Yaba Left

Last reviewed Saturday, October 24, 2026

“Yaba Left” is Nigerian slang for mental illness or psychiatric admission, taken from the Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital near the Yaba Left bus stop in Lagos. It’s used almost entirely as an insult or a joke: “you wan go Yaba Left?” The real hospital is a busy federal centre for every kind of mental health care.

Also called: FNPH Yaba, or the Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital, Yaba, which is the hospital’s own name. When it opened in 1907 it was called the Yaba Lunatic Asylum.

Our guide to what to expect at FNPH Yaba covers getting there, clinic days, the first visit and your rights.

Where the name comes from

The hospital sits near the Yaba Left bus stop, and over time the stop’s name became the hospital’s nickname, then a byword for madness. The hospital is old. It opened on 30 October 1907, when its first 48 residents were admitted to a disused railway building at Yaba. For decades it was an asylum, a place to keep people with mental illness away from society, with no doctors living on site. It has changed a great deal since; the nickname hasn’t.

The hospital

The Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital is at 8 Harvey Road, Yaba, and has been run by the federal government since 1975. Its emergency unit is open 24 hours, and everyone new registers there, with or without a referral letter. It registers about 20 to 25 new people a day.

Its services include:

adult psychiatry, for conditions such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and psychosis
drug and alcohol treatment
care for older adults, and a child and adolescent service
sleep disorders and forensic psychiatry
clinical psychology, social work and occupational therapy

It also trains psychiatrists, and runs schools for psychiatric nurses and occupational therapists.

In Nigeria: what the stigma costs

The phrase makes psychiatric care a punchline. The everyday effect is that people hide symptoms, because being seen to need help means being cast as the joke.

The stigma is well documented. In a 2005 community study in three south-western states, negative views of people with mental illness were widespread, and only about one in six people would consider marrying someone with a mental illness. The authors linked this to fear and to beliefs that people were somehow to blame.

The cost is late care. People commonly arrive after years of symptoms, or during a crisis, when earlier treatment would have been simpler and more effective. In a large Nigerian household survey, fewer than one in ten people with a mental health condition had any treatment in a year.

It also shapes how people accept help. Many Nigerians will speak to a therapist privately, online, long before they’ll walk into a psychiatric hospital where they might be recognised.

Language can change. Most people who use the phrase have never thought about who’s listening, which is what makes it worth interrupting. Plain words do the job: “psychiatric hospital”, “mental health care”, or “a person with a mental health condition”, the term Nigeria’s Mental Health Act uses. Our piece on mental health stigma in Nigeria goes further.

A psychiatric hospital vs a therapist

A psychiatric hospital has doctors who can diagnose, prescribe medicine and admit someone who needs care on a ward. Therapists on Mytherapist.ng offer talking therapy by video, voice or chat; they don’t prescribe or admit. The two often work side by side: a psychiatrist manages medicine for a condition such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, while a therapist offers talking therapy alongside. Yaba isn’t the only option, either; our guide to psychiatric hospitals in Lagos covers the others.

When to get help

If someone is in immediate danger, or has thoughts of ending their life, call 112 (or 767 in Lagos), or Safe Place Nigeria on 0800 800 2000. The full list is on our helplines page. The emergency unit at Yaba is open around the clock for psychiatric emergencies.

If you’ve been holding back because of what people might say, you can start privately. You can book a licensed therapist on Mytherapist.ng for general mental health and wellbeing, or find a therapist in Lagos.

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