Nigerian rapper, Oludemilade Martin Alejo, popularly known as YCee, has opened up on his six year journey with bipolar disorder, revealing that a severe shortage of mental health professionals in the country made it difficult for him to continue his treatment after returning home from the United Kingdom.

Speaking during an interview on Arise Television, the 33 year old artiste explained that he was first diagnosed with the condition in 2020 while living in London during the Covid-19 lockdown. He recalled spending about three months in and out of hospital as doctors worked through different diagnoses before eventually confirming bipolar disorder.

YCee said that before that period, mental health was barely spoken about in Nigerian conversations, noting that he had never really encountered the phrase until his diagnosis abroad.

He explained that visa restrictions eventually forced him to leave London and return to Lagos, where he had planned to continue his treatment uninterrupted.

However, he said that plan quickly ran into difficulty once he got back home, as he discovered just how limited access to specialised mental health care was in the country. He pointed to a serious lack of trained personnel, noting that psychiatrists, psychologists and other professionals who service the mental health sector remain in very short supply.

The rapper further stressed that Nigeria’s mental health crisis is tied to a much broader healthcare problem, explaining that many citizens still cannot easily access even reasonable medical care, let alone specialised treatment.

He also spoke about the stigma that continues to surround mental illness in the country, lamenting that conditions like depression are still dismissed in some quarters as a big man’s disease.

Despite the challenges, YCee said the six year journey involved medication, therapy and repeated hospitalisations, describing periods where things looked manageable and others where they became particularly difficult. He also disclosed that the condition affected his creativity and contributed to his prolonged absence from music, noting that his 2021 project did not receive the promotion he would ordinarily have given it due to his mental state at the time.

Despite facing some skepticism over how openly he has chosen to discuss his condition, YCee maintained that he intends to keep using his platform to push conversations around mental health further into the open in Nigeria.

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