Searching a way with mental troubles: pathways of ‘illness’, psychiatry and life in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

This thesis follows the lives of people who, by themselves and with others, are making their way while dealing with (past) symptoms of mental illness in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. They do so in relation to a space that was also the starting point of my fieldwork – the psychiatry ward of a state hospital – as well as other therapeutic spaces and the different forms of knowledge and religious experience that the city offers. They also do so in relation to other people – family, friends, acquaintances, healers and doctors – and (changing) ideas about themselves and the lives they wish for. Mental illness, a word I use because my interlocutors (possibly inspired by the hospital) referred to their experience as such, is both an event upon which people reflect and a condition in relation to which they now have to make their lives. How, I ask, do stories and experiences of ‘mental illness’ take shape for and by the people living directly with them, in a context where many possibilities for understanding and therapy are possible? How do ongoing symptoms and memories of mental illness affect living together, ideas about self and the world, and imagined futures?

In my analysis, I closely focus on the singularity and the dynamic and critical nature of my interlocutors’ experiences and ideas, driven by “the need to attend to people’s multiple, compelling concerns and to follow them as they move if we are to grasp what is at stake and how they construe their own experience” (Wikan 1998: 472-473). I follow scholars who problematize the idea that experiences like (mental) illness can be captured in facts or (objective) knowledge, or that we can completely ‘know’ someone else’s experience (Davis 2012, Stevenson 2014, Good 2012, Page 2017). I thus move away from narratives that define mental health in Africa primarily in terms of ‘lack’ (i.e. the global mental health gap) as well as those who search for ‘cultural models’ behind African ideas about illness (see Cooper 2016). Instead, following one of my interlocutors who told me “I am also doing research”, I turn to the different questions, uncertainties, critical reflections and moral experiments (Mattingly 2014) that experience of mental illness gives rise to. I situate these within the wider tensions (Di Nunzio 2019) that are part of living in a modern West African city like Ouagadougou.