When Mental Health becomes a Whisper in a Screaming World

May. Mental Health Awareness Month.

Yet here I am, trying to gather the courage to write this piece without crumbling under the very weight I’m trying to lift. The world is shouting, but mental health especially in places like Uganda, remains a whisper. A suppressed sigh. A secret confession in the silence of the night.

You see, the trauma we carry as a collective is not always born from war or famine. Sometimes, it’s birthed in boardrooms where young people are told they’re "too vocal" to be employed. It creeps through school corridors where students are flogged for not mastering English. It sits at burial grounds where we bury not just bodies, but our dreams, our truths, our scars, only to dig them up again during the next crisis.

This is what I call herd trauma—that inherited, absorbed, and shared wound we all pretend doesn’t exist. It’s the pain of growing up in a home where no one ever said “I’m sorry” or “Are you okay?” because survival took priority. It’s the weight of being the "strong one" in every circle, even when your bones are quietly breaking.

Mental health doesn’t announce itself in dramatic episodes, it hides in the everyday. It’s the girl who dresses up for church but hasn’t spoken a word at home all week. It’s the boy whose jokes make everyone laugh, but who cries after midnight because no one knows his father calls him useless. It’s the activist who speaks for communities but can't find the strength to speak to themselves in the mirror.

I have walked that path.

There was a time I couldn't distinguish between fatigue and depression. A time when advocacy became a mask. When I was fighting for inclusion, education, justice—but I wasn’t fighting for myself. When I boarded that plane to the U.S. as a Community Solutions Program Fellow, everyone saw the glossy Instagram story. No one saw the weeks before—of fighting thoughts, of self-doubt, of grief. My mother had just passed on in February that year. I smiled through orientation. I cried through the nights.

At the program, we had a healing session led by Dr. Deidre Combs=. She asked us to close our eyes and reflect on our journeys. The room filled with muffled cries, and for the first time, I allowed myself to cry too. Not as a victim. But as someone who had been carrying too much for too long.

It reminded me: healing is not weakness. It is work. It is resistance. It is war.

In Uganda, we’ve normalized emotional neglect. You find someone lying in bed for days, not eating, and we say, “She’s lazy.” A child withdraws from friends, and we say, “He’s stubborn.” But what if I told you laziness sometimes wears the face of depression? That silence sometimes screams louder than anger?

Mental health is political. It's cultural. It's generational.

When nurses flog students in training, we call it discipline but we forget that those same students, once qualified, will carry that unresolved trauma into hospital wards, treating patients with the same coldness they endured. When we treat grief like a ceremony with a start and end date, we forget that some people never really recover, they just walk with invisible wounds.

We don’t talk about how young people, especially activists, face rejection not just from systems but from their own families. How being different—in thoughts, dress, or ambition, is a ticket to emotional isolation. We don’t talk about the psychological tax of being the “first” in your family to succeed. First to travel. First to speak in international rooms. The guilt. The expectations. The fear of falling.

So we smile. We perform. We survive.

But let me say this: Survival is not healing. Survival is a stage. Healing is a revolution.

After the U.S. fellowship, I came back to Uganda and launched Sharing Circles, my Community Action Project. Not because I had figured it all out. But because I knew that if I didn’t create spaces to talk about pain, mine would eat me alive. With limited resources but burning conviction, I brought young people, many refugees, young mothers, persons with disabilities—together. Not to fix them. But to witness them. It wasn’t perfect. There were failures. Days when no one showed up. But I showed up anyway.

Through the Goldin Global Fellowship, I learned about Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD). It changed me. It taught me that people are not problems. People have problems, yes, but they also carry answers. They carry stories. They carry solutions.

Mental health doesn’t always need a psychologist. Sometimes, it just needs someone to say, “I see you.” To ask, “How are you?” and mean it. To reply, “Me too,” when someone says, “I’m struggling.”

We are in a crisis of connection. And in this May—this Mental Health Month, I ask: what if our greatest therapy is collective vulnerability?

What if healing is not a pill, but a circle? What if the revolution begins when one person chooses to unmask?

Let me end with a line I’ve written before:

“Sometimes we have voices in our minds telling us how great we are. How we can change the world. But outwardly they sound like daydreaming. ‘How can I achieve that when I can’t even take care of myself?’ we ask.”

You can. You will. Not because you’re perfect. But because you’re still here. Breathing. Hoping. Trying.

And that, my friend, is a miracle.

Herd trauma doesn’t break us. It binds us. And when we rise, we do so, together.

#TraumaHealing #CollectiveHealing #HerdTrauma #InvisibleWounds#ResilienceInPain #HealingIsRevolution #SurvivingNotThriving #BreakTheStigma #HealingTogether #MyStoryMyVoice #VoicesUnheard#ActivistJourney#TheActivistDilemma #SharingCircles #ABCDModel #AssetBasedDevelopment #CommunityHealing #GrassrootsVoices #MentalHealthAdvocate #UgandaVoices #AfricanActivism #VoicesOfChange #UnmaskingTrauma #CommunitySolutions #GoldinGlobalFellow #FaithInHealing #YoungLeaders