A few months ago, 20-year-old *Karabo  met up with her old school friend at a restaurant in Durban. They had dinner and decided to go for drinks at a bar afterwards.

 The next morning Karabo woke up with a missing tooth. A cleaner at the bar found her sleeping on the toilet seat.

Her underwear was missing, she had no bag and no identification book. She could not recall anything from the night before.

But this happens to her often.

Karabo has Bipolar II disorder. 

Later that afternoon Karabo told her mother that she had gone through another manic episode and did not recall anything from the night before.

Her mother told her to go to church and to see a sangoma within the week. 

“This depression business is nonsense, us black people do not believe in psychology but the power of God.�
Bipolar II is a clinical diagnosis with symptoms of depressive and manic episodes. However, Bipolar II does not include as many manic episodes as bipolar one. 

“Mental health is still heavily stigmatised within the local community in South Africa. It is often not recognised as a legitimate illness that should be treated medically.

This heavily impacts patients from this community,â€� says Karabo.  

Critical psychology in South Africa is an approach within mainstream psychology that condemns the way in which the mainstream school of thought often marginalises local ways of thinking.

Conventional psychology places emphasis on the individual.
In the South African context the phrase umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (this means a person is a person because of people around you) is at the core of the understanding of the self and community.

This phrase means that you are who you are because of your community. 
For many South Africans the self cannot exist exclusively without community.

Therefore to practice an understanding (as mainstream psychology often does) that is only limited to one individual would not be suitable in our local context.  

Before the start of a South African critical psychology school of thinking, mainstream psychology only focused on traditional western practices, which often failed to integrate local understandings of “the selfâ€� into practice. 

South African critical psychology is attempting to include traditional beliefs into mainstream psychological practice.

Karabo had been hospitalised nine times for her suicide attempts.

Her mother had always refused to intervene as she believed that Karabo’s problem could only be treated with a mix of religion and traditional medicinal practices.  

She did her undergraduate degree at the University of Cape Town. She did a BCom Accounting. She wanted to study psychology. 

Her mother refused to allow her to do so.

“Look, white people go to white psychologists and black people just don’t go to psychologists. We pray. Nobody will come to see you my dear. You cannot study psychology.�

The disregard of mental health issues is not only limited to communities and households. The department of health in South Africa has also not adequately prioritised mental health. 

South African Society of Psychiatry (Sasop) reported that mental health disorders are prevalent among 25% of the population. This figure only represents those who have come forward to be diagnosed. 

A study which was conducted by Prof Crick Lund from the University of Cape Town showed that the total loss per year in earnings for South Africans with mental disorders was around R30 billion due to the fact that mental disorder patients are unable to form part of the country’s workforce. 

The figure is starkly contrasted by the government’s expenditure on mental health. 

In July last year, eNCA reported that even though mental health is the country’s third largest disease, only 4% of the national health budget was spent on it.

But, even in light of these shocking figures, Karabo is enthusiastic about critical psychology’s approach to contextualizing psychology and hopes that one day things will be different for people like her. 

“Hopefully by the time I have children, there will be a better understanding towards mental illness.�

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