When depression hits

And so Leesi went to UGA, working in food service and later as an office assistant in a mailroom on campus to pay for expenses that weren’t covered by his scholarship. Though his parents eventually came around and covered Leesi’s necessities, he still felt like he needed to work so his parents weren’t burdened with too much debt.

Outside of work and classes, he joined an organization called Fight Against Youth Obesity (FAYO). Pulling from his experience programming archery activities for kids at a Jewish community center, he developed physical activities for kids to do every Friday for an hour and a half.

“Physical activity is something I like to do, and kids love to do,” Leesi says. “I knew it made me feel good and made kids feel good. I always wanted to be a positive light for them.”

Soon, though, he was struggling to feel positive anywhere. Even though Leesi became the president of FAYO and a brother in the prestigious African-American Greek organization Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., he felt like everything was happening from a distance. 

“I would try to get back to myself and figure out how to be happy in those moments when you’re sitting on a futon with people who are your friends, but I wasn’t able to channel any emotion outside of a heavy weight and frustration,” Leesi says.

He started dropping his friends off at parties but didn’t join them, wallowing in self-pity in secret.

“I knew it was going to happen,” he says. “No matter what the day looks like, you know how you’re going to feel when the night ends.”

Before Leesi knew it, he was graduating from UGA with a bachelor’s degree in exercise and sports science. He moved back in with his parents — who now owned UGA T-shirts after a several-year boycott — and took a gap year to prepare for the MCAT. 

“As a Nigerian, you only have three career options: physician, engineer, or lawyer,” Leesi says, chuckling.

At the end of the summer, Leesi returned to his fraternity brothers’ house at UGA to help with the first party of the year. It was a tradition for recent grads to come back. Vibes were flowing, and being back with his brothers gave Leesi permission to leave behind his anxious thoughts for a while. 

Once the music had faded and he’d dropped off all his friends who still lived in Athens, he was faced with an hour and a half drive back to Stone Mountain, alone.

That’s when the realization of life hit him. The depression he’d been using the party and the weekend with his brothers to avoid crashed into his consciousness. 

“I couldn’t see past graduation,” Leesi says. “I’d been working toward that for so long. Now that I’d graduated, I was supposed to have a life afterward, and I didn’t know what that was going to look like. I had to live this life that I never gave a fuck about before.”

I don’t want to be here anymore, he thought. 

He let go of the steering wheel.

The car drifted across the road, slowly, as if in anticipation. (“If you’ve seen the season three finale of “BoJack Horseman,” it was like that,” Leesi says.) 

Then Leesi felt a hand on his shoulder. No one was there, but he got the subliminal message: He needed to grab the wheel and pull over.

In that moment, he felt selfish and guilty. He didn’t want to take anybody else’s life because of his own recklessness.

I couldn’t believe that I almost did that to somebody, he thought. 

And then, the scarier thought: I couldn’t believe I would want to do this to myself.

In western Africa, suicide — the act of killing yourself because of depression — is associated with something that's not godly. That’s evil, some Nigerians would say. That’s demonic. That’s voodoo.

This taboo element makes it difficult to openly, or even privately, discuss mental health in many communities. If there’s a problem with your brain, the assumption is that God, not your community, will help you solve it.

“While I think religion is an incredible force, I also think that coming from the society that I do, God sometimes becomes your crutch when you’re having to fight against stressors,” Leesi says. “You run straight to the Lord anytime issues occur. Which is powerful and important but may obscure the fact that these can also be psychological mental health issues.”

“The Lord may be able to place these people in your lives who are able to help — doctors and psychiatrists and psychologists,” he continues. “But it becomes difficult to see how you can change how you perceive and handle stress. For me, that’s layered within being a refugee, being Ogoni, being a Nigerian. I had to deconstruct those layers.”

In the past, when doctors asked him if he was depressed, Leesi had simply lied. Now, though, he sought professional help. 

Day by day, he pulled himself out of the dark corners of his mind. He knew he wanted to be around for his family. But through therapy, he realized he also needed to live for himself. 

Putting it all out there

“Anxiety. It is defined as an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes, like increased blood pressure and shortness of breath. 

“Now, feelings of anxiety are normal, and we’ve all experienced them at one time or another, be it during your first test or competition or maybe you’re anxious walking down a dark hallway or walking into a room of your peers. Or… maybe you’re anxious at home giving your first King talk. 

