The Road That Still Led Me Here

Growing up, if you had asked me what I wanted to become, my answer would have gathered around a few persistent words: the brain, surgery, and understanding what lies between our ears. There was something compelling about the idea that within that small, protected space live memory, identity, suffering, and ability. I imagined a future in neurosurgery. Life did not follow the plan of early imagination. It curved and rerouted, and for a time I worked in banking, a structured and rational world that felt far from the human complexity I had once pictured. Something remained unresolved, and so I took what felt like a detour but was perhaps a return, into clinical psychology.

Arriving at Mathari

Walking into Mathari Teaching and Referral Hospital for my practicum felt strangely familiar, not because I had been there before, but because I had imagined something like it for a long time. Mathari is not just any institution. It was established in the early twentieth century during the colonial period and has grown into Kenya’s main national referral hospital for mental health. Like many psychiatric institutions of its era, it began with a custodial purpose, with spaces designed more for containment than for recovery, and over time it has changed. Today it sits at a complex intersection of care, teaching, and research, and it reflects both the progress and the ongoing challenges of mental health systems in many African settings: limited resources, high patient numbers, and at the same time real commitment from the people working within it.

Before I arrived, I carried the same quiet assumptions many people do. Mental health hospitals are often imagined at the extremes, either as places of chaos or as distant institutions where other people go. There is stigma in those images, and distance. What I found was more complex and more human. There were no dramatic scenes and no overwhelming disorder. Instead there were people: patients sitting, waiting, and speaking, sometimes quietly and sometimes with intensity; families trying to navigate systems they did not fully understand; and clinicians moving between cases, carrying both expertise and emotional weight. Within all of it were stories, each patient not only a diagnosis but a life shaped by biology, environment, trauma, resilience, and context.

Different tools, the same question

Experiencing mental health care directly did something no textbook had fully achieved. It grounded the abstract and turned theory into lived reality, and it revealed the gap between what we know and what we are still struggling to deliver in terms of access, continuity of care, and support. Standing in those spaces, I realised I had taken the step, not into neurosurgery as I once imagined, but into something related and equally serious: the study of the mind through relationship, through listening, and through trying to understand suffering not only as pathology but as experience.

It is easy to frame life choices as deviations or missed paths. But what we call detours are sometimes different routes to the same question. For me that question has always been what it means to be human, and how we understand the mind that holds that experience. Neurosurgery might have approached it through structure; clinical psychology approaches it through meaning. Different tools, the same curiosity. The environments we fear or misunderstand often hold the very insights we need. For many people Mathari remains a symbol shaped by stigma, but for those who walk its corridors and listen to the stories within it, it becomes a place of encounter, with suffering but also with resilience, and with systems that are still evolving alongside people committed to improving them. I did not become what I first imagined, but beginning this work, I realised something simple. I am where I am meant to be, not because the path was straight, but because it was honest.