The statement, “Ghanaians are very religious people,” is often used by both Ghanaians and non-Ghanaians to describe the former’s reading of spiritual meanings into almost everything. Spirituality has and continues to permeate various facets of Ghanaian society, sometimes destroying marriages and families and retarding progress in various spheres, including mental healthcare. In Ghana, mental illnesses are often associated with demonic forces, curses, witchcraft, or other spiritual causes. From a literary perspective, the following paper undertakes a social realist reading of Amma Darko’s Not Without Flowers in order to explore this phenomenon that continues to militate against proper mental healthcare in Ghana. The paper argues that in Not Without Flowers, wherein the mental illness of Ma, a female character, takes center stage, Darko draws on Ma’s mental disorder to mirror the spiritualization of mental illnesses in Ghana, explore the underlying factors responsible for this, shed light on the real causes of mental disorders, and ultimately condemn the reading of spiritual meanings into these disorders. The paper also discusses how Darko successfully presents these issues through a social realist approach, and eventually concludes that through this approach, her novel effectively exposes a sociocultural problem that has persisted in Ghana to date and offers insights into what the paper terms “African social realism.”