With all the crises that the country is
currently experiencing, from rising insecurity to rising debt, it is
easy to feel helpless and depressed. However, depression may just be the
cure for this country, as a book by psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi
reveals.
A history of depression
among leaders, in particular, says the author, has been found to be
extremely advantageous, especially in moments of crisis.
Depression
generates realism, resistance, creativity and empathy, qualities that
are critical when a nation is faced with an impending catastrophe.
Ghaemi
says that all the world’s most effective leaders, including Winston
Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr,
suffered from bouts of depression that enabled them to empathise with
sufferers.
LACKING EMPATHY
As
a result, they made decisions that succeeded in reducing the scale of
other people’s suffering. They were also extreme realists – they saw
reality more clearly than most people, and therefore, were able to
assess danger and risk more accurately.
In his book, A First-Rate Madness,
Ghaemi argues that in times of crisis, nations are better off with
realistic depressed leaders than idealistic happy-go-lucky ones.
Leaders
who are unable to manage a crisis tend to be optimistic and insensitive
to the suffering of others. They often come from privileged backgrounds
where they have not tasted adversity or hardship. They often see
themselves as better than others and seek to preserve their privileged
status.
Could it be that our leaders
have not experienced the kind of suffering that can make them save a
situation in a moment of crisis?
Could
the lack of empathy that our crop of politicians have shown towards the
hardships experienced by ordinary Kenyans be due to their sense of
entitlement that blinds them to the reality of Kenya? Do their
self-preservation instincts extend only to themselves, and not to the
nation?
“If normal, mentally healthy
people . . . run for president they tend not to be great ones,” says
Ghaemi. On the other hand, when the “abnormal” mentally ill leader is
confronted with a crisis or calamity, he rises to the occasion, and
quite often saves a nation.
“Thus
arises the empathetic leader, a person sometimes so arresting that the
rest of us become convinced he must be an other worldly saint, a
uniquely great soul, an anomalous event. He may be all those – but
perhaps the secret is more prosaic: the common yet profound imprint of
depression.”
Such leaders can produce
what the author calls “depressive activism”, which was perfected by
Mahatma Gandhi and adopted by the civil rights leader Martin Luther King
Jr. Both Gandhi and King had attempted suicide as teenagers, suffered
from depressive episodes in midlife, and severe depression towards the
end of their lives.
“They each pushed
the politics of empathy to its limits, and found their followers – the
mass of normal humankind – unable to keep up with them,” writes Ghaemi.
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
Both
used non-violent resistance as a strategy to overcome injustices, such
as colonialism and racism. Their strategies worked, even if this cost
them their lives. King himself admitted that “human salvation lies in
the hands of the creatively maladjusted”. Is the solution then to find
leaders who have endured suffering and depression?
Alas,
in Africa, even deep deprivation, suffering and depression in childhood
does not lead to greater empathetic leadership in adulthood.
While
many African political leaders started off their careers as a reaction
to great suffering and injustices, in the end, their empathy for the
less privileged sections of society waned or disappeared completely as
they became more entrenched within the political elite of their
countries and as they became more wealthy.
Prof
Paul Collier of Oxford University says that while African leaders are
often the product of grievance factors such as colonisation or
marginalisation, greed eventually overtakes their desire to bring about
social or political change. Hence, the activist morphs into a predator
that eats his own people for his own political and economic survival.
We don’t have to look very far to see these predators all around us.
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