Mental Health Rights Are Human Rights
We the people with mental health conditions deserve to be treated with dignity and liberty. We deserve to receive support and care that is free of coercion, torture and abuse. We will not be silent anymore.
Make your voice heard.
By sharing your lived experience, you are supporting us at local and international decision-making tables. Our voices are creating a paradigm shift from putting all the power in the hands of the mental health system to ensuring that we are cocreators in our mental healthcare.
The change we can make.
I became the first person with a mental health condition to testify in that capacity before the Nigerian National Assembly on the rights of persons with psychosocial disabilities, and the need for Nigerian legislators to honour the country’s international human rights commitments in the run-up to passing Nigeria’s first mental health legislation since 1958.
It was a game-changer.
It did something that I believe is fundamental to addressing and tackling inequities in the mental health space across the world - Nothing Without Us. People like me were no longer in the shadows or locked up, invisible to our society. We were part of the solution.
Together with Human Rights Watch, and with the support of the Disability Rights Advocacy Fund, we have documented incidences of people with mental health conditions detained, abused and traumatized by the very system that was supposed to protect and care for them. From traditional healing facilities to state-owned government hospitals, the rights of people with mental health conditions are being violated, and this must stop.
