Y’all do not realize how many codes ancient Igbo people were cracking? Y'all are just learning this? Even when it came to mental health, they were developing approaches that, in some ways, resemble things we recognize in modern mental healthcare even though their understanding of why mental illness occurred was completely different. The day I started researching precolonial Igbo approaches to mental illness, my mouth was left open. Yes, many conditions were interpreted through a spiritual lens and attributed to gods, spirits, or supernatural forces. But some of the actual practices used to help people were surprisingly familiar. They had practices resembling talk therapy, art-based therapy, music-based interventions, medicinal herbs, and even designated places where people who were too mentally unstable to remain safely with their families could be cared for. Obviously, they didn’t call these things “psychotherapy,” “art therapy,” or “psychiatric facilities.” Those are modern terms. But the parallels are fascinating. What makes it even more interesting is that these practices developed within their own spiritual framework. What could resemble talk therapy, for example, was explained to me as helping guide a distressed person away from harmful or irrational thoughts and toward different ways of thinking and behaving. One historian I spoke with described parts of the process to me, and I remember thinking, “Hold on… this sounds almost like a distant cousin of CBT.” 😂 Not CBT in the modern clinical sense, obviously, but the idea of challenging thoughts and trying to change behavior through changes in thinking sounded remarkably familiar. Other practices involved having people express or depict what they were experiencing so the healer could interpret what spiritual force was believed to be involved and determine the appropriate intervention. Their explanation for why it worked may have been completely different from modern day knowledge, but some of the methods themselves are fascinating to examine through a modern psychological lens. That is what blows my mind. They did not have modern psychiatry, neuroscience, diagnostic manuals, or our current understanding of psychopathology. They were working within the knowledge system available to them (gods, spirits, etc), yet they still developed complex ways of caring for people experiencing psychological distress. I swear, every time I become interested in some aspect of precolonial Igbo society and start digging into it, I leave flabbergasted. It makes me wonder how these indigenous systems of knowledge might have continued developing if colonialism had not disrupted, suppressed, and reshaped so much of Igbo society. When I tell y’all I’m proud of ancient Igbo people, you really don’t understand. The more I research, the more fascinated I become. They were cracking codes despite having limited knowledge.