The Plastic Smile

Participants Watching Our Short Film and Reflecting at the Jos Mental Health Summit

By Atinuke Adeosun

“Trauma is the basis of all mental illness.”

This is a quote that has stayed with me months after I heard it. It was said by Prof. Zubairu K. Dagona, PhD, Director of the Legislative Centre for Security Analysis (NILDS), and it should sound clinical: it is the basis of nearly every diagnosis a psychologist makes. But it hit me on a deeper level, because experiencing trauma is inevitably human. It looks different for different people. It could be a difficult childhood, a painful relationship, rejection from friends, family, or the world. We move through life absorbing things like that, so is it any surprise that many of us split ourselves in two just to survive? One half the world sees. The other we try to suppress, until it inevitably fights back.

That first half is the one that shows up to work or school every day, laughs at the right moments, asks how everyone is doing before they can ask you the same, keeps up with every conversation, remembers everything going on in your friends' lives, offers to help before anyone has to ask. It operates the way everyone else seems to, or tries to, hard enough to leave no trace that anything is wrong. It might even be the happiest person everybody knows. But you know what it doesn't let anyone see.

There is a name for that mask, one I have not heard used as often as it should: the plastic smile. It is not a lie, exactly; that caring, thoughtful, outgoing person could genuinely be you. It is just not the only you. It is armor too many of us have learned to wear. 

And on May 26, in a conference room in Rayfield, Jos, we watched a room full of people sit with that idea for the length of a short film and for many of them, for the first time.

The film was The Dumps. The room was the inaugural Jos Mental Health Summit. It was also the second time we had brought this film to Jos, and the reactions we got from that room tell the story about how much this conversation is needed. This is the reason Shades of Us shows up anywhere: a statistic can tell you a problem exists, but only a story can make you feel it, and recognize it in the person sitting next to you.

Why A Storytelling Organization Was In A Room Full Of Psychiatrists

The Summit, convened by Advancing Initiatives for Better Health (AIBETH) in partnership with Shades of Us, brought together 236 people under one theme: Building Resilience in the Face of Trauma. The World Health Organization (WHO) was in the room. So was the National Health Insurance Authority(NHIA), the Nigerian Medical Association, university teaching hospitals, faith leaders, media houses, and civil society groups working across Plateau State on the effects of the long history of communal tension and displacement. It was, by every account, the first summit of that kind the State has seen.

That is a lot of expertise in one room. What it does not automatically produce is recognition. A psychiatrist can explain the clinical markers of depression. A policy briefing can walk you through the NHIA mental health coverage. But neither one, by itself, tends to make a person go home and ask a friend, “Are you actually okay?” That is the gap storytelling exists to close, and it is why our founder stood in front of that room just before the lights went down, and why The Dumps was placed at the center of the day rather than at the edges of it.

Before the film ever played, the room had already started practicing what trust costs. In an earlier summit workshop, participants were paired off, one person leading the other blindfolded by the shoulders. Afterward, the ones who had been led described what it felt like to hand over control: one admitted needing constant assurance, another said even with that assurance, they were scared and kept trying to find their own way, a third said it gave the person behind them a strange, uneasy sense of control over someone else. It was a small, physical rehearsal of the same question the day kept returning to: what does it take to actually trust someone with the truth of how you are doing?

What the Film Asked of the Room

The Dumps follows a young woman whose life looks, from the outside, like the kind other people envy. Happy. Composed. Fine. The film spends runtime taking that surface apart, asking the audience to sit with what it costs a person to maintain it.

It worked exactly as intended. Participants did not just watch the film; they turned it back on themselves. Many described reflecting on how easily pain goes unnoticed when someone has learned to perform wellness convincingly. Several said the screening changed how they intend to ask after the people in their own lives: not the polite "how are you," but the version that actually waits for an honest answer.

The Dumps is available to watch in full on the Shades of Us YouTube channel, if you want to see for yourself what moved a room of 236 people.

We want to be careful here, because a film is not a treatment plan, and no screening replaces a referral to an actual clinician. However, what The Dumps did was no less necessary: it gave a room full of professionals, students, community leaders, and members a shared emotional vocabulary for a subject Nigerian culture still mostly treats as a rich people problem, discussed in whispers, euphemisms, or not at all.

The Harder Subject Underneath the Film

The Summit did not treat depression and suicide as separate, softer topics from the rest of the agenda. A workshop on suicide prevention by Prof. Haruna Karick sat on the same programme as the keynote on trauma and resilience, and it drew some of the strongest feedback of the day. Participants said it left them more confident recognizing when someone might be struggling silently, and clearer on what to do next.

The panel discussion that followed put a sharper point on why that recognition matters. Dr. Akawu Bitrus of the University of Jos described trauma bluntly: “Trauma is a thief.” He pointed to children who have lived through armed attacks and now say they want to grow up to be soldiers, not out of duty but out of a wish to retaliate. In his telling, trauma had already taken their futures from them before they were old enough to choose one for themselves.

That pairing matters. A film can open the door emotionally. A workshop on warning signs and appropriate intervention is what gives a person somewhere to walk once the door is open. Held together, on the same day, in front of the same audience, they did something neither one accomplishes alone: they moved the conversation from “this is sad” to “this is something I now know how to act on.”

What Actually Changed In That Room

Impact is easy to overstate at events like this, so we will stick to what the Summit data shows. According to the impact report compiled by AIBETH, 98% of surveyed participants rated the day good or excellent. Every single respondent said they intended to apply what they learned. 95% said they would pass the lessons on to others: colleagues, students, congregants, patients. Many left with something more concrete than a good feeling: a working knowledge of the NHIA mental health coverage that most did not know existed before that morning, new referral contacts across healthcare and community organizations, and a real, stated interest in a coordinated Plateau State Mental Health Network going forward.

This impact happened because storytelling was placed deliberately alongside clinical expertise, policy information, and cross-sector relationship-building, in a room designed to turn all of it into action rather than let it stay a nice afternoon.

Why We Keep Doing This

Shades of Us exists on the belief that some truths only land when a person can see themselves inside them. Plateau State has carried decades of trauma that often goes unspoken, absorbed instead into resilience narratives that can quietly become another way of not talking about pain. A summit like this one does not undo that history. What we hope it does is give people a framework for understanding trauma, and permission, in public, together, to say that the weight is real. And it hands them, in the same breath, the names of people and services who can help carry it.

The plastic smile only works because no one asks what is underneath it. On May 26, in Rayfield, a room full of people did.

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If this piece has raised anything difficult for you, please know that support exists and reaching out is a sign of strength, not weakness. Advancing Initiatives for Better Health (AIBETH), who convened this Summit, provides mental health support in Plateau State. For immediate support, the Suicide Research and Prevention Initiative (SURPIN) operates a 24-hour national helpline, and the Mentally Aware Nigeria Initiative (MANI) offers free, confidential crisis support. The Idimma Health Initiative trains lay counsellors to carry out community-based interventions, and its affiliate, The Sunshine Series, provides mental healthcare in grassroots communities across Nigeria and other Sub-Saharan African states. All five are reachable through their websites: aibeth.org, surpinng.com, mentallyaware.org, idimma.org and thesunshineseriesng.com. You do not have to carry it alone.