Mental health, treated like any other medical problem.

What we treat here

• Anxiety: constant worry, racing heart, chest tightness, panic attacks, health anxiety, social anxiety.
• Depression: low mood, losing interest in things you used to enjoy, exhaustion, hopelessness, guilt.
• Burnout and work stress: including the kind that shows up as headaches, stomach pain and insomnia rather than sadness.
• Sleep: trouble falling asleep, waking at three and not getting back, or sleeping far too much.
• Grief: including grief that has become stuck.
• Postnatal depression and anxiety: common, under-recognised, and among the most treatable things we see.
• Alcohol, tramadol, codeine, cannabis and other substances: including if you simply want to know whether your use is a problem.
• Trauma: accidents, violence, loss, or things from long ago that have not stayed in the past.
• Exam and academic pressure, and the stress of emigration plans and family expectation.
• Physical symptoms with no physical cause found: which are real symptoms, not imagined ones.

Worth talking to someone if

• You have felt low, flat or hopeless for more than two weeks.
• You have stopped enjoying things you used to enjoy.
• You are sleeping badly most nights, or sleeping all the time.
• You get episodes of sudden intense fear with a pounding heart.
• You are drinking or using something to get through the day or to sleep.
• You are irritable with people you love and cannot explain why.
• You have been having headaches, stomach pain or body aches and every test has come back normal.
• You had a baby recently and do not feel the way you expected to feel.
• You have thoughts of harming yourself. Please come today.

On the things people worry about

These are the reasons Nigerians give us for not coming sooner. All of them are worth answering directly.

"People will say I am mad." Anxiety and depression are not madness. They are common medical conditions, roughly one adult in every eight worldwide has one right now. You will be sitting in the same waiting area as everybody else, because this is a general hospital and nobody can tell which clinic you are here for.

"It is a spiritual problem." Your faith is yours and we will not argue with it. Many of our patients pray and take treatment, and those two things have never been in competition. Come and let us look at the medical side.

"My employer will find out." They will not. Clinical detail is never shared with an employer. On a corporate plan they receive fitness outcomes and aggregate figures only.

"They will just give me drugs." Not necessarily. Talking therapy, sleep work, lifestyle and treating an underlying physical cause are all on the table. Where medication helps, you will be told what it does, how long it takes and what the side effects are before you decide.

By stage of life

What the first session is like

1. A long conversation, in private. Longer than a normal appointment, because this needs it.
2. Some physical checks and often blood tests — thyroid problems, anaemia, vitamin deficiency and some medicines cause symptoms that look exactly like depression.
3. A discussion of what would help: talking therapy, medication, practical changes, or a combination.
4. A plan, a follow-up date, and a number to call if things get worse before then.

Common questions