Attack —
Social essay from Dave Okorafor
Whenever I hear a young Nigerian say an illness is 'an attack’, my heart sinks. It sinks because, if you completely unpack that statement and the mentality behind it, you will uncover many ugly things. The ugly things you will see include self-sabotaging ignorance, dangerous superstition, intellectual anorexia, mental resignation, lack of accountability, and other crippling psychological maladies.
Classifying an illness as an attack means: never patronise orthodox medicine; instead, find a spiritualist - perhaps a suited man clutching a bottle of olive oil, or a native doctor in a dingy corner.
Calling an illness an attack implies that whatever is happening is a mystery and can never be the person’s fault. Someone else, an evil person, must be responsible. This mentality interprets one’s own bowel movement as someone else’s fart. Whatever happens is never our fault; they’re after us.
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This belief completely removes the need for lifestyle adjustment and transfers responsibility to an imaginary domain beyond human control. So, where then do you even begin to proffer solutions?
Calling an illness an attack is also the heartbreaking realization that one’s parents’ investment in education did not work. The mind that strongly believes some illnesses are spiritual attacks has not opened itself to the light of useful education. That needs torchlight.
I can go on and on, but let me stop.
Those who believe that sudden headaches, unexplained weight loss, undiagnosed paralysis, or seizures are spiritual attacks will find my views off-putting, but who cares?
If you feel irked reading this, perhaps you should diagnose yourself properly as someone with an important journey to make with knowledge. And it is not a bad idea to begin that journey pronto. I have contributed to saving a couple of lives by insisting that mental illness is not a spiritual attack and that such conditions are amenable to orthodox medicine. Those individuals did well.
So, before you call an illness an attack, ask yourself: what exactly in the body has been attacked, and how exactly was the attack carried out?
