Theme Of Mental Health Issues In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

Bang. A gun goes off, and a girl lies dead on the floor. She had been having these thoughts for awhile now. Her mental health issues were too severe to handle. She had not thought to seek help to get rid of the thoughts going through their mind. It had never even crossed her brain. She did not want to be thought of as an “attention seeker” or “weak.” This constantly happens in the community. People in the community start feeling depressed and decide not to talk to anyone about it. They see it as shameful. This leads to suicide. When people in society arrive at mental health problems, they decide not to talk about their feelings because it is seen as a stigma in the community; therefore, these people take their own lives in order to solve the problem. Things like depression always come with a stigma attached to them. People are scared to tell other that they are depressed. They have a decent reason to feel this way. Humanity has this idea that people with mental health issues are “dangerous” or that they inflict their issues …show more content…
In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, the character Okonkwo decided to take his own life. Even though he took his life because of the action's he did, his act of hanging himself from the tree was still seen as something that Okonkwo should almost be punished for even though he is dead. When Okonkwo's body was taken down from the tree, clansmen from another village were sent to clean up the body. It was considered "an abomination" for a man to take his own life; therefore he is unworthy of his own clan cleaning up his body (Achebe 207). All of this goes to show how humanity takes actions of mental illness or mental illness itself and treats it like something that is undignified. Okonkwo's act and how people reacted to it is just another example of how people in society see mental health problem as something that should be