Naming the Unnamed: Detecting Spiritualized Mental Health Language in Igbo Community Text

Mental illness in many Igbo-speaking communities in South-East Nigeria is rarely discussed in clinical terms. Symptoms are instead described through spiritual or indirect language, attributed to a curse, a spiritual attack, or simply that "isi ya adịghị mma" (his head is not well), reflecting a broader pattern in which spiritual leaders, not health workers, are typically the first point of contact for signs of mental illness. This spiritualized framing is not incidental to the problem; it is a primary mechanism by which mental illness goes undiagnosed and untreated, since standard clinical or English-language screening tools fail to recognize distress expressed in these culturally specific terms. We propose a framework for detecting spiritualized and euphemistic mental health language in Igbo-language community text, including social media posts, community forum discussions, and public commentary, as an early, informal signal of untreated mental health need. The framework combines a curated lexicon of Igbo spiritual and euphemistic expressions for mental distress, developed with community and linguistic input, with a transformer-based classifier (AfroXLM-R) fine-tuned to distinguish spiritualized mental health language from other spiritual or religious discourse, which is common and often unrelated in everyday Igbo text. To address interpretability and community trust, the framework produces explanations that surface the specific lexical and contextual cues driving each classification, allowing public health practitioners to audit and understand, rather than simply accept, the model's output. We outline a validation plan using a manually annotated corpus of Igbo-language social and community text, evaluated against clinician-reviewed labels for classification accuracy, and assess explanation quality through practitioner review. This work aims to surface a population currently invisible to formal mental health surveillance: those describing distress in spiritual terms rather than clinical ones, and to provide a transparent, linguistically grounded tool for community health workers and NGOs operating in Igbo-speaking regions. More broadly, it offers a template for identifying culturally coded health language in other African language communities where mental illness is similarly spiritualized rather than clinically named.