The underreported mental health of African Entrepreneurs
The mental health challenges of African entrepreneurs are severely underreported. I'm changing this by collecting primary data, starting with Nigerian entrepreneurs, that will be analysed and published in an academic journal. Please complete this survey if you’re a Nigerian entrepreneur and share it with your friends. Why am I doing this?
About 10 years ago, I made a conscious career switch from medicine to entrepreneurship. During my time in medicine, it was commonplace to hear people talk about the risks to your mental health while working as a doctor. Factors like long work hours, anti-social shifts, weighty responsibilities, and more contributed to the high risk of mental health difficulties like anxiety, depression, and even suicide. This regular chatter, along with the doctor's own training in psychiatry and psychology, means that doctors are more aware of mental health challenges and how to cope with them. Despite this awareness, the prevalence of depression and suicide among doctors is still relatively high. A recent Medscape survey of doctors in the U.S., for instance, revealed that over 21% of U.S. physicians have depression.
In Africa, there’s similarly significant awareness of mental health challenges among doctors. There is a ton of academic research to support this awareness—over 300,000 hits on a simple Google Scholar search.
This is not the case for African entrepreneurs. Having navigated the switch myself, the nature of the job as an African entrepreneur has felt just as stressful as my experience working in medicine; however, the chatter on mental health among African entrepreneurs is muted. I thought this was just my own limited experience so I decided to search the research literature. I was shocked to not find a single hit on Pubmed, a premier academic search engine, when I searched for depression in African entrepreneurs.
To have no academic data on such an important phenomenon is bewildering. The global prevalence of depression in Africa is about 4.5%, and odds are that African entrepreneurs must experience these challenges yet no significant research has been published on it.
This is not the case further afield. UC Berkeley data on American entrepreneurs shows that they are twice as likely to have mental health illnesses as non-entrepreneurs.
I imagine that this elevated risk is similar for African entrepreneurs yet no data exists to prove this.
May is mental health awareness month so I’ve committed to gathering data and publishing academic research on depression among African entrepreneurs, starting first with Nigerians. If you’re a Nigerian entrepreneur, please help me better report data on your mental health and the factors that affect it. Please complete this survey and share it with other Nigerian entrepreneurs you know. I need 400 responses so I’ll be really grateful to have your response and those of your friends.
Thank you.