Mental Health - Depression In Leadership - 26th September, 2017

Suicide in this African society has been on the increase in recent times, some people blame the economy, they say it has affected the family ties, everybody is struggling for themselves. But does depression affect leaders differently? Does it affect the people at the top differently? What is depression? What is it not? This is something that affects a lot of leaders but they don’t like to talk about it. Leaders and leaders to be, leadership is lonely, it is lonely at the top, it is only when only you can see the vision and nobody else can. It is lonely because really exemplary leaders invest themselves, their very being, everything they have into the vision. Sometimes they even lose their families in the process. Mandela lost his family, not just his wife, his close immediate family. He was lonely, he married again, too late to start all over. He had paid the ultimate price and it was not just him. Would it have been easy for Mahatma Gandhi to have been in an ashram in a loincloth? Maybe that was not his first choice of how to live his life, but at a point his life was no longer his, it now belonged to the people.