parents. You want maybe with your gadgets. Socially you isolate yourself. Maybe there is something that is coming up. Then you see you withdrawn socially. You don't want to... You are not excited over the things that usually excite you. Like you used to love football and then suddenly you don't want to go. You don't want to watch that game. You don't want to play that video game you used to like playing. You want to keep to yourself. Maybe there is a problem. There is a problem. Emotionally you feel like people don't love you. Then you start feeling very sad. You get so irritable. You start getting angry at things that are not... Even people are like, Hey, you need to take it over. How come you are so angry at that? You are so angry. You are in a relationship. You are shouting. You are shouting at people, at your spouse if you are married. It's your girlfriend. You are shouting at her. You can even become physical. You are physical. Sometimes you start feeling like you want to harm yourself. Or you want to harm the other person. Maybe someone else. You can even feel suicidal when it gets to a different level. So there are those feelings. And behavior wise we have conditions that people will just notice you are out of your mind. When you start picking papers you see. You start doing things, you become violent. As in you go to where people are, you start fighting people. Maybe that is on the extreme side. But somehow behavior is people will also know. They will know. That there is something off. Something is not right. Something is off. What causes mental illness? Mental illness is caused by different things. Do you know that even the experiences, your normal life experiences can cause mental problems? It doesn't have to be hereditary. It is. One of them, the biggest is genetic heredity. You find that if say in your family there is someone, an uncle, an aunt, your grandparents had problems. Noticeable. Sometimes you keep on but people didn't know that it was. Yeah, it is mental. That guy used just to keep to himself. That guy used to not like doing things or dealing with people, didn't love social life. Maybe the person had a head up. There is a history in your family. So when you come for cancelling, the first thing is to check the history. So your genes, hereditary factors, those are point number one. Yeah. That in your family lineage, is there a person who ever behaved in a way that people felt it was not right. So that comes number one. Number two could be there is a problem in your brain. In your brain, in that some hormones are not okay. The way your brain is, it is not. That is biological, because it's all about your head and the way it functions. So if it is not functioning well, somehow you will develop this problem. And you have environmental. Environmental maybe you are living in a situation where you are so stressed. You are stressed always. Say, let's talk of GBV, a woman who is in a marriage where she is abused. Or a man is abused. Nowadays both. Both ways. Both ways. You are abused in a relationship. Be it physical, be it emotional, be it any kind of abuse. You can easily, it can easily lead you into mental problems. That you are so stressed that your brain at some point now starts having problems in the environment. Or just living toxic friends, toxic people, toxic family. That can lead to mental problems. Or the time they tell you you are bad, negative things. It's good to avoid such environments. Toxic environments. And then we have people who develop these problems because of the way they were brought up. When they were young, maybe they were abused. Something happened, rape, sodomy, or they were exposed to very severe, severe kind of stress or trauma. So they experienced what we call PTSD, post trauma. Yeah, post trauma to disorders. So they started having problems. Because of what you went through as a child. As a child, yeah. You grew up maybe with a relative who was abusing you physically, was always telling you cannot make it, making you feel less than you are. Than you are, yeah. Yes. You can even get stressed by living with a boyfriend who is physical, always abusing you. How can we support people who are okay, before you even get to the support. What are the extremes of mental illness? Are there things that are very, like how do we move from, this is, is there a level of that is very extreme or very little and are both valid? Of course, yes. We have levels and we have different types of of mental illnesses. Like for instance, I don't want to place one mental problem to be higher than the other. But we have cases like schizophrenia, which get to the level we call psychosis whereby now you are not able to operate normally here. So I would maybe place it on a different level. We have depression, we have bipolar, which is actually some kind of depression. But we have stress, the normal stress. We have anxiety to certain levels. We have anxiety that needs medication and we have anxiety maybe that can be dealt with. And we have different ways of dealing with these things depending on how severe a situation is. And sometimes you are just getting into a mental problem that can be sorted. You can either sort it yourself, you can go for psychotherapy, counseling or you can get a medication. So if today I realize that, okay fine, I am stressed, but the way I am feeling, it's not usual stress. What do I do? Or how do I know that there is a problem here that I need to deal with? What do I do? Who do I go to? Number one, you have to be self aware. Self aware about your own mental health and the people around you because they also determine your health, your mental health. So you have to be aware. You have to make sure that you are okay, but you cannot take care of others if you are not okay. If you are not okay. Taking care of yourself. So number one, you have to take care of yourself. Be aware. Know that once you've taken care of yourself, check the symptoms. Like I've said, when you check you have issues with mood, eating habits by the way, you are overeating or you are not having the appetite to eat, sleeping problems, you are oversleeping or you are not sleeping at all, irritability and all those. It is time to check the importance for awareness. People should be aware of what to look at. Now the moment you