“Yeah, those feelings are bound to come and go. They’re temporary. But imagine if those feelings during those temporary moments weren’t so temporary. Imagine that they grew into a consistent worry and fear, becoming an ongoing and underlying part of your life.”

These words made up the first minute of Leesi’s Rackham King Talk in January 2022. U-M’s Rackham Graduate School, which partners with units on campus to run the university’s master’s and PhD programs, holds these talks every year as part of its Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Day events. Graduate students discuss how their work relates to MLK’s legacy in a TED-talk style.

Dressed in a navy blue button-down with a shadowy image of the stars from the American flag behind him, Leesi talked about how his experiences at LOGOS differed from those at his Clarkston elementary school. 

“Clarkston was a place where my family, refugees from Nigeria, could feel seen and valued because here we were all refugees and immigrants. And even if you weren’t, it’s likely that your neighbor was. 

“But when I would step outside of my mom’s car to go to LOGOS every Wednesday, I knew I had to prepare myself for different expectations and perceptions because none of the other kids there looked like me. 

“Now, let me be clear, I don’t want to allude to my LOGOS peers as being racist or bullies in comparison to my Clarkston people because, in fact, they were my friends. And we played and ate together like all kids did. 

“But it was in this space I was always conscious that I was an outsider, an other, and that inexplicably came with the feeling that who I was didn’t matter as much as what others thought of me or how they viewed me, both the kids and the adults.”

Leesi explained that his first psychiatrist had diagnosed him with social anxiety. He spoke of the fact that MLK himself had attempted suicide twice before the age of 13, noting that that part of MLK’s history isn’t usually a highlight in the stories told about the civil rights icon. 

He emphasized the need to identify and reckon with problems like racism and mental health that had stifled our society as well as those negative experiences in each of our individual pasts that have “shaped our perceptions of those around us, influenced our actions, and ultimately halted our progress.”

“And if we can’t reckon with the reality of our current situation as a nation, a nation where despite the progress it’s made since Dr. King has seen racially motivated hate crimes against minorities rise within the last few years, a nation where anxiety and depression are growing despite widespread discussions about mental health…. This is our America. And if we can’t sit down as people and as a nation and truly come to terms with our reality, then we risk being forever stagnant, weighed down by our past by attempting to propel into our future.”

Once we take those initial steps, then “how do we move ahead to build a better tomorrow?” Leesi asked the audience. 

“Now, if there was an infallible answer, I’m certain Dr. King would have yelled it from that famous mountaintop. However, I do have a suggestion for how we should start.

“And that is namely to use your lived experiences — your stories — both the good and the bad, to inspire those around you. So they may have the tools to create a better reality, too.”

Regret and realization

Leesi’s parents watched his King Talk live on YouTube.

Their emotions were nuanced. Pride, of course, but there were also layers of deep sadness and guilt. 

Monica called Leesi that same day. 

I’m so sorry, she said. I’m so sorry that we as parents did not understand the extent to which some of these things affected you and how you had to adjust to the social standards around you.

Monica had noticed as Leesi had grown up that he’d become quieter, less bubbly than he was as a small child. She’d thought he was mostly just busy or wanted to be alone, like adolescent boys are wont to do. And Leesi’s anxiety had never translated into troubling behavior at school or confrontations at home.

“Maybe that is why we did not see it as a problem,” Monica says.

“I didn't see it,” George says, “and I blame myself. I blame myself a lot, but I also didn't know any better. I was trying to work and go to school and take care of them. We thought we did the best thing by bringing them amongst mostly white people. We were strangers to this society. We thought you bring your children around the people who own this place so they can understand the society in which they are going to live in a lot better. We did not know that it didn’t give them the balance they may have needed.”

“I think Leesi is capable of handling things because he’s so mature,” George continues. “He and his brothers — they didn’t tell us what they felt in those moments. But neither did we pay close enough attention to understand. Since the King Talk, I have not stopped being hard on myself. I owe them an apology.”

Now, when Monica talks with other Ogoni women through her work as president of OWAGA, she cautions them that their children — children of immigrants — may be suffering as much as they are.

“It is not just other children or only other children,” she tells them, “but also your children. My children.”

