INDIGENOUS EPISTEMOLOGIES AND THE RECONFIGURATION OF MENTAL HEALTH IN URBAN LAGOS STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

Mental health challenges in rapidly urbanising African cities continue to be predominantly framed through Western biomedical paradigms, often marginalising indigenous ways of knowing and healing. In Lagos, Nigeria’s largest urban Centre, traditional healthcare providers remain central to community-based mental health care, yet their epistemologies and practices are insufficiently theorised within mainstream mental health discourse. Drawing on qualitative interviews with ten indigenous practitioners, comprising Babaláwo and Oníṣẹ̀gùn, this study explores how indigenous epistemologies shape local conceptualisations, diagnoses, and therapeutic responses to mental distress in urban Lagos. Using a thematic interpretive approach grounded in African ethnopsychiatry and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS), the findings reveal that mental health is understood as a relational condition embedded in spiritual balance, moral conduct, communal harmony, and ancestral continuity rather than solely as an individual psychological disorder. The study argues that recognising and engaging indigenous epistemologies offers culturally resonant pathways for reconfiguring mental health care in African urban contexts. It concludes by advocating for a pluralistic mental health framework that meaningfully integrates indigenous knowledge into policy, practice, and urban mental health interventions in Nigeria.