Struggling Along in Nigeria: Depression, Treatment, and Morality

Abstract

In this article, we analyze the multiple ways of moral being with depression in urban Nigeria, including those of the ethnographer. This approach fits recent theorizing in moral anthropology and mental health that aims at uncovering how mental illness and ethical being come into being in between patients and meaningful others. We argue that the Nigerian experience of depression does not follow the Heideggerian model of moral breakdown and ethical performance but is rather a shared experience of struggling along without the ideal of a full recovery. By proposing a radical reconsideration of existing care models that are largely based on cure and correction, struggling along draws attention to the unfinishedness of depression. This is best described as a heightened everyday awareness that lingers in between reflective and unreflective modes of being that comprise both the physical and metaphysical worlds young Nigerians inhabit and allows for moral being with mental health struggles.

Heartbreaking anthropology hurts: Studying fertility rituals while struggling with infertility

“…For once, I let the ugly wounds, scars, and sutures I had always covered up to produce seamless texts show. Keenly poised, as this project is, between the desire to know, delve into, and explain and the deep and enduring agony this curiosity dredges up, in this article, I reveal the toll that research and writing have taken (Otto & van Roekel 2022; Schneider 2020; Berry et al 2017). Even as my reflections served as an additional analytical instrument, they are also part of a fraught methodological and writing labor (Anderson 2021).…”