Loneliness and belonging

In many ways, the King Talk was a catalyst for Leesi. In his undergrad, he’d begun wondering whether the relay races FAYO developed had a tangible benefit for the kids, beyond entertainment and even fitness. He thought of the soccer game he’d played in first grade, when his anger had dissipated as soon as he began moving, and the basketball games in his childhood neighborhood that were as much about camaraderie as they were about sports.

Doing the work to connect so many themes — racism, mental health, childhood experiences, physical activity — helped him realize how all of those pathways connected and gave him ideas to apply to his own research and dissertation. 

But the first year of his PhD had also been a grind. Between classes, his first published paper, and the King Talk, there were a lot of late nights to prove he was worthy of his status as a U-M doctoral student.

And he felt lonely, away from all the community support, both friends and family, that he’d had in Georgia. There were a lot of thoughts of: Damn, am I good enough to be here? and Is this a place where I can really thrive?

Leesi thought it would help that his girlfriend had come with him from Georgia to Michigan. But instead his heavy workload had taken a toll on their relationship. And after enduring several racist incidents in Ann Arbor, she decided to move back home.

Leesi debated following her. He had opportunities to teach at UGA, with the possibility of eventually restarting his PhD there. 

Leah Robinson, Leesi’s advisor at U-M, didn’t push him in either direction.

“She was a really supportive mentor in that time period,” Leesi says. “She didn’t try to force me to do anything that wasn’t going to be in my best interests.”

By the time Leesi traveled to the North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity (NASPSPA) annual conference in June 2022, he and his partner had decided to go their separate ways, but he still hadn’t decided if he wanted to stay at U-M.

Then he had a conversation with Jackie Goodway, Leah’s mentor, who was president of NASPSPA at the time. She told him she sympathized with the reasons he was considering leaving U-M but reminded him, too, of the opportunities that U-M offered.

“She believed in me,” Leesi says.

I’m going to stay, he thought afterwards. I can do this.

The next day was Leesi’s presentation on his first paper, which covered the differences between boys’ and girls’ views of their own motor skills after participating in a study that Leah had designed.

Afterward, Goodway caught up with him and told him she liked the passion he brought to the topic. 

We need you in this field, she reminded him.

“She understood the need for me as a person in motor development,” Leesi says. “But also the need for who I was as a Black man in this field.”

That was the first time since starting my PhD that I felt like I actually belonged,” he continues. “Like I could do this work and people could see the importance of this work.”

This time, it wasn’t intentional. About a week after Leesi returned to America, fatigue, sweats, and gastrointestinal distress set in while he was at work; he was so sick that he couldn’t make it the hour and 10 minutes home. In the emergency room, he found out he had malaria. His kidneys were failing, to the point that he needed to start dialysis.

Brittney and Leesi weren’t officially a couple, but that thought didn’t cross Brittney’s mind. Despite working nine-hour clinical rotations and taking exams during the day, she spent evenings and nights at the hospital next to Leesi, urging his mom to go home and get some sleep in her actual bed instead of on the padded bench in the hospital room where Brittney herself tried to doze until her 6 a.m. alarm.

“Being able to be there for him was never like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna do this so you’ll ask me to be your girlfriend’ or ‘I’m gonna do this because I’m supposed to.’ I cared about him a lot. I wanted to be there for him,” Brittney says. “He made it, thank God, but it was a little touch and go for a minute. Both of us are very big on our faith, and in those times, all I could think was, ‘I don’t think that the Lord would give me this amazing man and then kill him.’”

When Leesi was working in the mail room at UGA, there was this girl he thought was cute, Brittney Cunningham. But he was so anxious that when he saw her coming through the window, he’d run and hide. (They talked about this later. She knew all along that he’d run away from her.)

A lot of life happened after that. Even so, when Leesi saw that Brittney had messaged him on a dating app so many years later, the nerves came back. He started pacing in his apartment.

Bro, I’ve been wanting to talk to this girl for a while, he thought. Forget it, I’m doing it, let’s go.

Knowing that he was only in Georgia for a few months — and that his recent relationship had ended, in part, because of his decision to continue pursuing his PhD— gave him the confidence to talk frankly about what he wanted out of dating. Brittney had just gotten out of a long-term relationship as well, so she felt similarly. 

