Wealth Is A Mental Health Intervention: Three drivers of distress. Money was number one

A phone. A SIM card. And the audacity.

That is how one of the slides in Abuja last week described what Hauwa Ojeifo had when she started. Ten years ago she was in her twenties, nobody had heard of her, and she had just come through the worst period of her life. She had found nowhere to turn, and decided that nobody else should have to feel that alone.

If no one is there for me, I will be there for someone else.

So she published her own mobile number and told people in distress to call it.

That number became She Writes Woman, which today runs Nigeria’s first toll-free, round-the-clock mental health helpline operated by a private organisation. Free to the caller, every day of the year. Twenty-five thousand interventions in ten years. More than two hundred potential suicides averted.

I was there last week for its tenth anniversary, and one line on one slide is the reason I am writing this column.

The line

More than half of those who call report suicidal thoughts, and more than half of the suicide-related calls come from northern Nigeria.

Then a slide named the drivers of distress behind the calls. Family conflict. Relationship strain.

And ranked above both, with a naira sign beside it, financial instability.

Number one. Money was the leading driver of distress among the people calling that line. That is their finding, after ten years of answering it, and I have not been able to put it down since.

You already know this

I suspect you do not need the slide.

You have had the month where the money did not come in and you answered the phone anyway, sounding exactly like yourself. You have sat in a meeting discussing someone else’s budget while running the arithmetic on your own in the back of your head. You have been the woman in the office who everyone assumes is fine.

Or you have watched a business you built over eleven years come apart in eight months because the naira moved, or the facility was called in, or a pandemic happened, or a war somewhere else changed the price of everything you import.

And you did not tell anybody, because in this country we treat debt as a character defect and a failed business as a verdict on the person who ran it.

Nothing that serious ever has a single cause. But shame is what stops a person saying the one sentence that would let somebody help, and silence is where help cannot reach. We read about it afterwards and file it under personal tragedy, and it is rarely only personal.

The clearest research I can find on this is British, because Britain funds an institute to study it and we do not. In a survey of nearly five and a half thousand people living with mental health problems, it found a loop running in both directions. Eighty-six per cent said their financial situation had made their mental health worse. Seventy-two per cent said their mental health had made their finances worse. And people carrying both depression and problem debt are more than four times as likely to still be depressed a year and a half later.

Debt does not simply arrive alongside distress. It holds you inside it.

Why I write about money

I have written this column every Wednesday for a year. More recently, I have been asking who owns the banks, businesses, buildings and big contracts. Somebody could reasonably conclude that this is a column about money for its own sake

It is not, and here is the thing I have never set down plainly.

Wealth is not neutral. It takes the shape of whoever owns it and drives it. That is the entire reason it matters who is in a position to decide what good looks like, and it is why I started Inspired Women of Worth fifteen years ago, long before I was writing about cap tables.

Financial capacity is not the opposite of a meaningful life. For most women it is the floor the meaningful life is built on. It is why she can leave. It is why she can say no to the client. It is why a bad year stays a bad year instead of becoming the end of something.

Money is not a substitute for care. Nobody should read this and conclude that a healthy balance sheet replaces a doctor. But financial insecurity can turn a difficult life into one that feels impossible to manage, and that distinction is the whole of what I am arguing.

What she built, and what it let her do

Here is the part of Hauwa’s story that gets told least, and it is the part that belongs in this newspaper.

She holds a master’s degree in investment banking and Islamic finance.

She did not stop at a support group. She built an institution. A number anyone can dial at no cost. Protocols. Counsellors. Data solid enough to put in front of policymakers and have it hold.

In February 2020, with Human Rights Watch beside her, she became the first person with a mental health condition to testify before the Nigerian National Assembly. In August this year the Federal Executive Council approved a proposed amendment to the National Mental Health Act to decriminalise attempted suicide. The proposal still has to pass through the National Assembly, but the direction of change matters. A decade ago a Nigerian who survived the worst night of her life could be arrested for it.

She could do that because she had built something larger than her own voice. An institution with evidence behind it, allies around it and ten years of staying power. That is what institutional standing buys you. It gives a conviction the structure to reach a committee room, and occasionally to change a law.

The institution came first. The legislation followed.

Conviction without capital is a feeling

In May 2024, Melinda French Gates chose twelve people around the world and gave each of them a twenty million dollar fund to direct as they judged best, through the Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation.

Hauwa was one of the twelve.

A woman who once needed the help now decides where twenty million dollars of it goes.

And here is why I am telling you this in the business pages. You can care about something your whole life and change nothing, because conviction without capital is a feeling. Capital is what converts what you believe into something that outlives the believing.

But notice the sequence. She did not begin with twenty million dollars. She began with a phone and a SIM card and a number she was frightened to publish.

What she did not do was stay there.

That is the part we skip. We are sentimental about small beginnings in this country and we tell those stories beautifully. We are far less interested in what happens next, which is why so many women’s initiatives are still exactly the size they were on the day they started, run on personal savings by someone exhausted. Not for want of conviction. For want of capital, and for want of anyone who looked at them early and decided they were worth backing.

There is no small way to show up

That was the heading on one of the later slides, above a list of the people who turned up at the beginning. I should disclose that I was on it, which is why I can tell you what each line was actually worth.

Mine read: amplified her story, raised funds, opened doors.

Lanre Olusola, The Catalyst: poured a lifetime of therapy into her recovery.

Human Rights Watch: gave her the language and the framework to stand as an equal.

Men and women have stood with her, then and now. Both are represented among those who support the work, answer the phone and seek help through it. Whatever else this subject is, it is not a women’s issue with men watching from the side.

I had followed her on Instagram long before we met, when she was writing honestly about something almost nobody here would discuss. We met in person at one of our ABCD Zumbathon events, autism, breast cancer and depression, the three things the women around me kept quietly carrying. The D was there partly because of her. A year later I gave her a possibilities award I had invented and introduced her to Lanre on a stage, and there is a photograph of the three of us from that night, her in tears between us. It came up on the screen without warning during the organisation’s ten year journey presentation, and I was not prepared for it.

I have chaired her board of advisers in the years since.

Look again at that list. Not one entry on it is a grand gesture. Shared posts. Phone calls. Hours of someone’s time. The vocabulary of rights. Money, raised the ordinary way, a conversation at a time.

Ten years later, a national line, twenty-five thousand interventions, a change moving through the law and twenty million dollars in her hands to allocate.

That is the arithmetic. If you have ever wondered whether backing a woman early is worth the risk, there it is.

What they are asking for

Their request to a room like this one was specific, so I will pass it on exactly as they put it.

Train your managers to notice when someone is struggling. Give your staff somewhere to turn before they break. Sponsor a counsellor for a year, or adopt the helpline for your workplace, your school, your community, and keep the line open on Eid and on Christmas morning too.

If that is something your organisation can do, email the word PARTNER to [email protected]

And if money is the thing keeping you awake, a debt you have told nobody about, a business you are not sure will survive, a month you cannot see your way through, that is not a character failing and it is not separate from your health. The line is 0800 800 2000. It is free, it is open, and somebody is there. And it is not only for money. Whatever it is you are carrying, grief, a marriage, a diagnosis, a fear you cannot name, you do not have to be at breaking point to call.