By Gatonye Gathura
Kenya: Every night, over 200,000 angry women, most of them single mothers, are walking the urban streets across the country hustling for their daily upkeep.
About 7,000 of them are concentrated in Nairobi’s Central Business District, sandwiched between Tom Mboya Street and River Road.
But what these figures from the National Aids and STDs Control Programme do not show, is that alongside the women are hundreds of others equally angry young muggers, petty thieves and traders jostling violently for a living from an almost saturated informal sector.
Unemployment is proven to trigger profound and continuing levels of anger in people who feel discarded, undervalued, wronged or denied. It also drives actions of revenge or retaliation against a ‘system’ that has put them in a seemingly impossible situation.
Once that anger is triggered, the part of the brain, which controls emotion- amygdala, begins to go ‘crazy’. This is what causes a sensation of warmth when one is angry, with some people saying one is “breathing fire’.
The reality is that super doses of internal chemicals are at work, with adrenaline and noradrenaline surging from the brain.
Brain balance
What follows will depend on a small part of the brain that sits over the left eye. When someone is getting angry, the flow of blood is increasing to this frontal lobe of the brain, which controls reasoning, and if a good chemical balance is achieved, peace may prevail.
According to researchers, these two parts of the brain balance each other out quickly, with the response to anger lasting less than two seconds, hence the advice to count to 10.
However, if the cause of the anger is repetitive, with no light at the end of the tunnel, the suppressed anger can lead to heavy stress and depression.
It is then that the body moves into a process of progressive decline and degradation, triggering various health problems such as high blood pressure, and driven by well-documented imbalances in the body’s chemicals, serotonin and norepinephrine.
When these stress hormones are secreted in small doses, researchers say they can be useful to the body. However, for individuals where the stressors are always present and not changing for the better, these stress hormones may damage the brain, and lead to a state of chronic depression.
Chronic depression has been associated with serious mental health problems, heart disease, physical handicap, obesity and lung disease. A study done last year by Center for the Study of Adolescence found high levels of depression among Kenyan youth.
“Young people who do not have enough food to eat at home are six to nine times more likely to report being depressed to the point of giving up nearly all the time.”
The study found that getting a good job, living a better life and being able to actively participate in community affairs were major concerns for the youth - but that the majority of them were jobless.
This saw 10.2 per cent of young males and 6.9 per cent of young females report being depressed nearly all the time. “These rates of depression — especially for males — are significantly high.”