“That level of honesty opened up the ability to talk about more important things like religion very early,” Leesi says. “She was in school at the time — she’s one of the smartest people out there, I love her, she’s incredible — so we were able to bond on the importance of school. Seeing how she operated with her friends and her family was one of the things I truly, truly cherished about her, like the level of appreciation she talks about them and to them is something I love.”

“I was like, ‘I want what you have,’” Leesi says. “‘I want to be able to understand myself in the ways that you do. And I want to learn from you.’”

By the time Leesi traveled to Nigeria, he was smitten. He had no phone service on American networks, but he kept trying to find ways to talk to his girl. He and Tombari were sharing a Nigerian phone with internet access, and Leesi hogged it, DMing Brittney on Twitter whenever he had a spare minute.

“That caused some contention,” Leesi says, laughing.

Once he fell ill with malaria, he wasn’t lucid for a while. But when he became more alert and realized how much time Brittney had spent at the hospital, he was in awe.

“It was emblematic of exactly her core values and who she is and what she does for people she cares about,” he says. “It was like, ‘Wow, this is a level of love and appreciation in a person that I could only dream about.’ And even from there, we just continued to grow and get closer and closer. I’m not going nowhere without her. That’s my person. That’s genuinely the person that I believe the Lord has for me.” 

“As a kid, I was always like, ‘My parents are incredibly smart. They’re incredibly powerful to be able to go through these situations, just extremely strong,’” Leesi says, his eyes searching.

Now, looking back and realizing yes, there was strength. There is power. But in the doubt, in the down moment, they were able to lean on these protective factors like religion and community — and they leaned on them heavily.”

My parents have aged,” he continues, his voice cracking. “They both have grey hair. They’ve actually been able to grow and live a life where they’re not…I don’t want to say, we’re not struggling, but we’re not in a refugee camp. We’re not in that same position.

It makes me happy that they’ve been able to make it for so long.”

The research proposal

Leesi stands at the front of a conference room on the fourth floor of the U-M School of Kinesiology Building. All the seats are taken as U-M faculty, staff, and fellow PhD students crowd in to hear what Leesi has planned to propose for his dissertation research.

He comes off confident, fist bumping and hugging a few people as he gathers his notes. In reality, he’s sweating so much that the papers he’s holding become soggy. That’s particularly unfortunate because the digital notes he’d made in his presentation aren’t showing up so he has to consult his now-moist paper copies.

But he pulls it together. When he talked to his father recently, George had given him encouragement. As Ogoni, we have a foundation of strength and belief in God that allows us to instill firm self-belief in ourselves as well, George told Leesi. I was a leader in the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People! You, too, can fight! 

“Good afternoon, everyone,” Leesi says. “Thank you for being here today. My name is Leesi, and I am presenting my dissertation proposal titled, 'Exploring the Role of Youth Sports in Mitigating Culturally Informed Adverse Childhood Experiences and Mental Distress: A Mixed-Methods Examination of Protective Factors.'”

“Mental distress, including anxiety and depression, is a growing concern among youth. Approximately 9.4 percent of youth ages 3-17 are diagnosed with anxiety. Twenty percent report at least one major depressive episode. Alarmingly, about 70 percent of adolescents with depressive symptoms develop full-spectrum anxiety or depressive disorders in adulthood.

“This brings us to a critical contributor to mental distress: adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs.

“Traditional ACEs include stressors like abuse, neglect, and household challenges such as substance abuse or incarceration. ACEs disrupt brain development, impair emotional regulation, and heighten the risk of mental health challenges like anxiety, depression, and suicidality.

“However, traditional ACE frameworks often overlook culturally specific stressors disproportionately affecting marginalized youth.

“Culturally Informed ACEs, or C-ACEs, expand the framework to include systemic stressors like racism, discrimination, and historical trauma. These unique stressors amplify traditional ACEs, leading to heightened risks of anxiety, depression, and PTSD.

“This highlights the urgent need for culturally responsive interventions to address these systemic stressors and foster resilience. One such intervention is sports participation, which offers structured environments to build supportive relationships, self-esteem, and emotional stability.”

Leesi talks about the ways that marginalized people protect themselves against mental distress, highlighting the importance of a strong ethnic-racial identity and supportive relationships with peers, siblings, and/or parents.

He mentions that several of these factors were highlighted in a 2023 paper by Enrique Neblett Jr., a professor at the U-M School of Public Health. But, he says, there hasn’t been very much research that looks at more than one of these factors in one study or that focuses on the lived experiences of the kids participating.

