Betty Irabor opens up on her mental health struggles and the road to recovery with Pulse

On the outside, it seemed like Betty Irabor had it all and for the most part, she did but therein lay a terrible and silent battle between herself and her mind. Betty tried in vain to self-soothe but eventually, she had to reach out for professional help.

Now, on the road to recovery and with a new lease of life, Betty wants to use her story to inspire others.

Pulse sat down with Betty Irabor to walk us through her mental health journey.

1. Why do you think that now was the right time to share your story?

I’m not sure if I know it’s the right time but 'Dust to Dew' is a book that forced its way out of me, it’s a book that wrote itself. I think it’s very timely because there’s a lot of conversation about mental health and having gone through my own experience,

I wasn't sure if it was something I wanted to put out there but with everything going on, I said to myself, ‘’Do I want to keep my experience to myself or do I want to write about it and let other people be impacted?’ There’s a lot of darkness enveloping people right now and I’ve had my fair share of that darkness so I decided to put the book out and i’m nicely surprised about the reception.

2. What do you hope sharing your story does for the conversation surrounding mental health in Nigeria?

I think there’s always something gratifying when a public figure steps out to say that I’ve been there and done that and there’s no shame. We can all live regardless of the stigma. I think one of the reasons people don't want to share such experiences in the way I have is the fear of being judged, fear of being labelled ‘mad’ because people do not understand mental health and as far as they’re concerned, we are all mad.

I just hope more people will be required to seek therapy, understanding that it is a condition that requires help. When you’re ill, what do you do? You go to a doctor. So when the mind is ill, you go and see a mind doctor. I’m hoping people will feel more liberated and not bogged down by the judgement m of other people and afraid to seek help. It’s alright to say ‘I'm going to see a therapist or a psychiatrist’ without any embarrassment’’. I hope that people can seek help without feeling judged and even if they do judge us, it’s OK, as long as we get the help that we need.

3. When did you first become aware that you may be dealing with depression and how did you feel after that initial realisation?

I’ve always had a sleep problem. I would go to the pharmacy and buy a sleep aid like Valium and Lexotan and it seemed like the most natural thing to do and back then, there wasn’t as much drug control so you just go there and buy your pills. I indulged myself over the years and because it helped me to sleep, I just depended on those. With the benefit of hindsight, I guess there have been other therapies to help me sleep like breathing exercises, nutrition and relaxation techniques but then the easiest thing was to pop a pill. I thought it was just sleep deprivation but it lingered and after a while, with the abuse of the medication, they stopped being effective. I didn’t realise I was slipping into depression until I was 52 when I had the lethal combination of menopause and insomnia; double jeopardy. 

I didn’t have the normal symptoms of menopause like hot flashes. I didn't have most of the symptoms other women have with menopause, it just came with double the dose of insomnia and with that, I have a meltdown. At some stage, the mood disorder started playing up more and then everything changed for me.

4. You mentioned in the book the strong bond that you had with your family members. Why did you feel that you could not share your struggles with them initially?

I didn’t know what I was going through, I didn’t know it was a serious condition. Don’t forget, it wasn’t a conversation that you would hear girls talking about. I thought I could deal with it initially but eventually I started sharing with my siblings and my Mum and even then, I didn’t share the extent of the insomnia and the symptoms of mental health. They just thought I had a sleep problem which most of them thought would pass but mine wasn’t just a little sleep issue, it was huge, it was chronic insomnia.

5. What advice would you give to people who don't have a strong support system and feel like they may be alone in their struggle?

I’ve spoken to a lot of women, and men, who believe that people will not understand what they are going through.Most times, people tend to judge you and think you’re weak when you talk them continuously about issues you’re going through.

That’s when people say to you ‘pull yourself together, power up, just close your eyes and sleep.’ Most times, people don’t talk like they used to. Even on your birthday, people send a message ‘HBD’, people can’t even be bothered to write out the words ‘Happy Birthday’. 

How many of us pick up the phone, call and friend and say ‘How are you doing?’ and beyond that, pause, wait and actually listen to the response. We don't have time to be human anymore, everything is about our gadgets.So, when is the time for me to come and cry on your shoulder especially when you may have problems yourself, and how do we define friendship these days? I tell you something in confidence and somehow it finds its way to social media or some girls conversation? What I went through, if I was calling friends every morning, I’m sure they would have stopped picking my call. 

Luckily, I’ve always had a strong bond with my family and I was able to share my problems with them. Apart from my husband and children, no-one knew the extent of my mental health disorder. I think a lot of people are scared of being discouraged, scared of being judged, a lot of people don’t understand the intricacies of mental health so if I tell you I’m depressed, you probably think I’m just having a bad day.

However I did have great friends during those 7 years in the wilderness and when they asked ‘How are you?’ they actually meant it. They made the time to listen to me talk. 

6. Please explain the role your husband Soni played as you dealt with depression and what advice would you give to partners in a similar position who may feel helpless?

