The cinema of Nigeria informally referred to as Nollywood is the Nigerian film industry which has grown quickly in the last two decades to become the second-largest film industry in the world in a number of annual film productions, placing it ahead of the United States and behind only Indian cinema. Nollywood is Africa’s largest movie industry in terms of value and the number of movies produced per year. Nollywood exploded into a booming industry in the late 90s and pushed foreign media off the shelves. It is now an industry marketed all over Africa and the rest of the world. In 2009, UNESCO described Nollywood as being the second biggest film industry in the world after Bollywood in output and called for her support as the second largest employer in Nigeria. Most Nollywood films are soap operas that portray the typical Nigeriansocietal values concerning various issues of life. To the simple mind, these movies just educate and entertain but a more critical review would show that movies reinforce tendencies, help to sell a brand and entrenchStereotypical perceptions. Well-trained teachers counsel that we tend to remember about 30 per cent of what we see and that visual inputs have a very great influence on how we perceive things which explains the rationale for Modern educational instructional strategies emphasising visual aids. The role of the media and especially the cinema cannot be underestimated in health promotion as it reflects and also shapes public attitudes and values in relation to illness. The lifeblood of any culture is the values it espouses which develop over time into practices that find expression through our traditional institutions or may assume an intellectual dimension as discourses. The media and in particular Nollywood as a potent vehicle of values is very crucial in the public discourse of mental health issues. Erving Goffman defines stigma as signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier. Such signs were either ‘cut’ or ‘bunt’ into the body and advertised that the bearer was a slave, a criminal or traitor, someone to be avoided in public. The person with a stigma is more often defined as somehow less than human and to justify the stigmatization human beings tend to construct a theory as a basis of explanation. The stigmatization theory often dwells strongly on dangerousness, culpability and pollution. Our stereotypes concerning mental illness may have started in childhood reinforced in adulthood by the cinema. The media is a powerful source of information about mental health issues with tremendous potential for perpetuating the perception of stigma. Dr O.FAina, a psychiatrist has studied mental illness and cultural issues in west African films by analysing the contents of those films which are majorly centered on African culture and His findings were complemented by a more recent investigation by Dr Olayinka Atilola, also a psychiatrist, who specifically examined the frequency and modes of framing mental illness in the Yoruba genre discovered that 27 of the 103 films he studied contained scenes depicting mental illness. The most commonly depicted cause was sorcery and enchantment by witches and wizards as well as other supernatural forces hence the mode of treatment is magical and supernatural healing. They were usually treated in shanty mental asylums and sufferers depicted as dirty and retarded.
I am of the opinion that as our film industry gets more sophisticated and expanded; the producers need to realise the enormous responsibility this confers on them as potent agents of change and in particular for mental health advocacy. While some elements of our culture are mental health protective; there are practices within our culture that can accentuate stigma, frustrate health-seeking behavior and promote some ineffective treatment approaches that may be harmful. The sick role according to Parsons is the nucleus that feeds our stereotypes and our health-seeking behaviors irrespective of our level of education.
Our films can be arranged and produced in a way that interrogates our traditional sick role prescriptions in the light of emerging effective treatment modalities. The exaggerated supernatural causative theory of mental illness as a consequence of wrongdoing can only worsen the stigmatization of mental illness, encourage non-compliance with treatment in the hospital, absconding from admission and outright inhuman treatment of the mentally ill. Nollywood producers can consult with stakeholders in the mental health field as they develop their scripts such that a balanced view can be projected. Nollywood can borrow a leaf from productions like ‘House’ ‘Casualty’, ‘Grey’s anatomy whose production adopt painstaking professional precision in acting medical scenarios without compromising our peculiar, health-promoting cultural beliefs and practices that the orthodox medical practice may not have in her curriculum thus helping to forge a synergy.
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