“Few studies have actually centered the children’s voices to understand their perspectives on sports,” he says, “and how sports can be used to buffer the impact of stress on their mental health.”

They are still proud to be Americans, they say, but the American — and global — environment has changed since they arrived.

“When I see similar things to what has happened in Nigeria, it makes me see that this is a global problem,” Monica says. “It’s not just peculiar to Nigeria. This inequality, be it between men and women or between a bigger population and a smaller population, between colors and between children, it’s all over. That’s what I see. And I see that this global problem starts with individuals.” 

“What I’ve been doing myself is to see what I can do to be different from that. Being the president of the Ogoni Women Association of Georgia, I’ve been actively working to make sure that we treat one another the same, with respect. Not all of us have the same educational background, but we still work together. 

“We talk about it in our meetings, to be more open to other people, even though sometimes you’re scared of being open. We venture out there to have fun together with other people, bringing our food to other people to share with them. Because it is when you travel that you know that the things that are happening in your own little community are also happening in the bigger community and from the small countries to the bigger countries,” she concludes. “We have to do our part to minimize the inequality because other countries look up to America.” 

“That was a time when people felt the pain of the other person,” George says of 1996. “I’ve been thinking: If what happened to us had happened now, probably I’d be dead. My entire family would be gone.”

“I’m indebted to this country because today I have three boys. I have a son who, God willing, in the next couple of years will have a PhD. I have a wife who has a master’s degree. My second son has a degree and is working. I have a son who just graduated this year.

“We had a church that took us as their own. I lost my father at 19 before I came to this country, but I had somebody, Uncle Sam, who played the role of a father to me. I ran away from home, leaving my mother behind, but I came to this country, and I had somebody, Mama Nancy, who played the role of a mother. These were people who were role models to me and my family, people who held our hands to get us to where we are today. 

“Who would do that today? In the short time I’ve been here, I’ve seen so much evolution in policies, in actions, in rhetorics, and in people’s compassion. Yes, in people’s compassion and care about our common humanity.

“I pray it’s just a phase,” he finishes. “Otherwise I’m scared for what’s coming.”

Final thoughts (Leesi)

Leesi sits across the table from a writer in the School of Kinesiology Building in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The two of them have met more than 10 times over the course of a year and a half, reliving the lives of Leesi and his parents in sessions that last hours.

“I always want my story to make sense,” Leesi says. “But I’ve thought about: Who do I think is cultivating that idea of sense? Is it me? Is it society? Is it my parents, my friends, my siblings? Who am I trying to make sense to? Why? And is that sense beneficial, is that sense aligned with the purpose that God has intended for me and what I can actually do in this world?”

“If it doesn't, then that's not sensical,” he continues. “That's just a parameter that I placed upon myself that diminishes my mental health at times and limits my ability to be able to act in ways that are important.”

“If my work can help show how something like playing sports can strengthen a person’s sense of self and their connections with others — building the kinds of relationships and identities that protect mental health, especially in the face of stressful life events — then maybe that’s one way I can contribute to making sense of it all,” he says. “Not just for me but for all of us in the society at large.”

He mentions a quote by Martin Luther King Jr., who once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Leesi disagrees.

“I think that we bend it,” he says, referencing author Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me, in which Coates states that the arc is actually “bent toward chaos.” “Justice doesn't just happen. Right things don't just occur. That's not how history starts. That's not how movement starts. Movement rarely starts with just one individual. That individual is inspired by somebody else and that individual is inspired by somebody else and so on. People take small initiatives to be able to bend the arc.”

“Pictures and objects tell a lot of stories,” she continues. “They’re a good way to tell your life story: ‘This is how I came all the way to where I am.’ I have my baby picture with me. I have my mother’s Bible with me. I still have this wrapper.”

She gestures to the blanket she’d used to hold Leesi close as she ran covertly across the Nigerian border 29 years ago.

“So I like to keep stuff. And Mama Nancy likes to take pictures of us. And when she prints the pictures, she will not print one copy — she’ll print several copies.

“So in those suitcases, each of the kids have their own album. I’m waiting until they get married so that I can just hand them their luggage and say, This is yours. Whatever you want to do with your pictures, your history, that is up to you.”

“We don’t want the story to end with us,” she says, “or with them.”