Since going through this issue, when I go to weddings now and watch the starry-eyed couple get to the part when they make their vows in sickness and health, I always say that they don’t even know the vows that they are taking.Nobody actually thinks that there will come a time when their partner takes ill and the first thing they do is to move to the other room because suddenly they become a burden.

I actually understand that vow when I took ill and really I wouldn't judge anyone who cannot stay with their partners in moments of extreme pressure and dependence. You have to love someone so deeply that you want to be with them in the storm and you realise that the vows you took are for moments like this. My husband was with me and he suffered as much as I did even though he didn’t have depression. I think that’s why I had the motivation to pull out of it because at a stage, I looked at my family and asked, ‘do they really need this’? Not that I could help it but it got to a stage that I started wanting to get out of it and save them from what they were going through; it was too much. A mother is the one who holds up the family and when she is going through something, the whole family is too. 

In the afterword he wrote in my back, my husband wrote about his perspective as the husband of someone dealing with depression and the role he believes every man should play when their wives are going through issues be it financial, health or emotional. He explains how couples can deal with their issues without tearing the relationship apart. Mine was easy because when my husband and I made our vows, we meant it and every situation that has come along to test those vows, we have managed to beat it.

7. You mention in the book that even though you were going through what you went through, it never affected your work ethic. How did you find the motivation to keep functioning at such a high level?

I was in zombie mode. I would wake up, pack my things with all the wrinkles and hyperpigmentation from no sleep and antidepressants because work became a need. I just knew I had to keep going. I didn’t want to stop publishing and the other business I did because it was something that gave me purpose. I thought to myself that even though everything else is falling apart, this one must not.

The Genevieve teams would look at me and ask me to take the day off. Sometimes I would go to work and they politely shooed me out. When I had to go to the UK for six weeks, I was really troubled because Genevieve had become my life and I wanted to see it survive. I didn’t want to disappoint anyone by quitting and I kept pushing which I wouldn’t recommend to anyone because it put a lot of pressure on me and delayed my healing process. 

It finally got to a stage that either I died trying to keep everything together or I just gave up and gave up I did. I went to the UK for six weeks and they came up with edition after edition whilst I was away and was so proud that I had grown a team that could take the magazine further.

8. Recovery from depression is not linear. You suffered a huge setback in your healing when your brother Fred passed. What advice would you offer to those who keep suffering setbacks and feel discouraged by it all?

My brother’s death is the part that everybody has to stay strong reading. He was a sickler and I was that sister whom Mum would wake up at 4am and we would take Fred to the hospital We had no car or landline so I would strap him on my back and we would walk. We would all make that long journey to the bus stop and stay there for hours waiting for a bus. He would be grunting, crying out in pain and eventually, we would get to LUTH and wait for a Doctor that never came. We did that for practically all his life. I did not expect that the one that would take his life.

That morning I saw him, he woke up. He was delirious but he smiled. I made sure he was fine before going to a function. A couple of hours later, I was on my way back and I stopped off to buy chinese because he loved Chinese. They told me he was being discharged but I insisted on stopping by with the food. When I got to the hospital, there was a whole lot of drama that they had taken him home and that he was fine. Eventually, my nephew told me he had passed. 

I remember sitting in front of the ICU and seeing someone roll out a body from the mortuary and I lunged forward at the attendant screaming ‘open it, open it’. Even at that moment, I knew I was going to relapse and relapse I did.

For anyone going through depression and things that they have no control over happen, it’s difficult to advise because people process trauma differently. I didn’t handle mine well because I just allowed myself to relapse. It seemed like a good thing for me because I needed something to shield me from the pain of reality. I just ask people to stay strong and see their therapist, their psychiatrist and try and find their safe and happy place.

9. Do you think the state of Nigeria’s health sector is a large contributing factor towards the rising cases of mental health problems and what was your experience like when you sought treatment?

I was essentially a lab rat, I was an experiment in the hands of most of the psychiatrists I saw and I think that one off the reasons that my sojourn in the wilderness of depression lingered was because I was being constantly put on drugs. I think most of them need to learn to humanise mental health and show a human face when they are with a patient. One woman told me that she went to Yaba Neuro Psychiatric Hospital feeling depressed and suicidal and the first thing the psychiatrist said to her was ‘How can such a fine girl like you be depressed?’ which trivialised everything that she was going through. She had to convince them that she was depressed.

I kept going from one therapist or psychiatrist to another looking for answers that never came. Some the drugs simply made me feel worse and some even made me feel suicidal. I think there has to be a wake- up call to the mental institution in Nigeria. I don’t even want to say mental health institution as well as our whole healthcare system. I’m a big advocate of breast cancer through my foundation and i see that many years on, we are still not ready, not knowledgeable, we still don’t have the facilities to treat breast cancer, even in its early stages.

In fact, let’s start with education. There’s so much going on in Nigeria that we cannot start to compartmentalise healthcare without talking about a whole system overhaul. But for now, we need our psychotherapists to apply more analysis, talk and find out more about their patients rather than start prescribing medications that could further trigger suicidal thoughts.