realize that okay, here I am and I'm having these symptoms, you see, then what next? The next thing is maybe to seek for help. I said psychotherapy, you can go for a counselor. You can go for like young people we are talking to, go to a counselor even in college like you see at Zitec there is the office that deals with that particular problem. Yes. If we notice that maybe you are having a problem people, the other students notice that maybe there is something that you are doing that is not okay or the lecturer has noticed they send you to that particular office. So that is the way it should be done. The people around you should be able to know that. Uyuza sa there is something which is not right and then they help. Okay, yourself you should be able to know that why am I getting so irritable? Why am I getting so angered? Why am I feeling the way I'm feeling? Why am I hearing voices? You know sometimes you can hear voices because you've taken drugs. Yeah. Marijuana, cocaine, they have that effect. Yeah, that effect on them. Which can also lead to mental illness by the way the drugs they can make you have or they can trigger. They can trigger if you have those genes then they trigger you and they are having those mental problems. So it's about yourself. It's about checking yourself. It's about checking your friends. After you've checked yourself, you've checked your friends then you know where to, either to send them to a psychologist where they can be helped. And then they self-care. You have to take care of yourself. I say avoid toxic people. Yeah. Toxic environment and then eat well. Of course, eating well and exercising by the way. It's not like the way nutritionists say that you should eat well and keep fit. No, no, no. It also has a mental impact. Yeah. So you eat well, you take care of your body. It is all about from your physical, physiological and all that. Yes. So how easy is it to get access to a counselor? Because I think these days there are so many people who are depressed. Let's just leave aside the extreme cases. Because people are depressed out here and maybe as students, students can easily access counselors in their schools. So what about people who don't have schools and you need a counselor where do you have somewhere, maybe you can advise people that they can get counselors there? Yes. We do have, apart from schools, these schools nowadays it's mandatory that we must have those officers in the tech. We have our own office work dealing with church. Then the government also has done something, I think there's a toll free number whereby if you just google it, you'll see it. You check and see that there's a place whereby you can just ask for a counselor and it is provided. There's a number that you just dial and you get a counselor. If you're having those symptoms, especially if you're feeling suicidal, you see, you know you can get a mental problem, you get to a point where you feel you want to commit suicide. Never take that young people, never take that lightly. The moment you start telling yourself you feel like you want to commit suicide, it's a red flag. Yeah, it's a very big red flag. A very big one. So there's a toll free number you call. Kenyatta Hospital has a youth center whereby you can go and you get mental help for free. And maybe at the level of five hospitals, there's always a psychologist placed there for that because of the need that we have now. Mental health is a serious problem. It's a serious problem. Yeah, so how can we create awareness for mental illness so that people can be more aware and be able to take care of themselves and maybe their family and friends who might have a problem? Yeah, awareness. Like now that's, I think that's what we are doing in such forums. And then what we do, like I'll just give an example of where I work. We take that initiative to help even the youth that are not with us out there. Yeah. Just like last week, we had that program at Nyayo Estet. Just go talk to those people, those who have cleared high school, we tell them about mental health, what to look for, to know that you are having a mental health problem and where to seek help. Like to seek help. Yes, so that is the way we can create awareness. Going out there and telling people that mental health is real, bringing such forums in your studios, telling people that it is real. And then maybe in institutions, that's where most young people are to tell them that this is happening. And the government I think is also doing a lot about mental health. Yes, people are realizing it. Yeah, it's very real. Yeah, and unlike the olden days where maybe what we want to say is we are in a rogue or something, like people are more open to knowing that mental illness is real and taking action about it. So I want us to wind up and before we do, maybe if you have a word of advice to the young people who are watching and maybe all the generation talk to them about mental illness and just sum up. Mental health illness is real. Very real. It is your responsibility to take care of yourself and the people around you. If you notice you're having the symptoms I've talked about, just seek help. Seek help before it gets too late. Yes. All right. So thank you so much for coming, Wilkista. We appreciate your time. I'm sure people have learned a few things about mental illness and they are more aware. And just like just as you've said, it is our responsibility to take care of ourselves. Is there any number maybe you can give for someone who wants to reach out for something, for advice, for guidance? If you're comfortable with it. Maybe you can write an email to Wilkista Juma. At ztec.se.ke or you can maybe call me. You can be of assistance or I can maybe send you somewhere. Yeah. If I give my number. 710. Yeah, you can. Kamerastri. 0710. 762476. All right. Thank you so much, Wilkista. We appreciate your time so much. And like I said, we have learned a few things about mental illness. It is serious and you need to watch out for the red flags. Are we together? Take care of yourself. It is your responsibility. And if you notice something is off, sick help. You've already had to wear places you can you can find, you can easily access counselors and sick help. Thank you so much. We are taking a short musical break. Don't you go anywhere.